Power and property: commercialization,enclosures, and the transformation of agrarian relations in Ethiopia

The transnational agrarian social movement Vía Campesina is campaigning to have the United Nations negotiate and implement a Declaration, and eventually an International Convention, on Peasants' Rights. This article analyzes the origins and demands of the campaign and the place of the claimed rights in international law. Peasant organizations hope to follow in the footsteps of indigenous peoples' movements that participated in the negotiations preceding the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The peasants' rights campaign has succeeded in linking its demands to discussions of the right to food in the United Nations, where concern is growing over the approach of the 2015 target for realizing the Millennium Development Goals, in particular the halving of the numbers of people suffering from hunger. The campaign is likely to face stiff resistance from powerful UN member states, but could achieve substantial advances even if the path to a convention is difficult or never completed.     

The Politics–Bureaucracy Interface in Developing Countries

The political–bureaucratic interface has been the subject of much academic interest. However, research has tended to focus exclusively on wealthy institutionalized democracies, with little attention given to the political–administrative relationship in developing countries. However, recent evidence from reform processes in poorer nations increasingly highlights the importance of interactions between politicians and bureaucrats. This paper provides a systematic overview of the political–bureaucratic relationship in developing countries and in doing so makes two key contributions. First, it introduces a typology of political–bureaucratic relations based on four models—collaborative, collusive, intrusive, and integrated—discussing examples of each. Second, it analyses the main factors associated with different models of political–bureaucratic relations and considers how countries can move from one model of relations to another. The paper provides a much‐needed entry point for scholars and policymakers to better understanding the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats in developing countries. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Prosecutor Risk,Maturation, and Wrongful Conviction Practice

In this article we rethink the connection between prosecutorial experience and conviction psychology that undergirds much of the academic literature about wrongful convictions. The conviction psychology account of prosecutorial behavior asserts that prosecutorial susceptibility to cognitive biases deepens over time, thereby increasing the risk that prosecutors will become involved in wrongful convictions the longer they stay in the profession. Our interviews with more than 200 state prosecutors call into question the basis for this asserted correlation between prosecutorial experience and risk of misconduct. The prosecutors we met consistently reported that, all else equal, prosecutors tend to become more balanced, rather than more adversarial, over time. Hence, the prosecutors who present the greatest risk of producing a wrongful conviction are those who are either inexperienced or resistant to the normal maturation process. For this reason, we suggest that wrongful conviction researchers and database designers pay closer attention to the variables associated with prosecutorial experience and resistance that might affect the development of prosecutorial maturity and the consequent risk of wrongful convictions.     

Psychological Distress and Student Engagement as Mediators of the Relationship between Peer Victimization and Achievement in Middle School Youth

Peer victimization is a well-known national and international problem, contributing to a range of emotional, social, and behavioral consequences. Using structural equation modeling, the authors tested a theoretical model suggesting that psychological distress and student engagement mediate the association between the experience of victimization and concurrent academic achievement. Participants were 469 (46.4 % male, 53.6 % female) 6th to 8th grade students, from randomly selected classrooms in 11 middle schools in a southeastern school district. Structural equation models of the hypothesized effects demonstrated adequate fit to the data, with both symptoms of psychological distress and engagement mediating the relationship between victimization and academic achievement. In general, the results suggest that victimization predicts diminished academic achievement by way of psychological distress and poorer engagement in classroom and academic tasks. However, the direct relationship between victimization and measures of achievement lacked significance across many correlational and path analyses conducted. These findings have implications for researchers and practitioners in understanding how psychological distress and student engagement are associated with the academic performance of students who experience peer victimization.     

Federal‐provincial overlap and civil servants: The case of occupational training in Quebec and Ontario

Abstract: Over the years, many analysts concerned with how federations work have presented the reduction of federal‐provincial overlap and duplication as a way of decreasing intergovernmental tensions. While some have presented such overlap and duplication as inevitable or even beneficial, few have tried to establish how overlap really works and whether it is a real problem or one created mostly by the provincial governments who wish to take issue with problems of federal funding, joint management and accountability. Despite the fact that, ultimately, public officials are in the best position to determine whether federal‐provincial overlap is causing inefficiencies, even fewer studies have focused on how they manage their relationship in areas where two orders of government are involved. Thus, the best possible source of information on how overlapping sectors are managed has been left out. This article examines how federal and provincial officials in Quebec and Ontario have managed their relationships in a particularly contentious sector: occupational training. Sommaire: Plusieurs auteurs intéressés au fonctionnement des fédérations ont, au fil des années, eu tendance à présenter la réduction des empiètements et recoupements fédéraux‐provinciaux comme une façon de décroître les tensions intergouvememen‐tales. Certains auteurs ont présenté de tels chevauchements et dédoublements comme inévitables, voire bénéfiques, mais peu d'entre eux se sont penchés sur le véritable fonctionnement de ces empiètements et s'ils sont un problème réel ou principalement créé par les gouvernements provinciaux désireux d'engager une contro‐verse sur des questions de financement, de gestion commune et d'imputabilité. Bien que les fonctionnaires soient, ultimement, les mieux placés pour évaluer si les recoupements fédéraux‐provinciaux constituent des sources d'inéfficience, peu d'écrits font état de la façon dont les fonctionnaires gèrent leurs relations lorsque les deux ordres de gouvernement sont impliqués. Ainsi, la meilleure source d'information sur la gestion de ce type de recoupements nous manque. Dans cet article, nous examinons comment des fonctionnaires fédéraux et provinciaux au Québec et c'n Ontario ont géré leurs relations dans un domaine particulièrement conflictuel: la formation de la main‐d'æeuvre.     

A minimax procedure for electing committees

A new voting procedure for electing committees, called the minimax procedure, is described. Based on approval balloting, it chooses the committee that minimizes the maximum Hamming distance to voters’ ballots, where these ballots are weighted by their proximity to other voters’ ballots. This minimax outcome may be diametrically opposed to the outcome obtained by aggregating approval votes in the usual manner, which minimizes the sum of the Hamming distances and is called the minisum outcome. The manipulability of these procedures, and their applicability when election outcomes are restricted in various ways, are also investigated. The minimax procedure is applied to the 2003 Game Theory Society election of a council of 12 new members from a list of 24 candidates. By rendering outlying voters less influential and not antagonizing any voters too much, it arguably would have produced a committee more representative of the interests of all voters than the minisum committee that was elected.