The Political Impact of Environmental Economic Ideas

CO₂ taxes on industry increased in the Scandinavian countries over the course of the 1990s, whereas taxation on agricultural emissions of nitrogen stagnated or decreased. Variations between the two policy fields can in part be explained by contrasting ideational viabilities. Two diverging expert communities exist in the agricultural sector: the first is dominated by agricultural scientists, whose analytical vantage point is field production; the other is dominated by economists; whose analytical vantage point comprises overall socio-economic benefits. In the debate between these diverging models of cognition, the taxation of nitrogen is increasingly perceived as inefficient and unfair. Administrative bias and the position in the ministerial hierarchy affect the advice passed on to policy makers. The political viability of nitrogen taxes consequently decreases as politicians hesitate to employ a policy measure that can be cast into doubt on scientific grounds by the political opposition and agricultural organisations. Instead, alternative instruments developed by agricultural scientist are employed. Thus, the interaction between ideas and interests can contribute to our understanding of why the idea of externality taxation gains more political trenchancy in relation to the taxation of industrial CO₂ emissions than in the taxation of nitrogen emissions from agriculture.     

Neighborhood or School? Influences on Alcohol Consumption and Heavy Episodic Drinking Among Urban Adolescents

Little is known about the relative influences of neighborhood and school on the alcohol socialization process. Survey data from the Young in Oslo Study (N?=?10,038, mean age 17.1 years, 52% girls) were used to investigate the details of such influences, using cross-classified multilevel models. School and neighborhood contexts were equally important for ordinary alcohol use; however, neighborhood influences were mainly explained by individual and family factors, whereas peer-based sociocultural processes played a key role in explaining school effects. Neither context had much impact on heavy episodic drinking. The study suggests that “privileged” youth may be at risk of high alcohol consumption. Parental influences and peer-based sociocultural aspects of the school milieu should be considered in prevention efforts.     

RNICE Model: Evaluating the Contribution of Replication Studies in Public Administration and Management Research

Replication studies relate to the scientific principle of replicability and serve the significant purpose of providing supporting (or contradicting) evidence regarding the existence of a phenomenon. However, replication has never been an integral part of public administration and management research. Recently, scholars have called for more replication, but academic reflections on when replication adds substantive value to public administration and management research are needed. This article presents the RNICE conceptual model, for assessing when and how a replication study contributes knowledge about a social phenomenon and advances knowledge in the public administration and management literatures. The RNICE model provides a vehicle for researchers who seek to evaluate or demonstrate the value of a replication study systematically. The practical application of the model is illustrated using two published replication studies.     

Competition and service quality: Evidence from Swedish residential care homes

Against a backdrop of increased levels of marketization of welfare services in OECD countries, this article aims to shed light on the separate effects of private ownership and competition for the market on service quality. Using residential elder care homes in Sweden as our case, we leverage unique panel data of ownership and competition against a set of indicators, pertaining to the structure, process, and outcome dimensions of care quality. The main finding of our analyses is that competition for the market does surprisingly little for quality: private entrepreneurs perform neither better nor worse under stiff competition and the quality of care is approximately the same in those nursing homes that are exposed to the market as in those that are not.     

Balancing acts in construction: A study of two women painters in Denmark and Britain

The construction industry is the most male-dominated labour market in every country in Europe. In Britain and Denmark, women constitute only 1% of those employed in this industry. In spite of the barriers to women entering and remaining in skilled construction work, inroads have been made. Amongst housepainters in Denmark, for instance, women constitute 27% of the workforce and 40% of trainees, and in a number of local authorities' Direct Labour Organisations in Britain, relatively high proportions are to be found. Through the example of two women painters in Britain and Denmark, each with over 14 years' continuous employment, the authors identify the opportunities and obstacles to women entering and remaining in the construction industry. The commonalities and differences between the two countries are illustrated, and it is shown how integration has successfully occurred where social and working conditions are better. The paper concludes that gender segregation and the exclusion of women can be attributed to structural discrimination through training and recruitment mechanisms, the nature of labour relations, employment conditions and the wage system.     

Rent-seeking,political influence and inequality: A simple analytical example

A simple model allowing an analysis of the interaction between economic policy decisions and rent-seeking by private agents competing for political influence, is developed. Rent-seeking may be of the directly unproductive type, requiring resources that are withdrawn from productive activities, or it may manifest itself as income transfers (corruption) to political decisionmakers. In the political-economic equilibrium of the model the extent of rent-seeking, economic policy decisions, income inequality, etc. are endogenously determined.     

Left–right political scales

Nomination: 'Some expert judgments ' live on by Mogens N. Pedersen, p.147
Reflections: Revisiting expert judgements by Peter Mair & Francis G. Castles, p.150     

From Female Shamans to Danish Housewives: Colonial Constructions of Gender in Greenland, 1721 to ca. 1970

Abstract

Taking its inspiration from post-colonial feminist scholarship, particularly the writings of Greenland scholar Karla Jessen Williamson, this paper sets out to trace the ways in which conceptions of gender in Greenland changed as a consequence of the eighteenth-century colonial encounter with Christian missionaries and a Danish trade monopoly. According to Jessen Williamson, pre-colonial Greenlandic conceptions of gender were characterized by a certain social indifference to gender, and the absence of a given hierarchy of male dominance/female subordination—a situation of genderlessness. During the process of colonization, European morals of sexuality and hierarchies of gender were introduced, along with hierarchies of race. The paper focuses on two historical periods, the 1700s and the 1900s. We see the first period as characterized by intricate intersections of gender, race, and class, as well as transformations of existing norms of gender and sexuality. As for the second period, the paper investigates how the notion of genderlessness might provide a background for understanding the different implications of the process of modernization for different groups of women in Greenland. Our aim is to contribute to a continued discussion of different understandings of gender in Greenland and elsewhere.