Exchange rate volatility and regional trade agreements in Southern Africa

Economic Change and Restructuring - Exchange rate volatility is often perceived to cause a reduction in the overall level of trade. In view of the proliferation of rapid regional trade agreements...     

Public Administration Research in Mainland China: A Systematic Review of Chinese Public Administration in English Language Journals (1996–2016)

This study provides a systematic review of the development of Chinese public administration in English language journals. An analysis of articles in the top 25 English-language public administration journals worldwide from 1996 to 2016 confirmed increases in both the number and significance of studies of Chinese public administration. A systematic content analysis of abstracts of previous studies was performed and showed that social development and administrative reform were among the most important topics. With respect to the methodology of this study, qualitative methods were more frequently used than quantitative or mixed methods. Finally, implications for future research on Chinese public administration are discussed.     

The webs of belief around ‘evidence’ in legislatures: The case of select committees in the UK House of Commons

A wide‐ranging literature has explored the relationship between research, knowledge and policy. However, legislatures have often been overlooked in this research. While some studies have looked at ‘who has access’, the literature on how parliaments seek to engage with knowledge claims is particularly scarce. This article addresses this gap through a case study of UK select committees. By adopting an interpretive lens, the article explores how MPs and officials make sense of evidence in committee settings. It finds that legalistic definitions around ‘evidence’ shape wider beliefs in how to engage with knowledge claims and the practices of undertaking inquiries, and are underpinned by a distinctly political function of knowledge use in politics. Beliefs around evidence have significant repercussions and highlight tensions (i) around the authority of committee reports, (ii) between epistemic and democratic claims and (iii) with respect to who is included and who is excluded.     

Multiwinner approval voting: an apportionment approach

Public Choice - To ameliorate ideological or partisan cleavages in councils and legislatures, we propose modifications of approval voting in order to elect multiple winners, who may be either...     

Relational legal consciousness in the punitive welfare state: How Dutch welfare officials shape clients' perceptions of law

With a growing number of strict obligations and harsh sanctions for welfare recipients, the Netherlands has increasingly become a punitive welfare state. This article looks at what this means for welfare clients and their commonsense understandings of the law. To analyze how welfare officials shape clients' legal consciousness, I draw on an online survey among Dutch welfare clients (N = 1305) and a correlation analysis. The findings show that there is a clear relationship between welfare clients' own legal consciousness and their assessment of welfare officials' beliefs about the law. However, not all elements of their legal consciousness are relationally influenced by the same factors. Also, clients' self-reported compliance behavior is less relationally influenced than other elements of their legal consciousness. This study adds to our understanding of the mechanisms that constitute the production of relational and second-order legal consciousness and it contributes to the development of new research methods to study people's perceptions of law.     

Social Competence in Late Elementary School: Relationships to Parenting and Neighborhood Context

Despite evidence that neighborhoods confer both risk and resilience for youth development, the existing neighborhood research has a number of methodological limitations including lack of diversity in neighborhoods sampled and neighborhood characteristics assessed. The purpose of this study was to address these methodological limitations of existing research and to examine the relationship of neighborhood structural and social characteristics to family-level social processes and teacher-reported social competence during early adolescence. The study sample of 3,624 fifth graders (51?% girls) was ethnically diverse, including roughly even proportions of non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic youth. Neighborhood measures included economic disadvantage derived from the U.S. Census, physical and social disorder obtained by direct observation, and social capital from parental reports. Family-level social processes included parent reported family cohesion and youth reported maternal and paternal nurturance. We found that neighborhood factors significantly associated with youth social aggression and social competence but not social withdrawal, after controlling for individual demographic characteristics and parenting factors. There was limited evidence of moderation of family influences by neighborhood characteristics as well as the moderation of neighborhood effects by children’s gender. Neighborhood physical disorder was associated with increased social aggression among boys but with increased social withdrawal among girls. Implications of the study’s findings for research on neighborhoods and adolescent development and the development of preventive interventions are discussed.     

Sexual Attraction, Sexual Identity, and Psychosocial Wellbeing in a National Sample of Young Women During Emerging Adulthood

Identity-based conceptualizations of sexual orientation may not account adequately for variation in young women’s sexuality. Sexual minorities fare worse in psychosocial markers of wellbeing (i.e., depressive symptoms, anxiety, self esteem, social support) than heterosexual youth; however, it remains unclear whether these health disparities exclusively affect individuals who adopt a sexual minority identity or if they also may be present among heterosexually-identified youth who report same-sex attractions. We examined the relationship between sexual attraction, sexual identity, and psychosocial wellbeing in the female only subsample (weighted, n = 391) of a national sample of emerging adults (age 18–24). Women in this study rated on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely) their degree of sexual attraction to males and females, respectively. From these scores, women were divided into 4 groups (low female/low male attraction, low female/high male attraction, high female/low male attraction, or high female/high male attraction). We explored the relationship between experiences of attraction, reported sexual identity, and psychosocial outcomes using ordinary least squares regression. The results indicated sexual attraction to be predictive of women’s psychosocial wellbeing as much as or more than sexual identity measures. We discuss these findings in terms of the diversity found in young women’s sexuality, and how sexual minority status may be experienced by this group.     

Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.     

The European Union’s trade and investment policy in Asia: new challenges and opportunities in a changing global environment – or: following individual roadmaps

Asia is Europe’s largest trading partner and EU-Asia trade relations have undergone a rapid change since the global financial crisis. On a global scale, the new multilateral trade agreements such as the now stalled Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) involving European Unions’ (EU) major trading partners such as Japan, Singapore and Vietnam also have the potential to change the trade equations. In this paper, we evaluate the new EU trade policy which has been designed to ensure that the EU benefits from the changing global trade scenario and also look at the steps which have been taken by the EU to promote trade relations with its major trading partners in Asia in the predicted ‘Asian century’. We look into the Free Trade Agreements, which are being negotiated with its Asian partners and seek to understand the reasons which have resulted in delays in their signing and negotiations. We evaluate new policies pushed forward by its Asian partners such as the One Belt One Road policy by China and Japan’s policy of securing a large number of trading agreements in the America. Moving ahead, we also shed light on the indirect factors that may influence the success of EU trade negotiations in Asia such as the EU policy on granting China market economy status and the commencement of the ‘Brexit’ process. Lastly, we try to present a list of immediate priorities for EU in Asia, which will ensure that it secures a toehold in trade with the region. All in all, it is shown that the EU has not one and the same approach for all Asian countries but it negotiates flexibly and individually country by country. Because of this “country by country approach” the EU is also not ready to enter into general EU-ASEAN trade negotiations again.