The resurgence of denial rates for home loans: an examination of disparate effects on groups of applicants in the upper Midwest

Mortgage application denial rates have increased since 2002, but it is unclear to what extent this increase in denials has differentially affected “non-traditional” mortgage applicants that do not resemble “traditional” white, non-Hispanic opposite-sex couple applicants. This article uses augmented Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data to investigate disparities in denial rates between traditional and non-traditional mortgage applicants between 2004 and 2008 in the Federal Reserve Bank's ninth district. We find evidence that lenders became more cautious in lending decisions between 2004 and 2008, treating applicants with the same incomes and requested loan amounts differently over time. After accounting for a variety of loan, applicant, lender, and environmental characteristics, we find that many “non-traditional” applicant groups across the ninth district experienced persistently higher mortgage application denial rates when compared to white, non-Hispanic opposite-sex couples. In some cases, the gap in the mortgage application denial rates between non-traditional and traditional applicants has actually increased over time.     

Consideration set models of electoral choice: Theory,method, and application

In electoral research, decisions by voters are usually analysed as if they choose at once from the whole set of all competing parties or candidates. Consideration Set Models (CSM) posit that voters choose differently, namely in two stages. In the first stage, they exclude certain choice options and create a consideration set of viable options, while in the second stage they choose from within this set. This paper, which serves as an introduction to a special symposium about consideration set models of electoral choice, outlines the theoretical foundations of these models and discusses three methodological issues: research design, measurement, and statistical modelling. More specifically, we recommend the use of pre-election panel surveys, direct measures of electoral consideration sets, and statistical models suitable for analysing dichotomous variables and voter-party dyads. Furthermore, we briefly summarise the other contributions to this symposium and sketch some avenues for their application in future research.     

The political participation of disabled people in Europe: Rights,accessibility and activism

This paper provides the first systematic cross-national assessment of disabled people's electoral and political participation, based on research in the 28 Member States of the European Union and in the context of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. A mixed methods approach included policy analysis, information requests to national experts and secondary analysis of European survey data. The evidence populated indicators which suggest four lines of action: (a) lifting legal and administrative barriers; (b) raising awareness; (c) making political participation more accessible; (c) expanding participation opportunities in public life. Civil society organizations as well as public institutions have an important role to play as change agents in this regard.     

Permanent supportive housing for domestic violence victims: program theory and client perspectives

The US Violence Against Women Act of 2005 allocated $10 million to support collaborative efforts to create permanent housing options for domestic violence victims. Such programs are relatively new and rare, and up to now little research has examined their efficacy. This research investigates one permanent housing option, the permanent supportive housing model, through an exploratory case study of a Connecticut-based program currently being developed. The study compares the program design articulated by administrators and advocates with perspectives of domestic violence agency clients.

Findings indicate important differences between the program activities and goals articulated by administrators, and those preferred by clients. Although everyone agreed that personal safety was a priority, administrators stressed independence and choice whereas clients sought a stricter, community-centered environment with time-limited stays. These themes can be used to develop hypotheses for larger studies and have important preliminary policy and program implications.     

Science studies,climate change and the prospects for constructivist critique

Abstract

Starting from the debates over the ‘reality’ of global warming and the politics of science studies, I seek to clarify what is at stake politically in constructivist understandings of science and nature. These two separate but related debates point to the centrality of modern science in political discussions of the environment and to the difficulties, simultaneously technical and political, in warranting political action in the face of inevitably partial and uncertain scientific knowledge. The case of climate change then provides an experimental test case with which to explore the various responses to these challenges offered by Ulrich Beck's reflexive modernization, the normative theory of expertise advanced by Harry Collins and Robert Evans, and Bruno Latour's utopian vision for decision-making by the ‘collective’ in which traditional epistemic and institutional distinctions between science and politics are entirely superseded.     

The quest for inclusion and citizenship in Ghana: challenges and prospects

Ghana's tortuous journey to democracy received a major boost in the year 2006 with the enactments of two human-rights-related pieces of legislation. In this article the author contends, on the one hand, that the recent enactments of an amendment to the law on representation of the people and the persons with disability law in Ghana constituted a noteworthy landmark in the search for inclusive citizenship. On the other hand, the relation between society and the political authority during the processes of the enactments highlighted characteristics of a post-colonial African state. The author explores the antagonisms that surrounded the enactments of these laws. The article concludes that although the Ghanaian experience represents a new wave of re-thinking of rights in Africa, it also underscores the deep-seated issues of contestation and negotiations that unavoidably accompany the expansion of democracy and extension of rights to the excluded and the marginalized.     

Philosophy,Social Hope and Democratic Criticism: Critical Theory for a Global Age

Abstract

The attempt to connect philosophy and social hope has been one of the key distinguishing features of critical theory as a tradition of enquiry. This connection has been questioned forcefully from the perspective of a post-philosophical pragmatism, as articulated by Rorty. In this article I consider two strategies that have been adopted by critical theorists in seeking to reject Rorty's suggestion that we should abandon the attempt to ground social hope in philosophical reason. We consider argumentative strategies of the philosophical anthropologist and of the rational proceduralist. Once the exchanges between Rorty and these two strands of critical theory have been reconstructed and assessed, an alternative perspective emerges. It is argued that philosophical reasoning best helps to sustain social hope in a rapidly changing world when we consider it in terms of the practice of democratic criticism.     

创建学习型组织：背景、理论和实践意义

学习型组织理论是当今最前沿的管理理论之一。它是在知识经济正在到来、知识管理成为管理核心的时代背景下应运而生的。学习型组织有特定的内涵。在管理实践中，学习型组织已经显示出强大的生命力。我们应密切关注并积极推动学习型组织特别是学习型政府的建设。     

国家间公共政策的转移——概念、研究态势和理论

公共政策的制定者在决策过程中往往通过某种方式来参考其它国家的决策者在相似情况下的做法,包括正面经验和负面教训。这种政策转移(Policy Transfer)现象是公共政策制定和制度创新在现实中的一种主要途径和方式。论述分三个部分:首先,简述了政策转移的概念化过程,辨别了和其它相近概念的异同;其次,勾勒了本课题研究的多学科、多方法和多层次的态势,列举和介绍了一些代表性的研究实例;最后,探讨了相关的理论生成的问题。通过对有关政策转移问题研究的回顾、分析和总结,强调了我国政策转移中大量转移实践和理论研究缺失之间的矛盾现象;提出了开展我国政策转移研究的必要性和关注点;旨在引起我国公共政策的制定者和学者对这一课题的重视,为公共政策有关的决策实践和理论研究提供一个观察、分析和决策的角度。     

Approval regulation and endogenous consumer confidence: Theory and analogies to licensing,safety, and financial regulation

Safety regulation – in the form of pre-market approval, licensure, screening, and product entry limitations – governs numerous market realms, including consumer finance. In this article, we ask whether the effects of safety regulation go beyond safety and affect consumers' beliefs about the distribution of products they can use. We model “approval regulation,” where a government regulator must approve the market entry of a product based upon observable, unbiased, and non-anticipable experiments. We show that even if regulator and firm disagree about only quality standards, the disagreement induces the firm to provide more information about its product than it would in the absence of regulation. Put differently, purely first-order disagreements in regulation generate second-order consequences (more certainty about product quality). These second-order consequences of regulation are sufficient to generate first-order effects among end-users (more consumption of superior products), even when users are risk-neutral. In other words, even if approval regulation produces little or no improvement in safety or quality, it still aggregates information useful to “downstream” product users; these users will exhibit higher consumption and will more readily switch to superior products. In contrast with libertarian analyses of entry regulation and licensure, the model predicts that entry restrictions may be associated with greater product or service utilization (consumption) as well as with greater price sensitivity among consumers. Because contemporary cost–benefit analyses ignore these second-order effects, they are unlikely to capture the possible confidence effects of approval regulation.     

Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice

Much radical writing on academia is grounded in a mystified view of knowledge in which an ecosocialist pedagogy would be “theory from above.” This article argues for a different understanding of knowledge as materially situated in social and ecological relationships; oriented towards practice; developmental and contested from below, demystifying third-level education from the perspective of movement-generated knowledge. Concretely, this means starting from participants’ existing praxis and “learning from each other’s struggles”—using “frozen” movement theory and activist experience—to move towards a wider, more radical understanding. In Ireland such pedagogy is rooted in working-class community self-organising, rural environmental justice alliances, women’s and GLTBQ activism, and the anti-capitalist “movement of movements,” encapsulating Audre Lorde’s dictum, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” The article focusses in particular on a “Masters for activists.” The course supports movement participants to deepen and develop their activist practice but also to situate it within these wider and more radical understandings and emancipatory alliances. Taking movement praxis—rather than “contemplative” knowledge—as a starting point raises very different questions about theory and practice, forms and distribution of knowledge and the purpose and shape of learning.     

公共管理视域中的第三部门：功能、优势及困境

第三部门与公共管理无论从理念还是实践层面都具有紧密的内在联系。第三部门是公民社会的组织,在公共管理的多元主体体系中,代表来自市场和政府之外的力量。在公共管理中,第三部门发挥独特的功能,它已经成为推动经济发展、提供社会公共服务、推进民主政治进程、维护社会稳定、促进社会资本积累的重要力量。第三部门功能的发挥源于第三部门在贴近民众、行动灵活、创新性、专业性、广泛性方面具有独特的优势。同时,第三部门由于内外两方面的原因,存在活力缺失的困境。第三部门要走出困境,客观上需要第三部门自身、政府和社会的共同努力。     

Dynamics of governance,gross capital formation,and growth: Evidence from Brazil,Russia, India,China, and South Africa

This study investigates the impact of governance index and gross fixed capital formation on the economic growth of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) using annual data from 2002 to 2019. This study employs Fixed Effect Model, Driscoll and Kraay standard error with fixed effect, Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square, Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (DOLS) and Panel Dumitrescu Hurlin Causality test. The study has divided the variables into two models where model I includes the impact of governance index (jointly) on economic growth while model II examines the impact of governance index on economic growth individually. The findings demonstrate that the governance index, gross fixed capital formation, population, control of corruption, and governance effectiveness have a positive and significant impact on economic growth, whereas regulatory quality showed a significant and negative impact on economic growth. Furthermore, regarding the Panel test, we notice the presence of unidirectional causality among the constituent variables. Therefore, this study suggests that the government should encourage economic development in the BRICS countries and move away from outdated ideas and poor institutional quality in favor of a new comprehensive reform to achieve excellent governance, population growth control, labor law changes, and corruption control.     

Foreign direct investment,information and communication technology,trade, and economic growth in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation countries: An empirical insight

Information and communication technology (ICT) is one of the key sectors promoting economic growth in the present modern era of globalization. It promotes technological advances in global communications as well as production techniques and contributes to economic growth and development. Most of the economic activities, including international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), are largely dependent on various modern sources of ICT. The objective of this study is to examine the dynamic relationship between FDI, ICT, trade, and per capita gross domestic product growth across the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) developing nations from 2000 to 2017. We have used different panel estimates such as fully modified ordinary least squares, dynamic ordinary least squares, Fisher–Johansen cointegration test, panel autoregressive distributed lag, and Dumitrescu–Hurlin causality. We found existence of unidirectional causality from FDI to ICT and bidirectional causal relationship between trade and ICT. The outcome of our study suggests policy recommendations for improving the standards of ICT, specifically focusing on economic growth, trade openness, and facilitation of foreign investment in the SAARC countries.     

The growth of policies,rules, and regulations: A review of the literature and research agenda

This article reviews the vibrant literature on policy growth in political science and adjacent disciplines, thus offering a conceptual framework for situating past and future research efforts and facilitating the engagement between them. The first part presents important concepts that capture policy growth or aspects of it (rule growth, policy layering, policy mixes, policy accumulation, policyscapes, the policy state) and dominant measurement approaches. The second part provides an overview of the main drivers of policy growth in advanced democracies, discussing the role of societal demands, political competition, institutional fragmentation, and bureaucratic processes. The third part outlines the multi-faceted and far-reaching consequences of policy growth for policy, politics, and the polity. While policy growth is often portrayed as the price to pay for upholding the democratic capitalist order in constantly modernizing and diversifying societies, the existing research also points to the negative consequences emanating from increased state activity. Policy growth not only threatens to overburden bureaucracies and thereby undermine policy effectiveness; it may also transform the institutional structure of the democratic state and make its politics more complicated and conflictual.     

西方“整体政府”改革：理论、实践及启示

20世纪90年代中后期,西方各国进行了以"整体政府"为内容的第二轮政府改革运动。在理论上,西方"整体政府"改革既是对新公共管理反思与批判的结果,又是一定意识形态作用的产物,还与各种协作理论密切相关;"整体政府"已成为当代西方各国政府改革的新趋向,并形成了一种区别于传统官僚制和新公共管理模式的新型政府改革模式,即"整体政府"模式。该模式具有深刻的内涵、鲜明的特征和独特的治理结构。在实践上,"整体政府"改革具有丰富的内容,既有改革模式上的共性,又有具体操作中的国别特色,并形成了一种最佳实践模式。这一最佳实践模式具有独特的文化与哲学、新的工作方式、新的责任和激励机制,以及制定政策、设计方案和提供服务的新方式。西方"整体政府"改革对我国当前行政管理体制改革的进路具有三点启示:一是建立"内联"治理结构;二是发展"外协"合作关系;三是转变政府职能,建设和谐行政文化。     

Recent Developments to British Multicultural Theory,Policy and Practice: The Case of British Muslims

Since the early 1970s, there have been highly sophisticated arguments and conceptual discussions put forward in relation to how Western liberal democracies might wish to manage their diverse ethnic minority populations. It is apparent, however, that in the current climate, the important principles of unity and diversity are insufficient to challenge differing forms of ethnic, racial, and religious inequality. This paper argues that because of its underlying assumptions and modus operandi in the post-September 11 climate, British multiculturalism has been ineffective, even supporting some commentators' suggestions of a return to assimilationism. There is a new era in post-September 11 political hegemony, economic determinism and structural and cultural racisms, with European government rhetoric and public policy almost exclusively aimed at Muslims—whether as existing citizens or as part of a process of limiting immigration (which has tended to be from mainly Eastern European, North African, and Middle Eastern sending regions and nations). The example of New Labour and how it has attempted to deal with multiculturalism in Britain is a case in point. The discussion explores the changing concept of multiculturalism with special reference to British Muslims and debates that emerge in relation to identity, nation and civil society. It is argued that the experience and treatment of British Muslims is important to explore and appreciate in the current climate as it provides a test case for the future of (a) British multiculturalism and (b) British Muslims in society per se.     

Political Competition,Agenda Power,and Incentives to Innovate: An Empirical Examination of Vested‐Interest Theory

Technological innovations are by no means Pareto‐improving. I build on the argument that incumbent innovators can use political means to block rival innovations by emphasizing that the competitiveness of political system and some political institutions may diminish their ability to do so. I specify an institutional mechanism of agenda power, which provides newcomers with an improved ability to enter the game. The number of agenda power holders varies significantly among political systems, electoral systems, and administrative structures. With a sample of about 100 countries and across 20 years I show that politically competitive regimes, majoritarian electoral rules, and federal structures supply more holders of agenda power in comparison to their counterparts and, other things being equal, produce more innovations.     

How electoral vulnerability affects pension politics: Introducing a concept,measure and empirical application

Are electorally vulnerable politicians really less likely to support controversial legislation, such as pension reforms? While the literature on welfare state retrenchment has increasingly pointed to the role of electoral factors in the dynamics of social policy cutbacks, there are few studies that actually measure the magnitude of electoral pressure and its consequent impact on the politics of reform. To this end, the authors have developed a quantitative measure of the electoral vulnerability of politicians and tested its impact on pension reform outcomes using an original dataset comprising 16 Western European countries from 1980 to 2003. In line with expectations, the results show that the impact of electoral vulnerability on reform depends upon the system of interest intermediation. In corporatist systems, electoral vulnerability indeed impedes reform. But in pluralist systems, increased electoral vulnerability is associated with higher levels of reform. This is because unions in corporatist (but not in pluralist) systems can exploit electoral vulnerability in pre‐legislative bargaining, and thus pressure politicians. Consequently, this study has broader implications for the differential responsiveness of democracies to redistributive issues more generally.