新生代农民工就业信息获取渠道中的断裂现象

本文认为新生代农民工在就业信息获取渠道中存在三种断裂现象:乡村社会信息系统与城市社会信息系统之间、农民工的社会关系网络与城市社会关系网络之间、农民工管理组织和大众媒介信息传播之间。由此笔者还提出了信息洞这一概念。     

Getting the Order Right: Child Support Guidelines and the Cost of Raising Children

This article argues that the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) estimates of parental expenditures on children are an appropriate economic foundation for state child support guidelines. The USDA’s estimates are consistent with the public policy purposes of state guidelines and may improve the extent to which they accomplish federal intent. The article examines the role of valid and reliable child cost estimates in advancing the policy objectives for child support, summarizes the theoretical and empirical challenges of estimating those costs, suggests the limitations of the most widely used estimation methods in relation to the policy purposes described earlier, and evaluates the USDA’s method in relation to those same purposes. The evidence suggests that guidelines based on the USDA’s estimates are more likely than the most commonly used estimates to yield adequate child support orders and to allocate economic responsibility for children appropriately among the custodial parent, the noncustodial parent, and the state.     

Getting Out the Vote: Minority Mobilization in a Presidential Election

Despite attempts to mobilize communities of color, gaps in turnout among racial and ethnic minorities persist (e.g., Abrajano et al., J Polit 70:368–382, 2008; Pantoja et al., Polit Res Q 54:729–750, 2001; Kaufmann, Polit Res Q 56:199–210, 2003; Ramirez, Ann Am Acad Pol Soc Sci 601:66–84, 2005, Am Polit Res 35:155–175, 2007). Scholars are only beginning to understand how parties or independent groups seek to mobilize these communities. In this paper, we develop and test the Differential Contact Thesis, which holds that turnout differences between whites and minority groups are influenced both by lower rates of contact by the parties and the use of less effective methods of contact. To test this, we examine data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES), 2004 American National Election Study (ANES), and the 2004 Miami Exit Poll. Our results support the Differential Contact Thesis: even controlling for the initial likelihood to be contacted by the parties, racial and ethnic minorities were less likely to be contacted using the most effective techniques. To some extent, non-partisan contact seems to compensate for the inattention of the major parties toward minority voters, but this contact is less likely to mobilize voters than contact from the parties.     

Getting a Seat at the Table: Capital,Capture and Expert Groups in the European Union

European Commission expert groups provide powerful platforms from which interest organisations can steer the EU consultation process and weigh in on policy outcomes. Commission decision-makers and bureaucrats rely heavily on expert groups to provide expert policy advice on highly technical issues in the early stages of the policymaking process. Interest organisations provide this advice in order to have their voices heard at the EU level. But whose interests are being represented in these expert groups? Which types of interest organisations, in other words, get a seat at the table and why? This article, using data on over 800 expert groups and nearly 3,000 interest organisations, argues that expert group membership is largely a function of superior resources, EU-level interests and existing institutionalised ties to decision-makers. Far from simply addressing the Commission’s need for expertise, expert group membership is more a story of capital and capture.     

Intolerance and Political Repression in the United States: A Half Century after McCarthyism

What consequences for political freedom arise from high levels of political intolerance among the American public? Comparing surveys from 1954 to 2005, I document the level of perceived freedom today and consider how it has changed since the McCarthy era. Levels of intolerance today and in 1954 are also compared. Next assessed is whether restrictions on freedom are uniformly perceived or whether some subsections of the population are more likely to feel repressed than others. I find that while intolerance may have declined somewhat since 1954, perceived constraints on individual freedom have actually increased. These findings produce telling consequences for the subtheory of pluralistic intolerance. During McCarthyism, intolerance focused on the Left; today, many groups are not tolerated, so the loss of freedom is more widespread. Heretofore, many thought that pluralistic intolerance tended to be benign. At least in the case of the contemporary United States, it seems not to be.     

The Joys and Sorrows of Diversity: Changes in the Historical Profession in the Last Half Century

The evolution of the historical profession in the United States in the last 50 years provides much reason both for celebration and sorrow. An unprecedented amount of scholarship and teaching is being devoted to regions outside of the traditional American concentration on itself and Europe. New subjects of study—gender, race and ethnicity—have developed. At the same time, political correctness has both narrowed and distorted enquiry. Traditional fields demanding great intellectual rigor, such as intellectual and economic history, are in decline. Even worse, education about Western civilization and the Enlightenment has come to be treated with increasing disdain at colleges and universities. There has instead been a considerable expansion of cultural and women’s studies, including women’s and gender history. These have contributed greatly to the holy trinity of gender, race and class that seems to dominate history departments today. Affirmative action hiring for greater racial, ethnic and gender “diversity” has had an equally great effect on the historical profession. Many of those who were hired preferentially on the basis of past and present discrimination (either real or imagined) continue to emphasize that theme in their research and teaching, since it is their chief claim to professional legitimacy. As a purely intellectual movement, oppression studies cannot last. Any school that leaves out too much about the past is not something to hold serious minds for long. But since it in a small way supports a nationally based political spoils system of racial and ethnic preferences upon which the futures of many politicians rest, it might be expected to have a long life. This is one of the greatest challenges facing historical scholarship today. Even this pales into insignificance in the face of the looming changes in liberal arts education. History is in the process of being reduced from a requirement to an elective on many campuses. This is part of a national trend to move away from the acquisition of knowledge in favor of more broadly based skills. In this way history will suffer the same sorry fate as so much of traditional education in America.     

城镇化过程中农民家庭离散及治理研究——一个村庄的微观透视

家庭是社会的基石,农民家庭的稳定与幸福对于城镇化发展具有举足轻重的作用。改革开放40多年来,城镇化给城乡人民生活带来了巨大变化,也带来了新的挑战和困难。乡城流动过程中农民家庭发生异化,家庭成员或留或流,家庭处于离散状态。家庭离散虽然始于家庭,但要解决家庭离散问题,必须从制度入手,通过改变制度环境、实施制度关怀、实现多元合作治理,结束农民家庭的异态生存方式,给予其自由的迁移权。这不仅有利于实现农民家庭的体面劳动和幸福生活,而且也能为实现未来经济社会持续、稳定发展提供有力保障。     

Only conservatives are voting in the rain: Evidence from German local and state elections

In this note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the Conservatives profit from lower voter turnout at the expense of the Social Democrats. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using election day rain as an instrumental variable. Our particular contribution is the comparison of municipal and state elections.     

Innocents and Oracles: The Child as a Figure of Knowledge and Critique in the Middle-Class Philosophical Imagination

Abstract

This paper argues that the figure of the child performs a critical function for the middle-class social imaginary, representing both an essential "innocence" of the liberal individual, and an excluded, unconscious remainder of its project of control through the management of knowledge. While childhood is invested with affect and value, children's agency and opportunities for social participation are restricted insofar as they are seen both to represent an elementary humanity and to fall short of full rationality, citizenship and identity. The diverse permutations of this figure, as it develops in the middle-class imagination, are traced from the writings of John Locke to the films of Michael Haneke (via Charles Dickens and Henry James), to interrogate what this ambivalence regarding childhood reflects about middle-class, adult identity.     

Not So Scary: Using and Defusing Content Warnings in the Classroom

Content warnings — notices to students that class material may evoke their past traumas — have become entangled in (over)heated debates about the role of free speech on campus. Critics denounce content warnings as silencing tools intended to promote censorship, preclude discussion of difficult topics or punish professors who hold unpopular views. Supporters too often conflate content warnings with broader demands for classroom “safe space” that fail to recognize the distinct features of posttraumatic stress as a form of mental illness. In this article, I reconceptualize content warnings as a way to facilitate access to course material for students with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I then offer a set of concrete strategies for employing content warnings in political science courses. These strategies aim not only to support students struggling with trauma but also to de-escalate the controversy around content warnings by emphasizing how such warnings work to encourage engagement, access, and discussion.     

Getting Ready for Day One: Taking Advantage of the Opportunities and Minimizing the Hazards of a Presidential Transition

Presidential transitions make a difference to the quality of the start a chief executive has coming into office. With formal presidential transitions a reality since 1952, we have sufficient experience to identify some of the elements of an effective transition. This article focuses on how a president-elect can minimize the hazards and take advantage of the opportunities transitions offer. Opportunities and hazards can be found in the actions and commitments candidates take during their presidential campaigns, the information they gather on past transitions and on the actions of the incumbent president, the coordination they do with those in the Washington community, and their capacity to identify and take advantage of the early goodwill that exists when a new president comes into office.     

Getting out the vote: Social structure and the mobilization of partisanship in the 1989 European elections

Abstract: Why do European elections look more like national elections in retrospect than in prospect? One possibility is that during the run-up to a European election party leaders appeal for the votes of their 'normal' supporters, and their success in these appeals gives rise to the 'normal' outcome of the campaign. To test this hypothesis two definitions of 'normal supporters' are evaluated and the outcome is to discredit the use of party identification as a means of identifying supporters. Instead, social structure is employed to identify the groups that might respond to party appeals, and the basic finding of the article is that supporters defined in this fashion do increase their support for appropriate parties during the run-up to a European election, as though they were responding to appeals of the hypothesized kind.     

Fit for the Job: Candidate Qualifications and Vote Choice in Low Information Elections

Cues and heuristics—like party, gender, and race/ethnicity—help voters choose among a set of candidates. We consider candidate professional experience—signaled through occupation—as a cue that voters can use to evaluate candidates’ functional competence for office. We outline and test one condition under which citizens are most likely to use such cues: when there is a clear connection between candidate qualifications and the particular elected office. We further argue that voters in these contexts are likely to make subtle distinctions between candidates, and to vote accordingly. We test our account in the context of local school board elections, and show—through both observational analyses of California election results and a conjoint experiment—that (1) voters favor candidates who work in education; (2) that voters discriminate even among candidates associated with education by only favoring those with strong ties to students; and (3) that the effects are not muted by partisanship. Voters appear to value functional competence for office in and of itself, and use cues in the form of candidate occupation to assess who is and who is not fit for the job.