Retiring in debt? An update on the 2007 near-retiree cohort

This research note uses 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) data to update the authors' work reported in a prior article, which used earlier data to assess debt levels among households approaching retirement in 1995 and 2004. The authors assess whether there have been changes in the debt holdings of near-retirees in 2007, a point in time reflecting the start of the recent financial and economic crisis. Results show that debt levels of near-retirees were modestly higher in 2007 than in 2004, overall and across several subgroups. The results reinforce a general finding of the original article that current near-retirees, primarily baby boomers, are approaching retirement with more debt compared with their counterparts in the mid-1990s. Because the 2007 SCF data captures only the beginning of the current recession, the authors expect future trends to differ from the results presented here.     

Taking Threat Seriously: Prejudice,Principle, and Attitudes Toward Racial Policies

Drawing from group theories of race-related attitudes and electoral politics, we develop and test how anxiety influences the relative weight of prejudice as a determinant of individuals’ support for racial policies. We hypothesize that prejudice will more strongly influence the racial policy preferences of people who are feeling anxious than it will for people who are not. Using an experimental design we manipulate subjects’ levels of threat and find significant treatment effects, as hypothesized. We find that individuals’ racial policy attitudes are partially conditional on their affective states: individuals who feel anxious report less support for racial policies than those individuals who do not feel anxious, even when this threat is stimulated by non-racial content. More broadly, we conclude that affect is central to a better understanding of individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors.     

Oxfam Australia's experience of ‘bottom–up’ accountability

Oxfam's experience suggests that ‘bottom–up’ accountability can be an important mechanism whereby men and women living in poverty can hold others to account. The first section of this article illustrates this with two examples of Oxfam experience in Vietnam and Sri Lanka. The second section draws out some of the lessons from these examples and attempts to situate them within the broader debate about approaches to accountability. In the third section some suggestions are put forward about what would need to change if active citizenship and ‘speaking truth to power’ were to become the renewed focus of accountability.