Dawns, Twilights, and Transitions: Postmodern Theories, Politics, and Challenges

The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves conflicts between modern and postmodern politics. In this essay, we articulate the differences between modern and postmodern politics and argue against one-sided positions that dogmatically reject one tradition or the other in favor of partisanship for either the modern or the postmodern. Arguing for a politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served by drawing on the most progressive elements of both the modern and postmodern traditions. Developing a new politics involves overcoming the limitations of certain versions of modern politics and postmodern identity politics in order to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the new millennium.     

Local government in practice: evidence from two villages in northern Albania

This article examines how local government operated in two villages in northern Albania and describes how these two communities organized themselves to negotiate with the state. Post‐communist local government is examined by means of its functions as a provider and an organizer. The reluctance of central government to devolve power was reflected in the resources allocated to local government institutions and thus on their performance. While Albanian cultural traditions were a source of support and cohesion in the villages, they were no substitute for the development of the capacity to collectively negotiate with the state. There was a link between the way in which institutions were socially embedded and the capacity of the villages to form and support representative bodies. The article concludes that local government has been undervalued and argues for greater attention to be focused on the nexus composed of citizens and the institutions of government which are closest to them. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tax Toleration and Tax Compliance: How Government Affects the Propensity of Firms to Enter the Unofficial Economy

How do government‐supplied institutional benefits and the taxation and regulation of producers affect the propensity of private firms to enter the unofficial economy and evade taxation? We propose a model in which the incentive of firms to operate underground depends on tax rates relative to firm‐specific thresholds of tax toleration that are decisively affected by quality of governance—in particular by the presence of high‐grade institutions delivering services enhancing official production that anchor profit‐maximizing firms to the official economy. Some key predictions of the model concerning the determinants of firms' tax toleration and tax compliance receive broad support from empirical analyses of enterprise‐level data from the World Bank's World Business Environment Surveys.     

Settled Borders and Regime Type: Democratic Transitions as Consequences of Peaceful Territorial Transfers

Research arguing that external threats determine regime type has generally failed to provide systematic evidence in favor of the peace‐to‐democracy hypothesis. We suspect that the lack of confirmatory findings is likely driven by conflating the concepts of negative (absence of conflict) and positive (mutual trust and cooperation) peace. By focusing on territorial issues and the phenomenon of peaceful state‐to‐state territorial transfers (i.e., peaceful alteration of borders), we are able to observe the effects of replacing territorial threat stemming from negative territorial peace (or territorial rivalry) with the positive territorial peace associated with legitimate, mutually accepted borders. Our findings support the expectations that peaceful territorial transfers remove active and latent territorial threat and lead to demilitarization and democratization. Importantly, peaceful territorial transfers are not endogenous to regime type. Our study therefore supports an alternative explanation for the democratic peace: both democracy and peace may be a function of settling territorial threats.     

Status versus growth: The distributional effects of school accountability policies

Although the federal No Child Left Behind program judges the effectiveness of schools based on their students' achievement status, many policy analysts argue that schools should be measured, instead, by their students' achievement growth. Using a 10‐year student‐level panel data set from North Carolina, we examine how school‐specific pressure associated with status and growth approaches to school accountability affect student achievement at different points in the prior‐year achievement distribution. Achievement gains for students below the proficiency cut point emerge in schools failing either type of accountability standard, with the effects clearer for math than for reading. In contrast to prior research highlighting the possibility of educational triage, we find little or no evidence that failing schools in North Carolina ignore the students far below proficiency under either approach. Importantly, we find that the status, but not the growth, approach reduces the reading achievement of higher performing students. Our analysis suggests that the distributional effects of accountability pressure depend not only on the type of pressure for which schools are held accountable (status or growth), but also the tested subject. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Three Sorries and You’re In? Does the Prime Minister’s Statement in the Australian Federal Parliament Presage Federal Constitutional Recognition and Reparations?

Then newly elected Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a historic statement of “Sorry” for past injustices to Australian Indigenous peoples at the opening of the 2008 federal parliament. In the long-standing absence of a constitutional ‘foundational principle’ to shape positive federal initiatives in this context, there has been speculation that the emphatic Sorry Statement may presage formal constitutional recognition. The debate is long overdue in a nation that only overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised native title to lan with the High Court’s decision in Mabo in 1992. This article explores the implications of the Sorry Statement in the context of reparations for the generations removed from their families under assimilation policies (known since the Bringing Them Home Inquiry as the Stolen Generations). We draw out the utility of recent human rights statutes—such as the Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT)—as a mechanism for facilitating justice, including compensation for past wrongs. Our primary concern here is whether existing legal processes in Australia hold further capacity to provide reparation for Australian Indigenous peoples or whether their potential in that regard is already exhausted. We compare common law and statutory developments in other international jurisdictions, such as Canada, as an indication of what can be achieved by the law to facilitate better legal, economic and social outcomes for Indigenous peoples. The year 2008 also saw Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper express his apology to residential school victims in the Canadian Parliament, providing thematic and symbolic echoes across these two former colonies, which, despite remaining under the British monarchy, both forge their own path into the future, while confronting their own unique colonial past. We suggest that the momentum provided by the recent public apology and statement of “Sorry” by the newly elected Australian Prime Minister must not be lost. This symbolic utterance as a first act of the 2008 parliamentary year stood in stark contrast to the long-standing recalcitrance of the former Prime Minister John Howard on the matter of a formal apology. Rather than a return to a law enforcement-inspired “three strikes and you’re out” approach, Australia stands poised for an overdue constitutional and human rights-inspired “three ‘sorries’ and you’re in”.     

"Ripple Effects" in Youth Peacebuilding and Exchange Programs: Measuring Impacts Beyond Direct Participants

A number of organizations have a mission of encouraging peace throughout the world by enhancing young people's knowledge and understanding of other countries and cultures. One strategy used to further this mission is international or intercultural exchange programs. Most evaluations of exchange programs gather data only from the direct participants who traveled to another country. But these programs have the potential to have impacts that expand beyond the direct participants—or "ripple effects." Thus, a more appropriate methodology to evaluate exchange programs is "360-degree feedback," which gathers data from multiple sources. This study uses 360-degree feedback to evaluate a youth peacebuilding and exchange program by gathering data not only from the exchange students but also from chaperones, host families, and students and teachers in the host school. ANOVA analyses finds that the program had positive impacts on the exchange students and, in many cases, even greater ripple effects on indirect participants.     

“Success” in policy piloting: Process,programs, and politics

Research has demonstrated that pilots contain multiple shifting purposes, not all of which relate to simple policy testing or refinement. Judging the success of policy pilots is therefore complex, requiring more than a simple judgment against declared goals. Marsh and McConnell provide a framework against which policy success can be judged, distinguishing program success from process and political success. We adapt Boven's modification of this framework and apply it to policy pilots, arguing that pilot process, outcomes and longer-term effects can all be judged in both program and political terms. We test this new framework in a pilot program in the English National Health Service, the Vanguard program, showing how consideration of these different aspects of success sheds light on the program and its aftermath. We consider the implications of the framework for the comprehensive and multifaceted evaluation of policy pilots.     

Informing the Understudied R: Exploring and Advancing Typological Research

Creating offender typologies has become a growing interest and a potential method of improving understanding of programming needs and potential placements. Most typological research has only explored and described potential offender types. Relatively few studies have attempted to confirm the existence of created typologies or examine how offenders in each type predict important outcomes. Utilizing a large sample (N = 37,111) of reentering male offenders from Washington State Department of Corrections, we computed both an exploratory and confirmatory latent class analysis. After the confirmation of six offender types, we examined each type’s likelihood of several recidivistic outcomes. We anticipate that the described typology will assist case management, prioritizing offender needs, optimizing treatment services, and determining sequencing of multiple treatment types.     

Race/ethnicity,citizenship status,and crime examined through trauma experiences among young adults in the United States

Race/ethnicity, citizenship status, and trauma, have significant impact on delinquency and crime outcomes; though the reasons for some expected and unexpected crime pathways are still unanswered. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (n?=?7,103), this study found the following results: no difference in the likelihood of engagement in delinquency and crime between blacks and whites; cumulative trauma increased delinquency and crime rates for all racial and ethnic groups; racial and ethnic minority groups compared to whites reported a significantly higher level of childhood trauma experiences; and native-born female immigrant groups (but not male) were more likely to engage in delinquency and crime than first-generation female immigrant groups. Implications and recommendations are set forth.