Uncounted Votes: Informal Voting in the House of Representatives as a Marker of Political Exclusion in Australia

This article examines the implications of high levels of informal (or invalid) voting in Australian national elections using a social exclusion framework. The rate of the informal vote is an indicator of social and political exclusion with particular groups of Australians experiencing inordinate electoral disadvantage. Poorer voters, voters from non‐English speaking backgrounds and those with low education levels are especially disadvantaged by factors peculiar to the Australian voting experience. We begin by exploring the character and pattern of informal voting and then canvass the technical and socio‐economic factors which explain it. We conclude by considering proposed options for reducing informality, some of which are: the abandonment of compulsory voting, major structural change to the voting system as well as ballot re‐design, electoral education and community information initiatives.     

Ethnic Identity and Family Processes Among Adolescents from Latin American,Asian, and European Backgrounds

Ninth graders (N = 679; 50% male, 50% female) from Latin American (41%), Asian (38%), and European (21%) backgrounds reported on their ethnic identity and family attitudes and relationships. Adolescents also completed daily checklists of family interactions over a two-week period. Results indicated that ethnic identity, measured through exploration and belonging was more strongly associated with family obligation and assistance than with parent–child closeness and family leisure time. Adolescents from Latin American and Asian backgrounds reported significantly higher levels of obligation and assistance as compared to adolescents with European backgrounds, and these ethnic differences were mediated by ethnic identity. Longitudinal analyses indicated ongoing associations, with ethnic identity predicting respect and obligation one year later. The discussion focuses on the role of ethnic identity in children’s family connectedness during adolescence.

Laughing Our Way to a Stronger Democracy: Political Comedy’s Potential to Equalize Political Interest in Community College Students

What effect does political comedy have on political interest? Through an experimental design, changes in political interest are measured through a pre and posttest, comparing groups randomly assigned to watch The Daily Show, NBC Nightly News, Entertainment Tonight and a no-exposure group. Models indicate political comedy significantly affects political interest, measured through a unique 40-point index.     

Celebrity-led development organisations: the legitimating function of elite engagement

The past decade has seen a frontier open up in international development engagement with the entrance of new actors such as celebrity-led organisations. We explore how such organisations earn legitimacy with a focus on Madonna’s Raising Malawi and Ben Affleck’s Eastern Congo Initiative. The study draws from organisational materials, interviews, mainstream news coverage, and the texts of the celebrities themselves to investigate the construction of authenticity, credibility, and accountability. We find these organisations earn legitimacy and flourish rapidly amid supportive elite networks for funding, endorsements, and expertise. We argue that the ways in which celebrity-led organisations establish themselves as legitimate development actors illustrate broader dynamics of the machinery of development.     

Board Diversity,Stakeholder Representation,and Collaborative Performance in Community Mediation Centers

Does board diversity or representativeness influence organizational performance? Though it is understudied in both the public and the nonprofit sectors, learning more about this critical subject can enhance organizational performance within highly collaborative settings. Community mediation centers, which rely on multiple public and private resources to meet their programmatic objectives, provide excellent case studies for analyzing the impact of different kinds of interorganizational linkages on organizational performance. A multitheoretic view incorporating agency, resource dependence, and stakeholder perspectives is employed through a national sample and a two‐stage analysis using a logic model to test the cumulative impact of board characteristics and interorganizational relationships on organizational outcomes. Organizations’ collaborative capacity depends on several kinds of boundary‐spanning activities, including network ties, revenue sources, and the number of stakeholder groups represented on the board.     

Religion, State Power, and Domestic Violence in Muslim Societies: A Framework for Comparative Analysis

This article focuses on the issue of domestic violence in Muslim societies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The analytical framework is comparative, emphasizing four factors and the interplay among them: shari'a (Islamic law), state power, intrafamily violence, and struggles over women's rights. The comparative approach historicizes the problem of domestic violence and impunity to consider the impact of transnational legal discourses (Islamism and human rights) on "local" struggles over rights and law. The use of shari'a creates some commonalities in gender and family relations in Muslim societies, notably the sanctioning and maintenance of male authority over female relatives. However, the most important issue for understanding domestic violence and impunity is the relationship between religion and state power. This relationship takes three forms: communalization, in which religious law is separate from the national legal regime; nationalization, in which the state incorporates religious law into the national legal regime; and theocratization, in which the national legal regime is based on religious law.     

The role of family conflict and marital conflict in adolescent functioning

Recent research has suggested that general family conflict is more disruptive to child functioning than is marital conflict. We hypothesized, in contrast to earlier work, that marital conflict will contribute unique variance to our understanding of child functioning but only when it occurs in front of children. One hundred and forty-six mother/adolescent pairs served as participants. Mothers completed measures of marital and general family conflict. Both mothers and teachers completed measures on child functioning at two points in time separated by 1 year. Consistent with the earlier findings, general family conflict was more predictive of child adjustment problems than marital satisfaction. However, marital conflict occurring in front of the child was equally predictive of child problem behaviors as was general family conflict.     

Obligations Between Adult Partners: Moving From Form to Function?

It was observed at the end of the twentieth-century that inrelation to family law policy in the UK, the ‘parent-childrelationship was the only clearly ascertainable family relationshipto which legal consequences can be attached’ and it waspredicted that relational obligations between adult partnerswould become individually negotiable. Some considered that whileparenthood would remain subject to normative obligations, thelegal position of married and unmarried couples would be equatedvia the gradual de-regulation of marriage through increasingthe capacity of adults to define the terms of their own relationships.However, recent policy and practice-based developments reveala different picture. The purpose of this article is to considerthe interaction between these mutually informing discoursesand to suggest that rather than developing a more function-basedapproach to the imposition of intra-familial obligations, relationshipstatus continues to carry determinative weight. Particular attentionwill be paid to evolving jurisprudence in the ancillary reliefcontext which has given the fact of marriage, by itself, greaterdistributive consequences on divorce. It will be argued thatcontrary to predictions at the end of the twentieth century,the regulatory gap between married and unmarried relationshipsis becoming wider, and that obligations between parents whichare created by the ‘joint parenting exercise’ arebeing confined, in both arenas, to remedial awards based uponthe disadvantaged economic position of the primary caregiver.