Leonard Woolf,the League of Nations and Peace Between the Wars

Co‐founding The Political Quarterly was one among many of Leonard Woolf's achievements during a long career as a progressive political thinker and publicist, particularly in the field of international affairs. To mark the centenary of the publication of International Government, his most innovative and influential work on the subject, this article seeks to assess Woolf's contribution. It examines the Fabian background to Woolf's work, his support for and approach to the League of Nations and his commitment to collective security as an approach to peace. Through a broader understanding of the League it argues that certain failings in the area of collective security, however profound, should not be permitted to blight an otherwise impressive intellectual legacy.     

A tragedy of the anticommons: local option taxation and cell phone tax bills

When multiple taxing jurisdictions overlap and fail to account for one another’s actions, they over-tax the common base. This is a prediction of the anticommons model, in which numerous parties have authority to exclude others from using a resource. This model further predicts that when governments over-tax the base, private parties will underutilize the resource, and underutilization will be greater as the number of parties with exclusion rights rises. We test these predictions by studying cell phone taxation and local option tax authority, which allows some cities, counties, and special-purpose districts to levy taxes on cell phone use. Consistent with theory, we find that the tax rate on cell phone service is higher when local governments have the option to tax. Further, the percentage of households owning cell phones is lower when there is the local option to tax, and ownership rates fall with the number of taxes levied.     

The Productivity Consequences of Political Turnover: Firm‐Level Evidence from Ukraine's Orange Revolution

We examine the impact of political turnover on economic performance in a setting of largely unanticipated political change and profoundly weak institutions: the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Exploiting census‐type panel data on over 7,000 manufacturing enterprises, we find that the productivity of firms in the regions most supportive of Viktor Yushchenko increased by more than 15 percentage points in the three years following his election, relative to that in the most anti‐Yushchenko regions. We conclude that this effect is driven primarily by particularistic rather than general economic policies that disproportionately increased output among large enterprises, government suppliers, and private enterprises—three types of firms that had much to gain or lose from turnover at the national level. Our results demonstrate that political turnover in the context of weak institutions can have substantial distributional effects that are reflected in economic productivity.     

Citizen Participation in City Governance: Experiences From Vietnam

The radical political and economic reforms sweeping through former socialist countries during the last several decades have facilitated economic growth and urbanization. During this period of market reform and urbanization, citizen participation is greatly needed yet easily lost to other priorities. We employ stakeholder theory to examine whether citizen participation differs between large and small cities and between the poor and non‐poor people in Vietnam. Using data from a sample of citizens in five centrally managed cities, we found that citizens in large cities and citizens that belong to “unofficially poor” groups participate less. For policy makers, this implies that citizen participation should be of central importance in the management of current cities' expansions. In addition, the categorization of “poor households” needs to be closely monitored to minimize the risk of de facto poor households being excluded from the group. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

People with special needs and sexual behaviour problems: balancing community and client interests while ensuring effective risk management

Abstract

Deinstitutionalisation movements of the mid-1900s led to changes in policy and practice in the management of people with special needs (defined for this article as people with severe and persistent mental illness, intellectual disabilities and high levels of personality factors that interfere with treatment participation). Although the majority of clients with special needs receive care in community settings and interact more with family, friends and others in the community, some such clients require more rigorous case management. For clients who have offended, especially sexually, community-based services are scarce, and concerns regarding reoffence potential often supersede traditional understandings of diminished capacity. Recent reports suggest that jails and prisons have replaced hospitals as the institutions-of-choice for clients with special needs who engage in inappropriate conduct. This paper examines policies and practices regarding community risk management of people with special needs who have sexually offended. Vignettes are provided to illustrate how some clients and agencies have been affected, and suggestions are made to ensure best practices in risk management and public safety.     

Seeing Like an Orientalist State: The Three Deaths of Neda Agha-Soltan

On June 20, 2009 one image became a symbol of violence, as well as a rallying cry for a movement that contested the disputed election of hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The image captured the murder of a 26 year old protester named Neda Agha-Soltan, and showed a first-hand account, in bloody detail, of the savagery of state killing. With the help of social media, the video received mass attention from news organizations in the United States by June 22, 2009. Cursory analysis of the New York Times and The Washington Post, representation of Neda’s death, reveals an Iranian government that was unafraid to violently repress a democratic movement. It is my contention here that such a construction was framed by an Orientalist discourse which helped to fabricate three distinct deaths of this murdered protester. First the lasting images of death became a symbol of freedom; Neda’s second death showed a grievable life, one that provided an emotional space for a US audience; and finally her third death which became a means of defining and (re)stabilizing Orientalized perceptions of Iran as violent and barbaric. Ultimately, these three deaths became an instrument that would help justify the call for US intervention on behalf of Western morality and humanitarian aid.     

Ökonomisches Kapital der Eltern und Medizinstudium im Ausland. Wie Europäisierungs- und Globalisierungsprozesse die Reproduktion sozialer Ungleichheiten verändern

The fact that university degrees are accepted throughout Europe has led to the founding of medical faculties, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, that offer medical studies in German or English and thus attracting students from richer Western European countries like Germany. Unlike medical studies in Germany, access to these foreign universities is not dependent on the final school exam grade, but on the ability to pay high tuition fees. The article compares the social class background of medicine students in Germany with German medicine students in Hungary. The analysis shows that the percentage of medicine students who come from higher social classes is even higher in Hungary than it already is in Germany. Studying medicine in Hungary primarily serves as an immediate reproduction of the parents’ profession as many of German medicine students in Hungary have a parent who belongs to the medical profession. The case of German students studying medicine abroad illustrates how Europeanization and Globalization have changed the reproduction of social inequalities; upper classes profit most from the new opportunities.     

Konsekrationsinstanzen im digitalen Wandel – Beiträge zur Erweiterung des feldanalytischen Forschungsprogramms am Beispiel populärer Musik

The article has two objectives: First, pursuant to the recent papers on a “sociology of (e)valuation,” an extension of Bourdieusian field theory will be presented, which reacts to three problems with this theory that were expressed in the critical reception: the immanent tendency to emphasize reproduction more strongly than transformation; the disregarding of technology; and the simple dualism of cultural and economic logic. To begin with, a dynamization of the research program will be undertaken, in that fault lines and transformation dynamics will be revealed that could lead to the invalidation of Pierre Bourdieu’s strict homological assumptions. Following up on that, it will be shown how technology, which was neglected by Bourdieu, can become an (external) factor that causes fundamental changes in fields. Finally, in connection with Jörn Lamla’s reflections on “cultural capitalism” and through a differentiation of the concept of the instance of consecration, a level of analysis will be specified on which the transformation dynamics under discussion can be observed. Secondly, the successful integration of technology in new forms of consecration in the field of pop music will be examined. On the basis of the reaction of classical pop-music journalism to the new value assignment instances that have arisen through digitalization, it can be shown that the challenge arising from new forms of consecration results in negotiatory processes in the field of pop music journalism in which various repositionings in the relationship of cultural and economic logics appear.