Party System Competition and Private Sector Development in Africa

Democratic transitions by many African countries have generated much analysis of the organisational features of political parties or their role in voter mobilisation during elections. Yet, scholars have largely overlooked how parties negotiate economic policymaking or interact with the private sector in countries that are incipient democracies and emerging markets. This article argues that the stability or fragmentation of the party system affects patterns of private sector development and shapes linkages between the state, business and labour. It compares Mozambique and Zambia to demonstrate how variations in party system characteristics influence the relationship between economic and political interests.     

Charlottesville Paradox: The ‘Liberalizing’ Alt-Right, ‘Authoritarian’ Left,and Politics of Dialogue

In the aftermath of the 2017 Charlottesville tragedy, the prevailing narrative is a Manichean division between ‘white supremacists’ and ‘anti-racists’. We suggest a more complicated, nuanced reality. While the so-called ‘Alt-Right’ includes those pursuing an atavistic political end of racial and ethnic separation, it is also characterised by pluralism and a strategy of nonviolent dialogue and social change, features associated with classic liberalism. The ‘Left,’ consistent with its historic mission, opposes the Alt-Right’s racial/ethnic prejudice; but, a highly visible movement goes farther, embracing an authoritarianism that would forcibly exclude these voices from the public sphere. This authoritarian element has influenced institutions historically committed to free expression and dialogue, notably universities and the ACLU. We discuss these paradoxes by analysing the discourse and actions of each movement, drawing from our study of hundreds of posts and articles on Alt-Right websites and our online exchanges on a leading site (AltRight.com). We consider related news reports and scholarly research, concluding with the case for dialogue.     

Moral Disengagement and Building Resilience to Violent Extremism: An Education Intervention

This article reports on the development of an education intervention, the Beyond Bali Education Resource funded by the Australian Governments’ Building Community Resilience Grants of the Federal Attorney General's Department, that applies a conceptual framework grounded in moral disengagement theory. Beyond Bali is a five module program for schools that is specifically designed to build social cognitive resilience to violent extremism by engaging self-sanctions and preparing students to challenge the influence of violent extremism that can lead to moral disengagement. The theory of moral disengagement has been applied to the study of radicalization to violent extremism to explain how individuals can cognitively reconstruct the moral value of violence and carry out inhumane acts. The mechanisms of moral disengagement through which individuals justify violence, dehumanize victims, disregard the harmful consequences of violence and absolve themselves of blame have been used in the construction of violent extremist narratives. However, they have not been applied to the development of intervention strategies that aim to counter the radicalizing influences of violent extremist narratives.     

Interest group representation and framing in the media: A policy area perspective

This article analyzes interest group representation and framing in the news media. In contrast to previous work, it focuses on the role of the policy area in shaping the types of groups appearing in the media and the frames used by groups. Empirically, the analysis maps group representation and framing across six different policy areas in the Danish news media. It distinguishes between whether groups frame their viewpoints as furthering (a) the interests of group members, (b) the interests of other specific societal groups, (c) broad economic concerns, or (d) public interests in general. Interest group representation and framing is found to vary between these policy areas. Some areas mainly contrast economic groups and the interests of their members, whereas debates in other areas are more likely to be shaped by references to beneficiaries of welfare state services or broad, public interests.     

New York State of Mind: Parental Incarceration and Children's Visitation in New York State

The incarceration of a parent has a variety of negative effects on a child's psychological, academic, and developmental success. Children can end up in foster care as a result of the state terminating parental rights due to the parent's incarceration. Despite imprisonment of their parent(s), maintenance of visitation with the parent(s) is still important for their children. However, not all prisons have visitation programs that are suitable to visiting children. This Note proposes a model state statute that will recognize the importance of visitation, implement “child friendly” visitation programs, facilitate training for prison staff, and provide transportation for children in major cities to the prison facilities.     

Strength in Numbers or Quality over Quantity? Examining the Importance of Criterion Measure Selection to Define Validity Groups in Performance Validity Test (PVT) Research

Mirroring clinical guidelines, recent Performance Validity Test (PVT) research emphasizes using ≥ 2 criterion PVTs to optimally identify validity groups when validating/cross-validating PVTs; however, even with multiple measures, the effect of which specific PVTs are used as criterion measures remains incompletely explored. This study investigated the accuracy of varying two-PVT combinations for establishing validity status and how adding a third PVT or applying more liberal failure cut-scores affects overall false-positive (FP)/-negative (FN) rates. Clinically referred veterans (N = 114; 30% clinically identified as invalid) completing a six-PVT protocol as during their evaluation were included. Concordance rates were calculated across all possible two-and three-PVT combinations at conservative and liberal cutoffs. Two-PVT combinations classified 72–91% of valid (0–4% FPs) and 17–74% of invalid (0–40% FNs) cases, and three-PVT combinations classified 67–86% of valid (0–6% FPs) and 57–97% of invalid (0–24% FNs) at conservative cutoffs. Liberal cutoffs classified 53–86% of valid (0–15% FPs) and 39–82% of invalid (0–30% FNs) cases for two-PVT combinations and 46–75% of valid (3–27% FPs) and 60–97% of invalid (0–17% FNs) cases for three-PVT combinations. Irrespective of whether a two-or three-PVT combination or conservative/liberal cutoffs were used, many valid and invalid cases failed only one PVT (3–68%).Two-PVT combinations produced high FNs and were less accurate than three-PVTs for detecting invalid cases, though variable accuracy was found within both types of combinations based on the specific PVTs in the combination. Thus, both PVT quantity and quality are important for accurate validity classification in research studies to ensure reliability and replicability of findings. Applying more liberal cutoffs yielded increased sensitivity, but with generally higher FPs yielding problematic specificity, particularly for three-PVT combinations.     

Pre-parliamentary party career and political representation

Abstract

Members of parliament are accountable to both their district and party. Consequently, they have to balance their responsiveness to these competing principals when their preferences diverge. Existing research on this representational dilemma focuses mostly on the role of political institutions, whereas this article offers a new individual-level explanation: pre-parliamentary party careers. Using sequence analysis, three ideal-typical pre-parliamentary career paths are identified: the party local, the party functionary, and the party civilian. The share of party locals increases over time at the expense of party civilians in the Danish parliament, and these party locals are more likely to diverge from the party’s position when it is unpopular among their constituents. These findings corroborate existing evidence of political professionalisation in parliamentary democracies, but they also suggest that professionalisation may be associated with a localisation of politics leading to more rather than less constituency representation.     

Trafficking of Ethiopian women to Europe – making choices,taking risks,and implications

ABSTRACT

This piece focuses on the Ethiopian women victims of trafficking – the agency of these women in the whole trafficking process, and issues of choice – ‘trying a chance’, or just taking a risk to get out of poverty or difficult social circumstances, considering that they are lured, tricked, coerced, or even forced into the hands of traffickers by a wide range of circumstances and people, including family and friends. Traffickers target girls with economic, social, and family problems. Most of the trafficking of women and girls from Ethiopia is carried out through the use of service ‘agencies’ and human smugglers who facilitate the process of migration through a number of routes. Many of those who use the ‘desert route’ often begin from Sudan to North Africa from where they cross to Europe. The data for this contribution were generated in a study – ‘Captured in Flight: Experiences of violence among African women in Sweden’ – funded by the Swedish crime prevention agency (Brottsoffermyndgheten). The research for the project has been carried out in Sweden, but the women whose case studies are presented here have been in the Middle East, Turkey, Italy, Finland, and Greece before coming to Sweden.     

“Orbiting the Core”: Politics and the Meaning of Dialect in Chinese Linguistics, 1927–1957

In 1956, the Chinese Communist state launched its official language policy, which included the promulgation of a standard spoken language, called Putonghua. Their justification for this policy and their methods for implementation were guided by intellectual and ideological frameworks that formed during decades preceding the policy's rollout. In particular, Communist language reform was predicated on the conceptualization of Putonghua as a holistic language meant to serve the national body—and of local dialects, called fangyan in Chinese, as dependent on Putonghua for their very definition. This article interrogates the history of this framework. Focusing on dialect surveys from the 1930s, Chinese interpretations of Marxist linguistic theory in the early years of the Communist state, and methods of Putonghua promulgation in the late 1950s, this article reconstructs the epistemological regimes that gave meaning to the concept of independence and autonomy as they related to language in modern China.