Gender differences in perceptions for women's participation in unwanted sexual intercourse

This article examines the reasons that women and men give in explaining why women willingly agree to sexual intimacy when they would rather not be intimate at that time. Data collected from a sample of students on a southern campus included a set of scales which measured the beliefs about why women consent to unwanted sexual intercourse held by men and women. The findings indicated that most sexual intercourse was consensual and mutually desired. Perceived reasons for consent to unwanted sex by women varied for men and women, as did the ranking of relative importance of the reasons. Some support was found for the contention that compliance might be a function of gender socialization.     

Can foreign aid reduce income inequality and poverty?

This paper’s goal is to examine the effect of foreign aid on income inequality and poverty reduction for the period 1971–2002. Since simple cross-country regressions cannot be taken as ‘true’ time series findings we focus on dynamic panel data techniques, which allow accounting for potential simultaneity and heterogeneity problems. We find some weak evidence that foreign aid is conducive to the improvement of the distribution of income when the quality of institutions is taken into account; however, this result is not robust. This finding is consistent with recent empirical research on aid ineffectiveness in achieving economic growth or promoting democratic institutions.     

“I Got Your Back”: Friends’ Understandings Regarding College Student Spring Break Behavior

Behaviors that pose threats to safety and health, including binge drinking and unprotected sex, increase during a week-long break from university. Understandings with peers regarding these behaviors may be important for predicting behavior and related harms. College students (N = 651; 48% men) reported having understandings with their friends regarding alcohol use (59%) and sexual behavior (45%) during Spring Break. These understandings were to engage in behaviors characterized by risk (e.g., get drunk [23.5%], have sex with someone new [5.2%]) and protection (e.g., drink without getting drunk [17.8%], use condoms [15.8%]). After controlling for previous semester behavior and going on a Spring Break trip, Get Drunk Understandings predicted a greater likelihood of binge drinking and alcohol-related consequences; No/Safe Sex Understandings predicted condom use; and Sex Understandings predicted not using condoms. Understandings with friends regarding Spring Break behavior may be important proximal predictors of risk behaviors and represent potential targets for event-specific prevention.     

Thinking about Violence

In the book, Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala, I assembled a lens to shed light on the less visible and routinized aspects of violence in women’s lives, based on field work I conducted among ladina women in eastern Guatemala and indigenous Maya women in the western highlands. In this piece I reflect on the connections between the framework I developed in this book and theoretical extensions to study similar cases of gender violence in other contexts as well as on the possibilities for engaging in public sociology that this work has created. I also take the opportunity to respond to a few critics so as to engage in productive dialogue that can inform future work in this area.     

Understanding the rise of the regulatory state of the South*

This paper, and the special issue it introduces, explores whether, and how, the rise of the regulatory state of the South, and its implications for processes of governance, are distinct from cases in the North. With the exception of a small but growing body of work on Latin America, most work on the regulatory state deals with the US or Europe, or takes a relatively undifferentiated “legal transplant” approach to the developing world. We use the term “the South” to invoke shared histories of many countries, rather than as a geographic delimiter, even while acknowledging continued and growing diversity among these countries, particularly in their engagement with globalization. We suggest that three aspects of this common context are important in characterizing the rise of the regulatory state of the South. The first contextual element is the presence of powerful external pressures, especially from international financial institutions, to adopt the institutional innovation of regulatory agencies in infrastructure sectors. The result is often an incomplete engagement with and insufficient embedding of regulatory agencies within local political and institutional context. A second is the greater intensity of redistributive politics in settings where infrastructure services are of extremely poor quality and often non‐existent. The resultant politics of distribution draws in other actors, such as the courts and civil society; regulation is too important to be left to the regulators. The third theme is that of limited state capacity, which we suggest has both “thin” and “thick” dimensions. Thin state capacity issues include prosaic concerns of budget, personnel and training; thick issues address the growing pressures on the state to manage multiple forms of engagement with diverse stakeholders in order to balance competing concerns of growth, efficiency and redistribution. These three themes provide a framework for this special issue, and for the case studies that follow. We focus on regulatory agencies in infrastructure sectors (water, electricity and telecoms) as a particular expression of the regulatory state, though we acknowledge that the two are by no means synonymous. The case studies are drawn from India, Colombia, Brazil, and the Philippines, and engage with one or more of these contextual elements. The intent is to draw out common themes that characterize a “regulatory state of the South,” while remaining sensitive to the variations in level of economic development and political institutional contexts within “the South.”     

The project orthodoxy in development: Re-evaluating the cutting edge

This paper takes a broad critical posture towards the project as an instrument of development. It addresses the multidimensional features of what has become the project orthodoxy in development management, and some of the attending effects. It suggests that some of the virtues of the project have been offset by a number of negative consequences as it has become institutionalized in the procedures of both donor agencies and national governments in developing countries. An attempt is made to distinguish between those kinds of activities in which the project mode is most useful, and those for which its basic features and attendant trappings have great limitations. The argument concludes with a reassertion of the need for better linkages with programme management and the sources of policy.