THE KIDS' TURN PROGRAM EVALUATION: PROBING CHANGE WITHIN A COMMUNITY‐BASED INTERVENTION FOR SEPARATING FAMILIES

We provide evaluation results for Kids' Turn, a community‐based divorcing parent education program. Based on pre‐ and post‐test results from 61 parents, we found that parents reported improvements over time in interparental conflict, the number of topics parents argue about, parental alienation behaviors, parent anxiety and depression, and children's internalizing behaviors. These changes over time remained after we accounted for child sex, parent and child age, and time since separation. However, we did not observe any change in parenting behaviors. We discuss these results in light of factors influencing the ability of community‐based programs to affect change in families after divorce.     

Protesting a perceived injustice: Sex discrimination and the restoration of equity

In this paper we propose a theoretical model that examines the relationship between resources and significant others in people's attempts to restore equity. Viewing the restoration of equity as a complex process, we integrate resource mobilization and equity arguments in order to better understand how people come to dispute and settle fair terms of exchange in allocative relationships. With individual-level data, we examine sex discrimination complaints and show that protest reactions against a perceived injustice are influenced by the level of resources a person controls. We find that the more resources a person controls, the better able she or he is in managing the protest and negotiation for equity. Further, resources also protect complainants from reprisals by the source of the inequity. These findings provide insight into the process by which people attempt to restore equity, and they suggest that the examination of real-life inequitable relations enhances our understanding of reactions to inequity.     

Globalization and Domestic Trade Policy Preferences: Foreign Frames and Mass Support for Agriculture Subsidies

Reforming agriculture trade policy is key to breaking the deadlock in multilateral trade negotiations. While existing studies have focused on institutions and interest group barriers to agriculture trade reform in developed countries, most have failed to recognize the broad support for agriculture protection among developed countries. In this article we examine one of the drivers of this support: the ability of politicians to frame their own agriculture policies as less generous relative to those of other countries. Drawing on existing literature on heuristics, we argue that voters are malleable to politicians’ comparative framing of agriculture policies. Using an original survey experiment in the United States, we find that framing US agriculture as less generous than other countries generates an additional 12% of respondents supporting increased farm payments to US farmers. These results speak to the difficulty in reforming agriculture and more broadly about the lack of public support for unilateral trade liberalization.     

Electoral Competition and Agricultural Support in OECD Countries

Agricultural trade protectionism in developed countries remains a politically charged issue, yet few studies have attempted to explain the political dynamics behind this important trade issue. We consider agricultural subsidies as a type of distributive policy that targets the agricultural sector at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. Based on Cox (1987, 1990) and Myerson (1993) , we argue that electoral systems that encourage politicians to appeal to a narrow constituency tend to have a higher level of agricultural support. We test this theoretical hypothesis using OECD agricultural support data disaggregated by commodity and country. A cross-classified multilevel model is employed to account for complex variation of agricultural support across countries, commodities, and time. Our empirical results show that electoral systems that encourage politicians to target narrow (broad) constituencies are associated with relatively high (low) levels of agricultural subsidies.