Welfare Nationalism and Popular Support for Raising the Child Allowance: Evidence from a Norwegian Survey Experiment

Refugee and labour immigration have placed the issue of immigrants’ access to welfare benefits high on the political agenda. This article explores how voter preferences for increases in the child benefit change when respondents are reminded about immigrants’ access to benefits. The survey experiment shows that information about newly arrived immigrants’ access to child benefit has only a small impact on support for increasing the child allowance. By contrast, information about labour migrants’ access to benefits for children living in another European Union country has a strong impact, and the observed sensitivity to this cue is not to the same extent confined to respondents who otherwise support welfare dualism.     

Multialignment and Indian Foreign Policy under Narendra Modi

This article examines India’s emerging approach to foreign policy: multialignment. It argues that since the mid-2000s India has developed multialignment as a means of achieving what it perceives as its core interests and ideals in international relations. Characterised by an emphasis on engagement in regional multilateral institutions, the use of strategic partnerships, and what is termed ‘normative hedging’, multialignment is being utilised to boost India’s economic development and national security, as well as to project influence and promote its values. The article traces the emergence of this strategy during the governments of Manmohan Singh and its implementation and extension by the new government of Narendra Modi. It analyses the key arguments that have been presented in its favour and the ways in which it was been put into practice. It concludes with a brief assessment of multialignment as a strategy, as well as the prospect that it will deliver the dividends expected by India’s foreign policy elite.     

‘There were ethical dilemmas all day long!’: harrowing tales of ethnographic researchers in criminology and criminal justice

While there have been many ethnographies published within the disciplines of criminology and criminal justice, very few studies have examined actual field researchers who have successfully employed this qualitative technique. In this exploratory study, we identified and conducted phone interviews with a sample of eight scholars who have used variations of the ethnographic method to study aspects of life which relate to crime, deviant behavior, and social control. Respondents revealed to us their colorful stories, as well as the risks, rewards, and ethical dilemmas they experienced while attempting to balance the delicate roles of being insiders, outsiders, researchers, and participants. They specifically discussed how they negotiated the personal and professional obstacles of being thrust into criminal worlds (as well as criminal justice worlds) and ultimately managed to thrive while conducting fieldwork in perilous places.     

Reflections on calling and careers in community psychology

The current essay discusses the narratives of five community psychologists from the perspective of a career "calling." Each of the essays highlight different components of a calling: employing deep discernment to know the right path for oneself; experiencing a calling to do one's work, an invitation to which we choose to respond; serving community; discovering your quintessential self or "genius"; and using your gifts for the common good. Moreover, the author discusses how the essays not only illustrate calling, but also the emergence of confidence and the subjective career.     

Do Market Participants Learn? The Case of the Budapest Stock Exchange

In the paper we consider one of the faster growing Central European emerging markets: the Budapest Stock Exchange (BSE), in order to see whether the market becomes more weak-form efficient over time. The Hungarian exchange is selected because it is the oldest stock exchange operating in the region and, in 1995, it was the first Central European exchange admitted by the London Stock Exchange as a properly regulated stock exchange. As an econometric tool for comparative analysis, we use a Test for Evolving Efficiency (TEE). In a comparison of nine stocks and the market index (BUX) we found that the BSE becomes more mature but the process is surprisingly slow.     

Three Sorries and You’re In? Does the Prime Minister’s Statement in the Australian Federal Parliament Presage Federal Constitutional Recognition and Reparations?

Then newly elected Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a historic statement of “Sorry” for past injustices to Australian Indigenous peoples at the opening of the 2008 federal parliament. In the long-standing absence of a constitutional ‘foundational principle’ to shape positive federal initiatives in this context, there has been speculation that the emphatic Sorry Statement may presage formal constitutional recognition. The debate is long overdue in a nation that only overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised native title to lan with the High Court’s decision in Mabo in 1992. This article explores the implications of the Sorry Statement in the context of reparations for the generations removed from their families under assimilation policies (known since the Bringing Them Home Inquiry as the Stolen Generations). We draw out the utility of recent human rights statutes—such as the Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT)—as a mechanism for facilitating justice, including compensation for past wrongs. Our primary concern here is whether existing legal processes in Australia hold further capacity to provide reparation for Australian Indigenous peoples or whether their potential in that regard is already exhausted. We compare common law and statutory developments in other international jurisdictions, such as Canada, as an indication of what can be achieved by the law to facilitate better legal, economic and social outcomes for Indigenous peoples. The year 2008 also saw Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper express his apology to residential school victims in the Canadian Parliament, providing thematic and symbolic echoes across these two former colonies, which, despite remaining under the British monarchy, both forge their own path into the future, while confronting their own unique colonial past. We suggest that the momentum provided by the recent public apology and statement of “Sorry” by the newly elected Australian Prime Minister must not be lost. This symbolic utterance as a first act of the 2008 parliamentary year stood in stark contrast to the long-standing recalcitrance of the former Prime Minister John Howard on the matter of a formal apology. Rather than a return to a law enforcement-inspired “three strikes and you’re out” approach, Australia stands poised for an overdue constitutional and human rights-inspired “three ‘sorries’ and you’re in”.