Adolescent Gender Differences in Suicide-Related Behaviors

Utilizing data as well as factor analysis and multiple regression the previously published study, Risk Factors Related to Suicidal Behavior Among Male and Female Adolescents [(1996), Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Vol. 25, pp. 149–160], this follow-up study examined gender differences in risk factors that increase the probability of self-reported suicidal behavior among seventh through twelfth grade students (N = 3461) in a northern Midwest school district. The logistic regression results revealed gender differences in that the demonstration of more aggressive behaviors increased the likelihood of males reporting suicidal behavior.     

Reviews

Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, xx + 401 pp., £40.00.

Hugh Macdonald, The Soviet Challenge and the Structure of European Security. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990, ix + 318 pp., £38.50.

Jonathan Eyal, ed. The Warsaw Pact and the Balkans: Moscow's Southern Flank. London: Macmillan Press, 1989, xvi + 246 pp., £35.00.

Kurt M. Campbell & S. Neil MacFarlane, eds., Gorbachev's Third World Dilemmas. London & New York: Routledge, 1989, xvi + 270 pp., £35.00.

Terry L. Thompson, Ideology and Policy: The Political Uses of Doctrine in the Soviet Union. London: Westview Press, Westview Special Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989, viii + 220 pp., $28.95 p/b.

Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, 266 pp., £9.95 p/b.

Maria Lo?, ed., The Second Economy in Marxist States. London: Macmillan, 1990, xiv + 240 pp., £37.50.

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Paul G. Lewis, Political Authority and Party Secretaries in Poland 1975–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, xix + 340 pp., £35.00.

Leonard J. Cohen, The Socialist Pyramid: Elites and Power in Yugoslavia. Oakville, TX: Mosaic Press, 1989, 499 pp., $29.95 h/b, $19.95 p/b.

Diane P. Koenker & William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, xix + 393 pp., $39.50.     

The Paradox of the State-Run Media Promoting Poor Governance in China: Case Studies of a Party Newspaper and an Anticorruption Film

ABSTRACT

This essay draws on the analysis of media texts and ethnographic fieldwork to present case studies of the production, distribution, and consumption of two kinds of media products in China that are used for educating cadres about official policies, law and morality, namely, a Party-produced prefectural newspaper and an anticorruption film. Such pedagogic media products merit study because they are consumed by a huge audience of cadres who are entrusted with interpreting and implementing state policy and with carrying out the daily work of the different institutions that make up the Party-state. The case studies show that the internal circulation of pedagogic media products within the Party-state apparatus works in two ways to reinforce “organizational involution,” which causes poor governance. First, the content of the media products and their methods of distribution buttress the norms and institutional practices that entrench unchallenged power, corruption, and official malfeasance within the system. Examples include the role of top-down administrative fiat in determining the content of the media products and the ways in which individuals and institutions are compelled to purchase materials and participate in pedagogic activities to secure their positions. Second, state pedagogy deflects attention away from the structural failings of the Party-state system. The pedagogic products enable the Party-state to portray itself as the leading crusader in the fight against corruption, despite the corrupting consequences of its continuing unsupervised monopoly on power. Meanwhile, self-improvement exhortations in the media texts sidestep the question of systemic political reform.     

Government lawyers and the training of senior civil servants. Maintaining law at the heart of the French state

To assess the influence of law and jurists in the conduct of contemporary French state, this article examines the role of the Council of State at ENA (École Nationale d'Administration), the main school for top civil servants. Although the study reveals the decreasing part of law in the bureaucratic capital over the past fifty years, it also shows how government lawyers have resisted this downsizing process. The teaching of a subject called ‘legistics’ provides top officials with a different view of law. Dedicated to promoting the political utility of law, legistics complies with managerial values while it sticks to the Weberian model of bureaucracy. As a result of the introduction of legistics, new techniques of legal drafting have been spreading within French public administration. Legistics thus plays a role in the contemporary reshaping of public legal practices, as well as in the renewing of legal legitimacy in the reform of public affairs.     

The Criminal Justice Approach: Case Examples

The article presents a special form of a European comparative synopsis. For this case examples have been chosen ranging from administrative or minor (criminal) offences to increasingly serious offences and offenders. In this way it can be comparatively demonstrated how the criminal justice systems studied handle specific cases and whether they do so in a similar or different way.