Fueling the Populist Divide: Nativist and Cosmopolitan Preferences for Representation at the Elite and Mass Level

Political Behavior - Although populist leaders often employ an anti-elite discourse which presents the elite as unable or unwilling to represent ordinary citizens, we know very little about who...     

Why do rape survivors volunteer for face-to-face interviews? A meta-study of victims' reasons for and concerns about research participation

There is growing interest in understanding how different research methods are perceived by victims of violence and what survivors will reveal to researchers (termed meta-research or meta-studies). The purpose of this project was to conduct a qualitative meta-study on why rape survivors chose to participate in community-based, face-to-face interviews. Participants mentioned four primary reasons for why they decided to participate in this study: (a) to help other survivors, (b) to help themselves, (c) to support research on rape/sexual assault, and (d) to receive financial compensation. Implications for designing research recruitment protocols are discussed.     

Free and unfree labor in Qing China: Emigration and escape among the bannermen of northeast China, 1789–1909

Though internal migration in China during the Qing era (1644–1911) was mostly unrestricted, the government tightly controlled the movement of peasants who worked state lands in frontier regions and certain other locations. Such peasants accounted for 5–10% of China's population. In the state farms of northeast China, households could move legally only from one place to another within the system. Departure from the system was illegal. In this article, one of the first quantitative studies of migration in late imperial China, we apply discrete-time event-history methods to longitudinal, nominative household register data from six northeast Chinese state farm systems to compare how characteristics of the farm system, village, and household influenced the chances of legal moves and illegal departures. We show that among these state peasants, who were supposedly “unfree,” migration was not uncommon. We also show that the determinants of legal and illegal migration differed substantially. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for our understanding of migration processes in late imperial China.     

Moral and ethical dilemmas: seven years into the debate about human ambiguity

Developments in modern medical technology force many questions upon the health professions and the public. To what extent should technology be used to extend life when doing so seems futile, perhaps brutal? Who should decide such questions? What options should be available? Conditions in which such questions arise are often chaotic because of the nature of illness and treatment and because many extremely important issues in life have been poorly deliberated by the health professions and the public. This essay is an attempt to clarify some of the issues.