Transnational Protest: Australia and the 1960s

Transnational Protest: Australia and the 1960s . By Jon Piccini (London: Palgrave, 2016), pp.251, £72.00 (hb).     

Halfway competitive markets and ineffective regulation: the American health care system

Since the late 1960s the U.S. has attempted to develop a strategy for controlling the rate of growth of health care spending. During the 1970s this strategy relied heavily on various forms of regulation. Some regulatory programs were partially successful in moderating spending increases, but they generated significant opposition--particularly from powerful provider groups, who successfully convinced Congress and the states to dismantle most of the regulatory structure and to substitute various forms of competitive approaches to controlling spending. Some of these competitive strategies have been successful in increasing the efficiency of subsections of our health system. But they too have produced "losers," and the government has been pressured to enter the system to minimize their losses. The net result has been a political stalemate between halfway competitive markets and ineffective regulation. With the rate of health care spending growth near historic levels, it is likely that the 1990s will bring a return to a stronger role for government regulation. But it is unlikely that we are any more willing to tolerate the negative fallout from regulation today than we were in the 1970s, and therefore we predict that the proportion of GNP going to health care will continue to grow throughout the remainder of this century.     

The Psychology of Coercion Failure: How Reactance Explains Resistance to Threats

When confronted with coercive threats, targets often stand firm rather than back down. We identify one important yet unrecognized factor that causes actors to resist threats: psychological reactance. Reactance theory explains that when someone perceives a threat to their freedom to make choices, they attempt to restore their autonomy by refusing to capitulate. The result is unwillingness to concede to coercion that extends beyond rational incentives. We test for reactance as a cause of coercion failure with two novel experiments. Each experiment pairs a coercive threat treatment with a matched “natural costs” counterpart that imposes the same choice on the target without intentional action by a coercer. Controlling for prominent alternative explanations, including costs, benefits, power, credibility, and reputation, we find that the targets of threats capitulate less frequently and more often support aggression against their opponents.     

The scramble for resources: African case studies

China's renewed interest in Africa's resources is a mixed blessing. China is offering infrastructure packages that are especially attractive for post‐conflict countries but it is also helping countries with poor governance to avoid western pressure for economic and democratic reform.     

From Personalism to Contractualism: A Review of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project's Latest Documentary History of Emancipation

Since 1982, the collaborative editorial project of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project has published four volume of documentary material placing African Americans as slaves, soldiers, and newly free people, at the center of the process of slave emancipation in the US South. This review of the Project's fifth volume of records, Land and Labor, 1865, critically examines its contribution to our understanding of the emergence of free labor relations in the economy of the postbellum rural South. There, three forces collided in the efforts to remake labor relations after the Civil War ended slavery in the US: the efforts of slaveholders to control property and labor; the aspirations to ‘access to land and control of their own labor’ of former slaves; and the desire of Northerners to impose their own notions of ‘free labor’ as a set of contractual relations on both. Land and Labor, 1865, demonstrates how former slaves and their actions can be placed at the center of the evolution of Reconstruction policy.     

Applying Rasch modeling to the validity of a control balance scale

Classical test theory approaches to measurement are based upon a number of fairly restrictive assumptions. The nature of these assumptions is such that scales designed to operationalize latent constructs are treated with little regard for the interaction between the human subject and the items that compose the measurement scale. A competing measurement approach, the Rasch model, has been advanced to improve upon the limitations of classical test theory. In this article, the Rasch model was applied to a scale designed to measure Tittle's control balance ratio. Analysis suggests that the original scale and response category options do not meet fundamental measurement. In particular, several items exhibited misfit (and were thus removed from the scale), response category options were reduced from eleven to four, and the scales that form the control balance ratio exhibited very little gender bias. An alternative control balance scale that retains the original items is presented, but this scale no longer summarizes the control balance ratio as one overall score. The implications of these results are addressed.