The face of the party? Leader personalization in British campaigns

The personal characteristics of political elites play an important role in British elections. While the personalization of the media’s election coverage has been the subject of much debate, we know less about the conditions under which voters receive personalized messages directly from elites during the campaign. In this paper, we use a new dataset that includes more than 3300 local communications from the 2015 general election to explore variation in the personalization of campaign messaging. We find that there is systemic variation in terms of where photographs of party leaders are included in election communications, which provides further evidence that campaign messages are deployed strategically to portray the candidate – and their party – in the best possible light.     

A Multi-Level Conceptual Model to Examine Child Welfare Worker Turnover and Retention Decisions

There is little disagreement about the importance of a healthy stable workforce in promoting effective provision of child welfare services. This review proposes a multi-level conceptual model of child welfare workforce turnover combining traditional individual and organizational impacts with factors associated with community context. Identified gaps in the literature along with a related research agenda are reviewed. Also presented is an overview of the Florida Study of Professionals for Safe Families, a longitudinal study of new hires into the child welfare workforce across Florida, providing opportunities to address gaps and test model characteristics regarding turnover decisions and related outcomes.     

Australian National Anthologies: A Study of Poems and Poets

This article analyses the contents of fifteen Australian “national” poetry anthologies published between 1946 and 2011. The study has three basic aims: to identify the most anthologised poems (as determined by the greatest number of inclusions in all anthologies), to identify poets with the most poems anthologised, and to identify the poets most consistently represented during this period. Based on quantitative data derived from each anthology’s table of contents, this article provides an empirical and analytical account of Australian national poetry anthologies over a six-decade period. The results reveal a core group of consistently anthologised poems and poets. While each anthology is different, there is a degree of consensus among national anthologists regarding the inclusion of “standard anthology pieces”. This article also considers the role of national anthologies in supporting a hierarchy of established literary reputations and perpetuating a poetic tradition in Australian literature.     

Reintegrating young combatants: do child-centred approaches leave children—and adults—behind?

This article uses recent experience in Angola to demonstrate that young fighters were not adequately or effectively assisted after war ended in 2002. The government's framework excluded children from accessing formal disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes, and its subsequent attempts to target children have largely failed. More critically the case of Angola calls into question the broader effectiveness and appropriateness of child-centred DDR. First, such targeting is inappropriate to distinct post-conflict contexts and constructs a 'template child' asserted to be more vulnerable and deserving than adult ex-combatants, which does little to further the reintegration of either group, or the rights of the child in a conflict context. Second, child-centred reintegration efforts tend to deny children agency as actors in their own reintegration. Third, such efforts contribute to the normalisation of a much larger ideational and structural flaw of post-conflict peace building, wherein 'success' is construed as the reintegration of large numbers of beneficiaries back into the poverty and marginalisation that contributed to conflict in the first place.