Coping with Concerns: An Exploratory Comparison of Australian,Colombian, German,and Palestinian Adolescents

Consistent with an emphasis on positive psychology, and on ability rather than deficit, this study of adolescents in 4 communities sought to examine how young people cope with their concerns. Samples of Australian, Colombian, German, and Palestinian students completed the general form of the Adolescent Coping Scale, an 80-item instrument used to measure coping. A comparison of young people's usage of 3 coping styles and 18 coping strategies within these communities indicated that Palestinian youth report greater usage of all but three strategies (namely, physical recreation, relaxation, and tension reduction), and German youth report the least usage of 2/3 of the strategies assessed. Both Palestinian and Colombian youth were noted to utilize more seek to belong, focus on the positive, social action, solving the problem, seeking spiritual support, and worry than were German or Australian adolescents. When the relative usage of coping strategies within national settings was considered, some noticeable differences were apparent. For example it was found that regardless of the national setting young people reported most frequent use of working hard and use of problem solving strategies. When it comes to more culturally determined activities such as physical recreation, the Australian and German students ranked this strategy more highly in their coping repertoires than do the Colombians, and more noticeably, the Palestinian students. For example, although physical recreation is ranked as the second most commonly used strategy for the German sample, it is ranked 16th by the Palestinians. The study demonstrates the importance of identifying coping strategies that are reflective of each community under investigation. Similarity in coping cannot be assumed across different student populations. Consequently caution needs to be exercised when importing coping programs from one community to another.     

Justice and Culture: Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum and O'Neill

Is it possible, in a multicultural world, to hold all societies to a common standard of decency that is both high enough to protect basic human interests, and yet not biased in the direction of particular cultural values? We examine the recent work of four liberals – John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and Onora O'Neill – to see whether any of them has given a successful answer to this question. For Rawls, the decency standard is set by reference to an idea of basic human rights that we argue offers too little protection to members of non-liberal societies. Sen and Nussbaum both employ the idea of human capabilities, but in interestingly different ways: for Sen the problems are how to weight different capabilities, and how to decide which are basic, whereas for Nussbaum the difficulty is that her favoured list of capabilities depends on an appeal to autonomy that is unlikely to be acceptable to non-liberal cultures. O'Neill rejects a rights-based approach in favour of a neo-Kantian position that asks which principles of action people everywhere could consent to, but this also may be too weak in the face of cultural diversity. We conclude that liberals need to argue both for a minimum decency standard and for the full set of liberal rights as the best guarantors of that standard over time.     

Bureaucracy,Network, or Enterprise? Comparing Models of Governance in Australia,Britain, the Netherlands,and New Zealand

Theories of democratic government traditionally have relied on a model of organization in which officials act impartially, accept clear lines of accountability and supervision, and define their day–to–day activities through rules, procedures, and confined discretion. In the past 10 years, however, a serious challenge to this ideal has been mounted by critics and reformers who favor market, network, or "mixed–economy" models. We assess the extent to which these new models have influenced the work orientations of frontline staff using three alternative service types—corporate, market, and network—to that proposed by the traditional, procedural model of public bureaucracy. Using surveys of frontline officials in four countries where the revolution in ideas has been accompanied by a revolution in methods for organizing government services, we measure the degree to which the new models are operating as service–delivery norms. A new corporate–market hybrid (called "enterprise governance") and a new network type have become significant models for the organization of frontline work in public programs.     

Transparency, Democratic Accountability, and the Economic Consequences of Monetary Institutions

Debates about the appropriate mix between autonomy and accountability of bureaucrats are relevant to numerous areas of government action. I examine whether there is evidence of a tradeoff between transparency, democratic accountability, and the gains from monetary delegation. I begin by presenting a simple theoretical model which suggests that central banks that are transparent, in the sense of publishing their macroeconomic forecasts, will find it easier to acquire a reputation. Despite making central banks more subject to outside scrutiny then, monetary transparency can lead to improved economic outcomes. I also consider arguments about the effect of accountability provisions involving parliamentary oversight and control over central bankers. The article then uses a new data set to examine these issues empirically, focusing on a natural experiment involving disinflation costs under different central banking institutions during the 1990s. Results suggest that countries with more transparent central banks face lower costs of disinflation while accountability provisions have no clear effect on disinflation costs. My results also concord with earlier findings that the effect of monetary institutions is conditional on other features of the political environment.