Deepening democracy through community dispute resolution: problems and prospects in South Africa and Chile

Post-apartheid South Africa and post-Pinochet Chile have taken significant steps to democratize justice. This article acknowledges conventional reforms of both countries’ criminal justice systems but focuses primarily on case studies of participatory and restorative initiatives that have attempted to expand the theory and practice of public safety practices in non-state settings. The experience of resolving interpersonal disputes in new democracies and what it means for the people who do it is examined. The research hypothesized that public participation in matters of justice and security can foster more active citizenship, a contribution to deepening democracy in countries in transition, as South Africa and Chile have been since the early 1990s. The experiences of the Community Peace Program and the Barrio Sin Violencia shed light on both the potential and the limitations of efforts to deepen democracy through community dispute resolution. They suggest that whether or not public participation in matters of justice and security fosters more active citizenship in democratizing countries depends on complex cultural and historical influences, including perspectives on sources of authority, institutional patterns of justice, and mutual trust.     

Cognitive Constructs and the Intention to Remit

This paper explores migrants’ motivations to remit from a new, behavioural (cognitive) perspective, based on Structural Equation Modelling. We supplement the mainstream economic analyses of migrants’ observed characteristics by analysing remitting behaviour based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). With this behavioural lens, we show that non-tangible, cognitive constructs are highly relevant in explaining the intention to remit. Results underline the fact that migrants’ attitudes and norms, the latter in particular driven by the family, are decisive for remitting. Classical socioeconomic variables also show significant results, but contribute comparatively little to explaining the intention to remit.     

Are Women as Likely to Take Risks and Compete? Behavioural Findings from Central Vietnam

Using controlled experiments to compare the risk attitude and willingness to compete of husbands and wives in 500 couples in rural Vietnam, we find that women are more risk averse than men and that, compared to men, women are less likely to choose to compete, irrespective of how likely they are to succeed. Relevant to development programmes concerned with lifting women out of poverty, our findings suggest that women may be more reluctant to adopt new technologies, take out loans, or engage in economic activities that offer higher expected returns, in order to avoid setups that require them to be more competitive or that have less predictable outcomes.     

Revisiting the Effects of Case Reports in the News

Synthesizing several theories about the likely impact of case reports in the news, we propose that the impact of featuring identified victims in a news story is contingent on the degree of similarity between the audience member and the identified victims. We execute a population-based survey experiment involving immigration policy to examine our theory. Our results suggest that featuring specific, identified victims in a news story will promote more supportive policy opinions than otherwise identical stories about unidentified victims, but only when the victim is highly similar to the audience member. Conversely, case reports featuring identified people who are dissimilar to the audience member will decrease the extent to which the story encourages victim-supportive policy attitudes. Overall, our experimental findings shed light on the conditions under which the inclusion of case reports increases versus decreases the policy relevance of news stories. Our findings also help explain previous inconsistencies in findings about the impact of case reports. Additional analyses allow us to speculate as to the reasons for the differential direction of effects.     

Televised Exposure to Politics: New Measures for a Fragmented Media Environment

For many research purposes, scholars need reliable and valid survey measures of the extent to which people have been exposed to various kinds of political content in mass media. Nonetheless, good measures of media exposure, and of exposure to political television in particular, have proven elusive. Increasingly fragmented audiences for political television have only made this problem more severe. To address these concerns, we propose a new way of measuring exposure to political television and evaluate its reliability and predictive validity using three waves of nationally representative panel data collected during the 2008 presidential campaign. We find that people can reliably report the specific television programs they watch regularly, and that these measures predict change over time in knowledge of candidate issue positions, a much higher standard of predictive validity than any other measure has met to date.     

The contested terrain of land governance reform in Myanmar

State control of land plays a critical role in producing land dispossession throughout the Global South. In Myanmar, the state’s approach towards territorial expansion has driven the country’s system of land governance, resulting in widespread and systemic land grabbing. This article investigates ongoing land governance reforms as key terrains for contesting such abuses of power. Employing a relational land governance approach, we view reform processes as shaped by changing power-laden social relations among government, civil society, and international donor actors. Legal and regulatory reforms in Myanmar potentially act as sites of meaningful social change but in practice tend to maintain significant limitations in altering governance dynamics. Civil society organizations and their alliances in Myanmar have played an important role in opening up policy processes to a broader group of political actors. Yet, policies and legal frameworks still are often captured by elite actors, becoming trapped in path dependent power relations.     

Grantmaking in a Disorderly World: The Limits of Rationalism

This article reflects on the real world relevance of rational approaches to grantmaking. The characteristics and environment of foundation work are outlined, then both traditional and newer funding practices are analysed. Unpacking implicit assumptions of a rational approach, eight costs to foundations and their grantees are identified. The final sections of the paper consider what grantmaking for a complex and disorderly world might encompass. In conclusion, while rational approaches to grantmaking provide a comfortable aura of certainty, funders need to adapt to a little discomfort.     

The view from below: Cuban agriculture in the ‘special period in peacetime’

This article examines the changes taking place in Cuban agriculture at the local level as a result of the demise of the socialist trading bloc and Cuba's subsequent economic crisis. Based on fieldwork in three municipalities of Cuba, the authors describe new developments in each of the three main sectors of Cuban agriculture: state farms, production co‐operatives and individual peasant producers. They conclude that the dominant trend of this period is the tendency toward decentralisation of the state farm sector ‐ culminating in the historic September 1993 decision to form production co‐operatives on the state farms — counterpoised to renewed attempts to impose greater state control over peasant producers. Overall, they find a good deal of experimentation and heterogeneity in the actual implementation of state policy at the local level.