What Gets Measured,Gets Done: Understanding and Addressing Middle‐Class Challenges

Middle‐class families face a range of challenges, including uneven income growth, imposing child care costs, and affordability gaps for higher education. The ideal policies by which policy makers and public administrators can aid the middle class are far from obvious. Policy solutions are likely to mirror our government and population, meaning that they will be decentralized and varied. Achieving a “growing and thriving middle class” requires understanding the composition of the middle class across the country. Benchmarking and measuring the middle‐class condition at the state and substate levels is critical to crafting and adopting effective policy solutions. This Viewpoint essay highlights the Colorado context to demonstrate the measurement of the middle class and tracking of its lived experiences.     

Alien Citizens and the Canonical Immigrant: Do Stigmatized Attributes Affect Latina/o Judgment about Discrimination?

Negative elite and news media attention to Latino‐relevant issues, particularly undocumented immigration, has dramatically increased in recent years, potentially stigmatizing attributes of Latinos such as immigration status and language use. Concomitantly, immigration policy changes were leading to widespread arrests and deportation of many Latinos. Herein, we ask two questions: First, to what extent do Latinos perceive and experience discrimination? Second, to what extent do immigration status, generational status, and language use moderate beliefs about discrimination? Using Pew National Survey of Latinos data, we find that Latino beliefs about the problem of discrimination is a decreasing function of “proximity” to the “canonical immigrant”—defined here as first‐generation immigrants who are Spanish‐language dominant. Further, we demonstrate that reported rates of victimization due to discrimination exhibit no clear pattern and are flat over time. We conclude by demonstrating that discrimination beliefs have significant implications for systemic trust, anxiety, and policy preferences.     

Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation in Africa

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc it was widely assumed that Cuba would be the next domino to fall. But now over ten years has passed since the demise of communism and the Castro regime is still in power with no signs of capitulation. However most analysts of contemporary Cuba still assume it is only a matter of time before the island succumbs to the forces of the market and the politics of liberal democracy. Indeed, for the regime to have resisted for so long is seen as illogical and counterproductive. Contrary to such mainstream views, this article argues that the encouragement of popular involvement in the revolution, especially through the mechanism of participation, has given the regime hidden strengths which may not only have secured its survival under extreme duress but could also offer a route through which it might emerge from the crisis. In this context the most important issue at stake in Cuba is not how quickly it can integrate with the global market or how long it can hang on to the remnants of Soviet‐style central planning, but rather how popular participative democratic practices can be channelled into an alternative development model aimed at satisfying basic needs and promoting selective engagement with the world market on terms decided by a politically engaged population.     

Cape Legal Idioms and the Colonial Sovereign

A crucial element of sovereignty politics concerns the role that juridical techniques play in recursively creating images of the sovereign. This paper aims to render that dimension explicit by focusing on examples of crime-focused law and colonial rule at the Cape of Good Hope circa 1795. It attempts to show how this law helped to define a colonial sovereign via such idioms as proclamations, inquisitorial criminal procedures, and case narratives framing the atrocity and appropriate punishment for crimes. Referring to primary texts of the time, the paper explores how procedures and narratives of Cape law were also deeply involved in fashioning specific images of the sovereign in whose name it claimed to operate.     

A note on crop mixtures under indigenous conditions in Northern Nigeria

This note contends that crop mixtures are employed by farmers primarily as risk precautions and that the immediate objective of farmers is not only one of profit maximisation but also of stability of income. The results of an income stability model employed to verify this hypothesis seem to agree relatively well with existing information in parts of Northern Nigeria.