The Information Have-Less: Inequality, Mobility, and Translocal Networks in Chinese Cities

The “information have-less” is a social, economic, and political category for millions of rural-to-urban migrants and laid-off workers, who populate the vast gray zone of China's digital divide. Disengaged from institutions of agricultural and industrial production, the information have-less make use of such inexpensive ICT services as Internet cafés, prepaid phone cards, and Little Smart mobile phones. These low-end digital technologies are critical to enhancing labor mobility (both physical and social) and to the formation of “translocal networks”. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary assessment of ICT usage in, key city-regions in China and consider the consequences of translocal network formations for evolving information inequality in China. These networks raise key theoretical issues related to regionalism, mobility, and state-firm relationships that impinge on low-end service provision, and stratified patterns of information access and utilization within the have-less populations. We view translocal networks an important socio-economic asset of the information have-less and an arena for the articulation of labor mobility in China’s industrialization process and latest wave of urbanization. Carolyn Cartier is associate professor of geography at the University of Southern California. She is the author ofGlobalizing South China (Blackwell, 2001) and the co-editor with Laurence J.C. Ma ofThe Chinese Diaspora: Place Space, Mobility and Identity (Routledge, 2003). Manuel Castells is Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His current, research focuses on the social and economic implications of the Internet and the debate on new development strategies for the Information Age. Jack Linchuan Qiu is assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He co-founded and moderates the Chinese Internet Research Group, a network of researchers from the academic, policymaking, journalistic, and activist communities.     

Approval voting in practice

Several leading professional associations have recently decided to use approval voting (AV). The largest of them, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE), with more than 300,000 members, adopted AV in response to practical political problems with conventional plurality elections of precisely the sort that AV was designed to solve. This paper analyzes results of the first three multicandidate elections conducted by the IEEE using the new system. Issues examined include participation rates, use of multiple votes, patterns of shared support, majority rule, AV-dominance, effects on outcomes, and encouragement of candidate entry. In general, AV appears to have had a successful test.     

Decision games applied to police decision making -an exploratory study of information usage-

An analysis of police decision making is presented using the decision board technique developed by Leslie Wilkins. This method assumes that decision making can be measured by observing a subject's response to stimuli presented in the form of pieces of information. A board was created and employed with fifty municipal police officers. Findings suggest that police demonstrate individualized preferences for varying amounts and kinds of information. The nature of the offense was considered most frequently. The attitude of the offender was also an important determinant of the decision outcome; and the offender's attitude then influenced the amount and type of information subsequently used.     

Implementation evaluation: A future direction in project evaluation

The problem of implementation failure is an important component in the evaluation of criminal justice projects. In general, the issue of project implementation has been neglected by organizational researchers and evaluation specialists as well as by policymakers and program developers. In direct contrast to the existing pattern, we stress the importance of organizational factors and the relationships between individuals and organizations for the successful implementation and institutionalization of criminal justice projects.     

Priming time for Blair? Media priming, Iraq, and leadership evaluations in Britain

Priming is often mentioned in studies of media effects in Britain, yet empirical tests of its extent and nature are lacking; most evidence of priming effects is from the United States. Moreover, research on British elections concludes that the media have little impact on the public’s perceptions of issues, including in the 2005 election. In this paper we argue that priming by the British media has been misconceived and thus not studied adequately. We demonstrate that the issue of the war in Iraq was primed by media coverage in 2005, both as a consequence of the volume of coverage of the issue and its tone. The influence of Iraq was not just long-term, via its impact on confidence in the Labour government or Tony Blair’s reputation, but was also affected by media coverage during the campaign. We also demonstrate that the media’s coverage of Iraq in 2005 influenced voters’ evaluations of Blair by polarizing consumers of the same news. Finally, we find slightly more of an impact of the tone of coverage of Iraq in 2005 but it is moderated by the editorial stance of the newspaper—the editorial stance of British newspapers still seems to matter, suggesting that the dealignment of the British press has not eliminated the influence of reading a newspaper that endorses a party, no matter how qualified that endorsement may be.     

Incidence of Fetal Drug Exposure in Alabama: 2004–2011

Postmortem toxicological results for neonates and stillborn fetuses were examined to determine the incidence of drug exposure in utero and the relationship to fetal mortality. From 15,600 fatalities with toxicological analyses, 39 subjects were identified; 22 had positive findings (56%). Among the general population, 10,500 had positive findings (67%). Among the subject population, 22 drugs/metabolites were identified; cocaine/benzoylecgonine was most frequent (9 of 22 cases, 41%) then methamphetamine/amphetamine (7 of 22 cases, 32%). Respective incidences among the general positive population were 12% and 6%. Fetal/neonatal concentrations overlap the general population and exceed the mother. Remaining substances, detected largely in fatalities unrelated to drug exposure, were of little toxicological significance. The variety, with exceptions, reflects the general population. That the incidence of cocaine and methamphetamine among fetuses/neonates is three‐ and fivefold greater than the general population is evidence that maternal abuse of these drugs poses greater risk to fetal viability than all other substances identified.     

An Antipodean History of Interpretation

In this paper, we explore the connections between intepretivism's core and its peripheries in both geographical and epistemological terms, by tracing the relationship between interpretivism and Australian political scholarship. In this task, we draw on some of the most celebrated and influential work on Australian politics—by political scientists but before them historians and anthropologists—to show how the approach typically undertaken by these researchers echoes key tenets of interpretivism, especially through an interest in subjective beliefs and experiences, a desire to uncover and bring to life richly contextualised detail, and a commitment to the abductive linking of theory and practice. As such, we suggest that the spread of this counter identity to interpretive researchers in Australia risks manufacturing a sense of methodological antipathy, marginalising the work of interpretivists from mainstream political scholarship.     

Party competition in emerging democracies: representation and effectiveness in post-communism and beyond

Competition among political parties is subject to two demands: representation and effectiveness. This poses a dilemma for democratization, as the political opening creates pressures for the representation of long-suppressed voices, but the strain of socio-economic transformation engenders pressures for greater effectiveness in building market economies and democratic polities. How do new democracies cope with this dilemma? This article extends the author's previously published work on party-system institutionalization by focusing explicitly on this problem, including on how electoral reforms affect the distinct pulls of representation and effectiveness. Based on data from eastern European and former Soviet states compared to western European and Latin American experiences during their initial periods of democratization, the evidence shows that the institutionalization of representation and effectiveness in post-communism is more hazardous. Politics in the post-communist region is characterized by numerous contending parties, weak political actors and floating constituencies. Volatility is not only higher in comparison to other regions but continues unabated during successive elections. These conditions contribute to the ‘ineffective representation’ evident in the relatively large share of wasted votes at each election, with significant sectors of the electorate left out from legislative representation. Electoral reforms reflect the twin pressures: changes in formula in the direction of proportional representation favour broader representation, but higher thresholds seeking greater effectiveness make more difficult entry into parliament. The resulting mechanical and strategic effects confirm the expected direction of the reforms, although the contrary pulls towards representation and effectiveness render difficult the stabilization of party competition.