Developing Countries in Need: Which Characteristics Appeal Most to People when Donating Money?

Abstract

A discrete choice experiment was conducted to discover the relative importance of five characteristics of developing countries considered by people when choosing countries to donate money to. The experiment was administered via an online survey involving almost 700 university student participants (potential donors). The most important recipient country characteristic for participants on average is hunger and malnutrition, followed by child mortality, quality of infrastructure, income per capita, and, least importantly, ties to the donor’s home country. A cluster analysis of participants’ individual ‘part worth utilities’ representing the relative importance of the country characteristics reveals they are not strongly correlated with participants’ demographic characteristics.     

Doing Harm While Doing Good: The Child Protection Paradox

Every Australian citizen expects state and territory governments to protect children from child abuse and neglect. Protecting children from harm is seen as good. This however is not a simple matter. The ultimate act in protecting children is to remove them from parental care. This causes trauma for the child and pain and distress for parents no matter how inadequately they may have been caring for their children. In that respect removing a child from parental care does harm to parents and children. This article explores the paradox of doing harm while doing good. The article has an Australian focus but the authors think that this issue affects child protection services in many countries.     

Cause and response: vulnerability and climate in the Anthropocene

Causal analysis of vulnerability aims to identify root causes of crises so that transformative solutions might be found. Yet root-cause analysis is absent from most climate response assessments. Framings for climate-change risk analysis often locate causality in hazards while attributing some causal weight to proximate social variables such as poverty or lack of capacity. They rarely ask why capacity is lacking, assets are inadequate or social protections are absent or fail. This contribution frames vulnerability and security as matters of access to assets and social protections. Assets and social protections each have their own context-contingent causal chains. A key recursive element in those causal chains is the ability – means and powers – of vulnerable people to influence the political economy that shapes their assets and social protections. Vulnerability is, as Sen rightly observed, linked to the lack of freedom – the freedom to influence the political economy that shapes these entitlements. In the Anthropocene, human causes of climate hazard must also now be accounted for in etiologies of disaster. However, attention to anthropogenic climate change should not occlude social causes of (and responsibility for) vulnerability – vulnerability is still produced in and by society.     

Negative Campaigning in a Multiparty System

Research in political campaigning in Scandinavian countries is inadequate, and research in negative campaigning is entirely non‐existent. A ‘negative campaign message’ is defined as an explicit critique of the political opponent. Applying this definition to the 2005 Danish election indicates that negative campaigning comprises a very limited aspect of the political campaigning in the course of this election. The opposition tends to employ negative tactics the most in their attempts to establish their political platform. The media provided extensive coverage to the few negative campaign messages, thus presenting a biased sense of the political campaign to the general public. This biased media coverage encourages parties to ‘go negative’ in their respective campaigns in the battle for media attention.     

Work Engagement in the Public Service Context: The Dual Perceptions of Job Characteristics

Interest in work engagement research has increased significantly due to its positive influence on both employee and organizational performance. Studies show how engagement is explained through job characteristics in the Job Demands-Resource model, yet a more nuanced approach has been proposed. In this qualitative study, home caregivers’ perceptions of job characteristics are investigated. Semi-structured interviews and observations reveal three main themes: Optimization, helping others, and emotional work. These show a dual perception of job characteristics consequently influencing the experienced engagement. Using Public Service Motivation literature, these dual perceptions are discussed.     

Competitive Advantage in Nonprofit Grant Markets: Implications of Network Embeddedness and Status

This article empirically addresses the effects of network embeddedness on nonprofit organizations’ ability to access financial resources within competitive markets, with a focus in this analysis on the acquisition of foundation grants. We test theory on the role of organizational status in competitive markets using data from a network of nonprofits linked by foundation grants in metropolitan Atlanta during 2000 and 2005. We find that observable characteristics of nonprofits, including size, fundraising expenses, and financial health, explain success in grant markets. However, market status in previous time periods, operationalized as prior relationships with influential foundations in grant markets, additionally explains future grant awards. Our findings suggest that the status conferred through connections to important actors in a network can raise the profile of a nonprofit and increase the probability of grant success.     

What to Do Here? What to Do There? The Effect of Change in Organization Size on Public Management

For a long time, researchers have been interested in the consequences of creating larger public organizations. The outcomes of changes in the size of public organizations have been relatively widely studied; however, much less is known about the internal processes through which these outcomes are actually achieved. This article explores whether changes in organizational size affect public management. As endogeneity is an inherent problem when studying outcomes of organizational size, we apply a quasi-experimental design in order to establish the causal linkage between size and different elements of public management. We use unique survey data collected before and after a large reform that changed the size of most Danish municipalities. The results suggest that public management related to daily operations is generic and not affected by size, whereas public management related to overall tasks such as creating a vision, servicing the mayor, and maintaining external relations is positively affected by size changes.     

Local television news and voter support for law enforcement

Television has become “the” medium of the masses in contemporary America. However, there has been very little systematic investigation about television’s impact upon agents of political authority, such as municipal police agencies. This research analyzes potential linkages between voter support for local police and voter viewing habits of local television news. The impact of television news upon voter support for police is assessed in the context of a multivariate model, which includes media and non-media predictor variables. Voter “support” for a municipal police agency is deemed a multidimensional concept and is measured in absolute and relative terms. The findings of this exploratory study suggest that local television news has minimal or no impact (positively or negatively) upon voter attitudes toward local police agencies. The inability of mediaand non-media variables to explain voter support for municipal law enforcement indicates the need for a completely new paradigm to guide research in this niche of criminal justice.