Can a leopard change its spots? Strategic behavior versus professional role conception during Ukraine's 2014 court chair elections

Do judges respond to institutional and strategic incentives or do they strictly follow dominant professional role conceptions? This article weighs in by exploring whether an ideational shift toward judicial empowerment and independence can germinate from institutional reforms. Ukraine's 2014 Euromaidan revolution and the comprehensive judicial reform adopted in its wake provide a test of the competing theoretical accounts. A judicial lustration law sacked all incumbent court chairs, who had been appointed by the executive, and gave Ukrainian judges the right to elect new chairs via secret ballot. I analyze this radical step toward judicial self-government using an original data set with individual- and court-level data. The key finding is that less than a fifth of Ukrainian judges embraced their newly granted agency and elected a new chair for their court, whereas the overwhelming majority followed dominant professional norms of deference and reelected the sacked court chairs. This finding holds for all rungs of the judicial hierarchy and for all regions of Ukraine. Even protégés of ousted president Yanukovych won the secret ballot vote by their peers more often than they lost it. Beyond Ukraine, these results suggest that empowering individual judges in the highly hierarchical structure of a civil law judiciary is unlikely to lead to a judicial behavior shift, at least in the short run.     

The ‘Regulatory State’ in Higher Education: Assuring Quality through New Modalities of Control in Brazil

The Brazilian Higher Education (HE) sector, following a global trend of rapid transformation, has undergone marked changes over the past two decades. These changes have involved the design of quality assurance tools as instruments for regulatory governance. In presenting an overview of the recent history and characteristics of quality assurance in the Brazilian HE sector, this paper contextualises the Brazilian experience according to broader conceptual frameworks and discusses how and why regulatory governance in this sector has so radically changed.     

Multiple femininities in two Russian women’s magazines, 1970s–1990s

In both the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, femininity and beauty were traits often attributed to the ideal working mother portrayed and promoted in state media. But with greater exposure to global beauty ideals in the post-communist era, the sexualized and beautified female body acquired a social value that was independent of its role in the reproductive process. In this paper, I analyse changes in the way care for the female body was represented in two Russian women’s magazines Rabotnitsa and Krest’yanka (1970s–1990s). Over this period, the ideal of the working mother figures less prominently and there is an increasing focus on the ways that women-consumers ought to work on their individual body-projects. This might appear to be a radical change. But by analysing the representations of women more carefully, I show that the move towards the privatization of the body project was already under way in the late Soviet period, but only for some categories of women. That is, non-Slavic women of various ages could be working mothers, but individual consumption was a realm reserved for their Slavic countrywomen.     

Jo Vellacott (1922–2019): an appreciation

This appreciation of Jo Vellacott, independent historian and Quaker, draws upon details of her long and adventurous life. It focuses especially on the valuable contribution she made to researching and understanding the life of suffragist Catherine Marshall (1880–1961), the history of democratic suffragists, pacifism, the First World War and modern British history.