How Americans Think About Trade: Reconciling Conflicts Among Money, Power, and Principles

Trade has again emerged as a controversial issue in America, yet we know little about the ideas that guide American thinking on these questions. By combining traditional survey methods with experimental manipulation of problem content, this study explores the ideational landscape among elite Americans and pays particular attention to how elite Americans combine their ideas about commerce with their ideas about national security and social justice. We find that most American leaders think like intuitive neoclassical economists and that only a minority think along intuitive neorealist or Rawlsian lines. Among the mass public, in contrast, a majority make judgments like intuitive neorealists and intuitive Rawlsians. Although elite respondents see international institutions as promising vehicles in principle, in practice they favor exploiting America's advantage in bilateral bargaining power over granting authority to the World Trade Organization. The distribution of these ideas in America is not arrayed neatly along traditional ideological divisions. To understand the ideational landscape, it is necessary to identify how distinctive mentaal models—mercantilist, neorealist, egalitarian, and neoclassical economic—sensitize or desensitize people to particular aspects of geopolitical problems, an approach we call cognitive interactionism.     

Development of Friendship and Task Values in a New School: Friend Selection for the Arts and Physical Education but Socialization for Academic Subjects

Friends provide important social contexts for student development. Research has shown that adolescent friends are similar to each other in their interest and values for different school subjects. Yet our current understanding does not extend to knowing whether selection, deselection, or socialization processes are responsible for this phenomena. Without this knowledge, it is very difficult for parents, teachers, and schools to know how and when to intervene. This study investigated selection, deselection, and socialization effects on adolescent students’ task values for academic (languages, math and science, and social sciences) and non-academic subject areas (the arts and physical education). A social network approach was used to examine two waves of annual data collected from school-based networks of adolescents in the first and second years of high school education in Finland (N?=?1419; female?=?48.6%; mean age at first measurement point?=?16). The results revealed that adolescents tended to select friends with similar levels of task values (friend selection) for the arts and physical education, but friends did not become more similar in these areas over time (friend socialization). In contrast, there was evidence of friend socialization, but not friend selection, for the academic school subjects. Across all subjects, differences in task values did not predict friendship dissolution (friend deselection). These findings suggest that to a significant extent, students make agentic choices in developing friendship with schoolmates based on their task values in non-academic subjects. The resultant friend contexts that individuals created, in turn, affected their task values in academic subject areas. These results shed light on the complexity of friend effect mechanisms on task values at the subject domain-specific level.     

Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism

A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, www.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.     

Reciprocal Relationships between Teacher Ratings of Internalizing and Externalizing Behaviors in Adolescents with Different Levels of Cognitive Abilities

Are internalizing and externalizing behavior problems interrelated via mutually reinforcing relationships (with each behavior leading to increases over time in levels of the other behavior) or mutually suppressing relationships (with each behavior leading to decreases over time in levels of the other behavior)? Past research on the directionality of these relationships has led to ambiguous results, particularly in adolescence. Furthermore, the extent to which prior results will generalize to adolescents with low levels of cognitive abilities remains unknown. This second limit is particularly important, given that these adolescents are known to present higher levels of externalizing and internalizing behaviors than their peers with average-to-high levels of cognitive abilities, and that the mechanisms involved in the reciprocal relationships between these two types of behaviors may differ across both populations. This study examines the directionality of the longitudinal relationships between externalizing and internalizing behavior problems as rated by teachers across three measurement waves (corresponding to Grades 8–10) in matched samples of 138 adolescents (34.78?% girls) with low levels of cognitive abilities and 556 adolescents (44.88?% girls) with average-to-high levels of cognitive abilities. The results showed that the measurement structure was fully equivalent across time periods and groups of adolescents, revealing high levels of developmental stability in both types of problems, and moderately high levels of cross-sectional associations. Levels of both internalizing and externalizing behaviors were higher among adolescents with low levels of cognitive abilities relative to those with average-to-high levels of cognitive abilities. Finally, the predictive analyses revealed negative reciprocal longitudinal relationships (i.e., mutually suppressing relationships) between externalizing and internalizing problems, a result that was replicated within samples of adolescents with low, and average-to-high levels of cognitive ability.     

African farmer-led irrigation development: re-framing agricultural policy and investment?

The past decade has witnessed an intensifying focus on the development of irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa. It follows a 20-year hiatus in the wake of disappointing irrigation performance during the 1970s and 1980s. Persistent low productivity in African agriculture and vulnerability of African food supplies to increasing instability in international commodity markets are driving pan-African agricultural investment initiatives, such as the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), that identify as a priority the improvement in reliability of water control for agriculture. The paper argues that, for such initiatives to be effective, there needs to be a re-appraisal of current dynamics of irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly with respect to the role of small-scale producers’ initiatives in expanding irrigation. The paper reviews the principal forms such initiatives take and argues that official narratives and statistics on African irrigation often underestimate the extent of such activities. The paper identifies five key characteristics which, it argues, contradict widely held assumptions that inform irrigation policy in Africa. The paper concludes by offering a definition of ‘farmer-led irrigation’ that embraces a range of interaction between producers and commercial, government and non-government agencies, and identifies priority areas for research on the growth potential and impact of such interactions and strategies for their future development.     

Cultural Stressors and Mental Health Symptoms Among Mexican Americans: A Prospective Study Examining the Impact of the Family and Neighborhood Context

Studies of stress consistently have linked individuals’ experiences of stress to maladjustment, but limited attention has been given to cultural stressors commonly experienced by minority individuals. To address this, the current study examined the links between cultural stressors and prospective changes in mental health symptoms in a sample of 710 (49 % female) Mexican American youth. In addition, the moderating role of both family and neighborhood cohesion was examined. In-home interviews were completed with youth, mothers (required) and fathers (optional) to collect data on youth’s experiences of cultural stressors (discrimination and language hassles) and internalizing/externalizing behavior, and mothers’ report of family cohesion and mothers’ and fathers’ report of neighborhood cohesion. Analyses revealed that youth’s experiences of discrimination and language hassles at 5th grade were related positively to increases in internalizing symptoms at 7th grade. Additionally, youths who reported higher levels of language hassles in 5th grade experienced increases in externalizing symptoms across the 2-year span. Both family and neighborhood cohesion emerged as significant moderating factors but their impact was conditional on youth’s gender and nativity. Limitations and future implications are discussed.