'Gold and Bracelet,Water and Wave': Signature and Translation in the Indian Poetry of Adela Cory Nicolson

Writing under the male pseudonym'Laurence Hope', Adela Cory Nicolson published three collections of poetic verses set in colonial India between 1901 and 1905, namely The Garden of Kama, Stars of the Desert and Indian Love. In the late 1880s, dressed as a young male Afghan groom, Nicolson routinely followed her husband to the military camps that the British colonial authorities had set up in Afghanistan. This experience of gender and cultural cross-dressing finds a special place in many of Nicolson's love poems. Although Leslie Blanch has claimed that the'mainspring of Laurence Hope's verses still elude us', it is clear that Nicolson relied heavily on appropriating the poetic languages of Hindu'bhakti' and Islamic'sufi' traditions, thereby transforming the erotic conventions of the late Victorian fin de sicle. Her use of poetic signature is central to the formation of such a poetics. Long ignored on grounds that it was merely part of the enormous left-over corpus of colonial exotica produced and consumed with unprecedented eagerness in the age of empire, Nicolson's poetry therefore invites a reappraisal on the grounds that it constituted a significant act of translation: a practice aimed at reconceptualizing notions of national poetic legacy under colonialism and at reworking gender and identity in relation to poetic voice.     

The Effect of Unions and Organized Civil Society on Social Policy: Pension and Health Reforms in Argentina and Brazil, 1988–2008

This article shows how modified European power resources theories can be applied to Latin America to explain differences in the depth of policy reforms. It innovates on previous work on Latin American social policy by particularly examining the effect of unions and other civil society groups on the process of structural reforms (or lack thereof) in the health and pension sectors in Argentina and Brazil. Through a most similar system design, this analysis shows that the strength and support (or opposition) of organized civil society groups is a crucial condition to account for the enactment (or failure) of a given broad policy reform.     

Quality Management in Public-Sector Organizations: Evidence from Six EU Countries

Although there is considerable evidence for the hypothesis that an efficient use of management techniques is the key to a good public service delivery, a lot of studies come to the conclusion that there is only partial, reluctant implementation or even a general lack of the use of such techniques by public managers. This paper examines the determinants for the use of quality management techniques in public sector organizations from six EU countries. It turns out that especially more organizational autonomy and result control appear to be of importance while, surprisingly, the combination of these variables leads to negative results.     

Intragroup Contact and Anxiety Among Ethnic Minority Adolescents: Considering Ethnic Identity and School Diversity Transitions

Everyday interactions with same-racial/ethnic others may confer positive benefits for adolescents, but the meaning of these interactions are likely influenced by individual differences and larger structural contexts. This study examined the situation-level association between contact with same-ethnic others and anxiety symptoms among a diverse sample of 306 racial/ethnic minority adolescents (Mage = 14 years; 66 % female), based on (1) individual differences in ethnic identity centrality and (2) developmental histories of transitions in diversity between elementary, middle, and high school. The results indicated that at the level of the situation, when adolescents interacted with more same-ethnic others, they reported fewer anxiety symptoms. Further, for adolescents who had experienced a transition in school diversity, the positive benefits of contact with same-ethnic others was only conferred for those who felt that their ethnicity was very important to them. The importance of examining individual differences within larger developmental histories to understand the everyday experiences of ethnic minority adolescents are discussed.     

Experimental Evidence on the Impacts of Need-Based Financial Aid: Longitudinal Assessment of the Wisconsin Scholars Grant

We conduct the first long-term experimental evaluation of a need-based financial aid program, the privately funded Wisconsin Scholars Grant. Over multiple cohorts, the program failed to increase degree completion and graduate school enrollment up to 10 years after matriculation. The program did reduce time-to-degree for some students and modestly increased the number of STEM degrees earned. The lack of robust effects raises important questions about the conditions necessary for financial aid to benefit students.     

Causal inference and American political development: contrasts and complementarities

Public Choice - Causal inference and American political development (APD) are widely separated and (to some) fundamentally incompatible tendencies within political science. In this paper, we...     

Beyond COVID-19: Five commentaries on expert knowledge,executive action,and accountability in governance and public administration

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This first suite of commentaries focuses on the executive branch, variously considering: the challenge for governments to balance demands for accountability and learning while rethinking policy mixes as social solidarity and expert knowledge increasingly get challenged; how the policy-advisory systems of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and United Kingdom were structured and performed in response to the COVID-19 crisis; whether there are better ways to suspend the accountability repertoires of Parliamentary systems than the multiparty agreement struck by the minority Liberal government with several opposition parties; comparing the Canadian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis and how each has brought the challenge of inequality to the fore; and whether the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated or disrupted digital government initiatives, reinforced traditional public administration values or more open government.