Can process conditionality enhance aid effectiveness?

Can process conditionality enhance poverty reduction in developing countries? We address this question in a political-economic framework with political distortions on the recipient and the donor side. Process conditionality is a useful tool only if the international financial institutions hold all necessary information to assess the political situation in recipient countries and to select the true representatives of the poor into a participatory process. If they do not hold this information or if bureaucratic interests reduce their incentive to acquire this information, process conditionality loses its effectiveness.     

Identification of DYS385 allele variants by using shorter amplicons and Northern Thai haplotype data

Primers currently used for amplification of locus DYS385 on the Y chromosome give quite long amplicons that are difficult to resolve on native polyacrylamide gels. We therefore designed new primers that give much shorter products for easy separation. With this system, two allele variants that were characterized by sequencing as 14.1 (GAAA --> GAAAA) and 14.2 (GA insertion), were identified in two unrelated Northern Thai men due to their decreased mobility. Interestingly, initial capillary electrophoresis mistyped the 14.1 variant amplified with the traditional primers as allele 14. Forty different haplotypes were found in 147 Northern Thais with a haplotype diversity of 0.9430. Haplotype 13-18 (frequency 0.136) is the most frequent one: for comparison: haplotype 14-18 (frequency 0.074) was found to be the most common in a population from Bangkok (n = 95) in an earlier study. This striking difference within Thailand's population probably results from genetic differences in the founding populations.     

Power and Policy Design: A Comparison of Green Taxation in Scandinavian Agriculture

This article demonstrates the political importance of policy design in overcoming the opposition to the use of green taxes directed towards producers. The purpose of the article is to establish the link between the political power of producers and policy design. It is argued that the more politically powerful they are, the more likely policy makers are to reimburse tax revenues, to give producers control over the spending of the revenue and to design tax schemes in which there is a direct relationship between the subject being taxed and pollution. A comparison of fertilizer and pesticide tax policy making in Denmark, Norway and Sweden supports this argument.     

Efficient Rent-Seeking in Experiment

In a series of experiments we show that people learn to playthe efficient outcome in an open-ended rent-seeking game. Thisresult persists despite quite different experimentenvironments and designs, like different propensities ofcompetition, group sizes etc., and is interpretable as aresolution of the so-called Tullock paradox which states thatreal-world rent-seeking expenditures are much lower than whatthe standard rent-seeking model predicts.     

The Adolescent Society Revisited: Cultures, Crowds, Climates, and Status Structures in Seven Secondary Schools

The authors used data from seven schools in a metropolitan region to explore continuity and change in adolescent cultures and status structures; they identified six major types of status structures and explained variation among them in terms of characteristics of communities and schools. A key feature of the study is comparison of school climates, using both survey data and qualitative case studies that provide an interpretive context for the survey responses; this methodology allows a contextual level of analysis that is unavailable in either single-school ethnographies or large data sets that aggregate responses from individuals situated in many schools.Roberta Garner is Professor of Sociology at DePaul University. She received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago (1966). Her interests are in sociological theory, political sociology, and the sociology of culture.Judith Bootcheck is Associate Professor of Sociology at DePaul University and received the Ph.D. from Purdue University (1969). Her interests are in youth and the aging, families, and social problemsMichael Lorr is a Ph.D. student in Urban Studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received an MA in sociology from DePaul (2002) and his interests are in sociology of culture, political sociology, and sociology of educationKathryn Rauch received an MA from DePaul University with a focus on sociology of education and youth     

The Creation of Normative Facts

In Kelsen's formalist and reductionisttheory of law, the concepts of `authority' and`competence' may be explained exclusively in termsof those norms on which the validity of other legalnorms or of legal acts is dependent. Kelsen describesthe nature of these norms in different ways; at leastthree different conceptions can be distinguished. Arational reconstruction of the most plausible of theseconceptions will understand sentences expressing such`norms of competence' either to state truthconditions for normative sentences of a lower level orto state criteria for an act to be a legal act. Inboth functions, norms of competence regulate thecreation of normative facts.