Self-Interest, Ideological/Symbolic Politics, and Citizen Characteristics: A Cross-National Analysis of Support for Privatization

In this essay, the authors explore attitudes toward government privatization of electric utilities across two sets of nations: developed market economies (DMEs) and transition economies (TEs). They utilize generalized hierarchical linear model to analyze individual attitudes nested within these two groups of polities and discover a wide gap between the DME and TE nations in terms of preferences for privatization, with attitudes in DME nations being far more favorable. Attitudes toward the privatization of electricity are explained by a combination of ideological/symbolic predispositions, self-interest, and citizen values/characteristics. The most consistent variables in the model are the ideological/symbolic predispositions, while the weakest are citizen characteristics/values. In terms of self-interest, the analysis indicates that those who work for the public service or a public firm are more likely than others to oppose the privatization of electricity. In contrast to some public administration literature that asserts well-informed and interested citizens will oppose privatization, the authors find no convincing relationships. Instead, the most educated and politically efficacious citizens, as well as those who have confidence in the way democracy works within their nation, are more prone than others to support privatization of electricity.     

Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia

This article examines how the Commonwealth Parliament of Australia seeks to hold responsible ministers directly and senior public servants indirectly accountable for the performance of departments and programs on the basis of published performance data and inquiries conducted by parliamentary committees. From the perspective of an outsider, the scrutiny process in the Australian parliament, although not without its problems, is more systematic and substantive than is the case in other parliamentary systems such as Canada. Creating a more meaningful dialogue in the Australian parliament on performance issues will depend more on changes to the intersecting cultures of the legislature, government and the public service than on organisational and procedural reforms to any of those institutions.     

Healthy Country, Healthy People: Policy Implications of Links between Indigenous Human Health and Environmental Condition in Tropical Australia

Investment in programs that help Indigenous people undertake work maintaining the environmental health of their country has benefits for the environment as well as the physical, mental and cultural health of the Indigenous people involved. For health these findings have direct implications for some national health policies, service provision to homelands, health promotion and Indigenous health research. There are also direct implications for environmental investment in northern Australia and the design and regulation of markets in resource entitlements. Indirectly the findings should be important for economic, employment and education policies as well as those promoting social harmony. Given the range of benefits there is a strong argument for cross-agency investment in working on country by Indigenous people.     

The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous Adjustment in EU Meta-Governance

This article asserts that attempts to resolve the crisis through recent changes in European meta-governance are just the latest phase in a project to secure “continual adjustment” in European societies to the systemic demands of competitiveness. The structural pressures experienced at the scale of European societies are located in the process and scale of world market integration. This New Materialist scalar-relational approach sees adjustment to the systemic demands of competitiveness as likely to continue into the future and suggests that the scope for alternative more Keynesian programs of reform through EU meta-governance is highly constrained.     

Genetic and Environmental Influences on the Association Between Pubertal Maturation and Internalizing Symptoms

The literature consistently shows an association between pubertal maturation and internalizing problems in girls. The association for boys is less clear. The present study examines genetic and environmental influences on the association between pubertal maturation and internalizing problems for boys and girls in two primarily Caucasian adolescent twin/sibling studies: The Swedish Twin study of CHild and Adolescent Development (706 same-sex twin pairs aged 13-14, M = 13.7 years, 50 % female), and the Nonshared Environment in Adolescent Development sample (US-based, 687 same-sex twin/sibling pairs aged 10-18, M = 13.6 years, 47 % female). For girls, more advanced pubertal maturation was associated modestly with more internalizing problems, and that association was entirely explained by shared environmental influences. For boys, the association between pubertal maturation and internalizing problems was weak and inconsistent. Results for girls were remarkably consistent across samples. Findings suggest that nongenetic mechanisms mediate the association between pubertal maturation and internalizing problems. Findings have implications for intervention such that environmental influences shared by twins/siblings may provide the best targets for intervention strategies designed to minimize the potential negative effects of pubertal maturation on internalizing symptoms in girls.     

The centrality of labor time in South African gold mining since 1886

Labor time, as a dimension of South African mining labor history, has been ignored, both conceptually and historically. This article remedies this yawning gap by presenting primary and secondary evidence which demonstrates the centrality of labor time in South African gold mines since the discovery of gold in 1886. To this end, labor time is traced in two ways. Part I tracks industrial working time by tracing the length of the working day and week. Part II tracks the ever-increasing length of the African migrant labor contract. While industrial working hours remain remarkably stable for almost a century, the migrant labor contract systematically increases over a similar period. These two measures of labor time eventually coincide when the migrant labor system dissolves and black African workers take annual leave together with their compatriots across the racial divide. The explanation for the mining industry’s long struggle to both maintain relatively long working hours and increasingly maximize the length of the migrant labor contract is construed as completing the received wisdom of Harold Wolpe's much celebrated and criticized `cheap- labor' thesis. (Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap Labor Power.”)     

Workers’ Compensation and Moral Hazard in Tunisia

Moral hazard is a problem of asymmetric information that plays a central role in numerous contractual relationships and may lead to suboptimal resource allocation. Both ex ante and ex post moral hazard problems in workers’ compensation (WC) have been extensively analysed in developed countries. The main objective of this paper is to test the presence of ex post moral hazard in the Tunisian context. To our knowledge, this is the first analysis on this topic in a developing country, Tunisia. It is particularly important to study moral hazard problems in developing countries, since the negative impacts of such problems could be exacerbated in the developing world. Dionne and St-Michel (1991) have developed a methodology for testing for the presence of ex post moral hazard in the context of a more generous WC regime in Quebec. The Tunisian institutional context that we study is similar to that prevailing in Quebec; that is, in 1995, there was a significant increase in the generosity of the WC regime. Applying a more general econometric technique than that used by Dionne and St-Michel, we find that this increase in the generosity of WC led to longer periods out of work for recovery. This increase is more pronounced in the case of difficult-to-diagnose injuries.