Ethnic Law and Minority Rights in China: Progress and Constraints

Western discourse on human rights in China typically assumes that China's minority rights law must be a sham because China is an authoritarian state. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, China has articulated an "ethnic law" that elaborates rights and preferences that minorities value. At the same time, People's Republic of China ethnic law is inadequate to grant the idealized range of minority rights claimed by the Chinese state, and some rights are being eroded by the marketization of China's political economy. The most notable weaknesses in the ethnic law system include the failure to enlarge the scope of ethnic regional autonomy, a lack of preferential policies sufficient to offset the growth of the economic gap between Han and minority areas, and an inadequate program for overcoming antiminority bias. While an emerging minority elite is a stabilizing factor in minority‐state relations, additional measures to expand minority rights are required, some of which are suggested by the policies of other Asian states.     

The Effect of Family Structure and Family Functioning on Adolescents' Perceptions of Intimate Time Spent with Parents,Siblings, and Peers

In previous research, family structure variables have been operationalized as family size, birth order, sibling spacing, and sibling density. These structure variables have been linked to parental strictness, reasonableness, and supportiveness [J. S. Kidwell (1981), Number of Siblings, Sibling Spacing, and Birth Order: Their Effects on Perceived Parent–Adolescent Relationships, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 43, pp. 315–333]. Other research has drawn attention to the link between the amount of time adolescents spend with parents and peers and the influence of family relations variables—intensity, duration, and frequency of conflicts. [R. Montemayor (1982), The Relationship Between Parent–Adolescent Conflict and the Amount of Time Adolescents Spend Alone and with Parents and Peers, Child Development, Vol. 53, pp. 1512–1519]. More recent research has related family structure (family size, sibling spacing, and gender) effects to the amount of time adolescents spend with parents, a measure of relationship quality, and a set of measures of discipline [R. A. Richardson et al. (1986), Parent–Child Relationships in Early Adolescence: Effects of Family Structure, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 48, pp. 805–811]. To date, the questions asked by researchers have not simultaneously explored whether it is the family relations or the family structure variables that contribute most powerfully to the amount of time that female and male adolescents spend with family members and peers. In this research adolescents were asked to report the amount of time they spend with their mother, father, siblings, and peers, and to respond to a questionnaire that has three factors that define family functioning: Parenting Style (democratic decision making), Intimacy, and Conflict [P. Noller et al. (1992), Parent and Adolescent Perceptions of Family Functioning: A Comparison of Clinic and Nonclinic Family, Journal of Adolescence, Vol. 15, pp. 101–115]. The analyses revealed that complex and interpretable family structure and family functioning factors differentially influence whether males and females spend time with family members and peers.     

The role of credible commitments in state finance

Margaret Levi's Of Rule and Revenue raises a host of important problems in the theory of the state. It provides an important step in the development of a theory that combines economic and political institutions into the same framework, potentially allowing scholars to address important issues such as the divergent economic paths taken by various states. It will therefore be an important book, and warrants attention. This approach holds much promise for the development of a theory of institutional development of the state from the middle ages onward.I have tried to sketch some additional directions for the theory to develop, pointing toward the answer of questions not directly faced by Levi — or for that matter, by much of the public choice literature: How do we explain the evolution of a predatory state into one with explicit limits on its powers? How do we explain the rise of representative institutions? Answering these questions often requires looking beyond the individual state to its international context. Competition among states, especially in the form of war, plays a key role here, and has two consequences. First, a major consequence of large-scale wars was fiscal stress. At such times, even a preditory state might agree to exchange limitations on its own powers for revenue. Second, the brief discussion of early modern Europe suggests that states with limited government might have had a financial advantage over those which were not so limited. The latter played a major role in the successful Dutch revolt against Spain and in the English defeat of France.     

Fantasy,Commitment and the Irish Peace Process

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

Strategic Research Partnerships: Constructing Policy-Relevant Indicators

Absent a set of indicators based on a set of valid constructs, it will remain difficult to determine the importance of strategic research partnerships (SRP) for the U.S. economy and the enterprise of science and technology in general. The purpose of this paper is to identify characteristics of a desirable policy indicator for strategic research partnerships. In choosing among the many possible conceptualizations and indicators of SRP, a framing question should be: “what is the public stake?” The fact that SRP activity has great economic import (still an open question) does not imply an equivalent government or public policy importance. This seems to imply, then, that SRP indicators should focus on such factors as the composition of R&;D (e.g. do they shift the balance in available public domain research?), impacts of labor and human resources, tax implications (e.g. use of tax credits, foregone revenue and its impacts), and, especially, public-private partnerships (e.g. how are government-sponsored or -brokered SRPs different from others?).