Household furniture tip-over deaths of young children

The potential for the injury or death of a child resulting from the tip-over of a piece of household furniture or a domestic appliance has not been previously well recognized. We reviewed nine accidental deaths of young children that resulted from avoidable residential hazards and/or lapses in supervision of the children by their caregivers. The offending household items included televisions, bedroom dressers, a kitchen stove, and a lounge chair. The causes of death were mechanical asphyxia, blunt trauma, and combined blunt head trauma and asphyxia. All of the deaths could have been prevented by appropriate anchoring of the piece of furniture and/or closer supervision of the child. A thorough multidisciplinary investigation is essential in establishing the cause and manner of death in such cases and in identifying risk factors that may aid in the prevention of future childhood deaths.     

State Failure and Success in Uganda and Zimbabwe: The Logic of Political Decay and Reconstruction in Africa

This article uses the post-colonial experiences of Uganda and Zimbabwe to demonstrate both the strengths and weaknesses of competing theoretical explanations for problems of state and economic failure in Africa. It shows that they all explain some but not all of these processes. It demonstrates the crucial role of contextual circumstances and ongoing structural changes in each country in determining the success or failure of policy regimes and, of current prospects for a long-term transformation to liberal democratic capitalism.     

Sanya: Japan's internal colony

Abstract

You have to get up early to know Tokyo. Take Baba as a case in point. By day, it is an ordinary, slightly run-down park beside the tracks of the city's central commuting loop, halfway between Shinjuku and Ikebukuro stations. Go at dawn and a thousand men populate the park—young men in shirts and sneakers, carpenters in their belling, knicker-like pants, the muscular dokata, construction workers, duffle bags thrown over their shoulders and heavy black cloth shoes on their feet, a handful of men in office suits and leather shoes, old men, hoboes—the park is a different world. At six, the action begins. Vans pull up and encircle the square, the contractors dismount, enter the crowd, and wait as clusters of men gather around them to negotiate the sale of their day's labor. Small eating carts dot the park and along the cement paths second-hand clothes vendors peddle pants and jackets piled on squares of open cloth. The bargaining reaches a climax at seven, when wages are highest, and goes on for another hour as weaker, less aggressive men take what is left. Then, one by one, the vans with their cargoes of workers drive off, the cart-owners lock up, the clothes vendors bundle their goods back into their squares of cloth, and by eight Baba is once more a drab, empty park.     

Militarized Justice in New Democracies: Explaining the Process of Military Court Reform in Latin America

While a large body of literature emphasizes the importance of judicial reform in new democracies, few scholars have examined the reform of military justice systems in these settings—despite the potential for these courts to compete directly with civilian courts and subvert the rule of law. This article focuses on Latin America to empirically examine how the process of reforming military courts has played out in each democracy following authoritarian rule. We outline two distinct pathways: (1) unilateral efforts on the part of civilian reformers, and (2) strategic bargains between civilian reformers and the military. Within the unilateral category, we further distinguish efforts driven by civilian courts, those pursued by politicians, and those undertaken in the context of larger political transformations. Ultimately, we find that, absent a dramatic defeat of an authoritarian regime and its armed forces, reform efforts that do not engage and bargain with the military directly often fail to achieve long‐term compliance and improvements in human rights practices. The success of such reform efforts, therefore, may come at a cost in other areas of democracy and civil‐military relations. We conclude the article by summarizing our findings and reflecting on the lessons they provide for ongoing military justice reform efforts around the globe.     

Politics and Corporate‐Sector Environmentally Significant Actions: The Effects of Political Partisanship on U.S. Utilities Energy Efficiency Policies

This study assesses the direct, indirect, and total impacts of political partisanship on state‐level utilities' investment in energy efficiency. This subject is of utmost importance because energy efficiency improvement has become a linchpin in worldwide efforts to combat climate change and other environmental challenges. Analysis of data on 51 electric utilities nested within 31 U.S. states indicates that political partisanship influences utilities' energy efficiency policies. There is strong evidence that electric utilities in states dominated by the Republican Party are less likely to invest in energy efficiency than those in states governed by the Democratic Party. This finding suggests that political partisanship may be shaping the policy and regulatory frameworks put in place by state governments to incentivize or compel the participation of private‐sector entities' in environmental management and/or resource conservation.     

The Economic Evaluation of Policing Activity: An Application of a Hybrid Methodology

This paper advances a hybrid police cost function that synthesises the proactive/preventive and response/reactive methodologies from the criminology literature. The model presents a coherent estimation process that can help in the allocation of scarce resources to police forces and also enable economists, government organisations and criminologists to assess the scale and technical efficiency of forces. This hybrid model uses response survey data for a sample of English and Welsh police forces in which relative efficiency rankings are contrasted with relative performance measures produced by the Audit Commission. We find that there are considerable divergences in police force's scale and technical efficiency during 1997/98 and 1998/99 utilising non-parametric techniques.     

Culture and Negotiation Strategy

In this article the authors investigate the relationship between culture and joint gains by examining the role of information sharing and power strategies in intracultural negotiations. Previously, the authors found that the relationship between cultural values or norms and joint gains was uncertain in six cultures: France, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, and the United States. Of the five values and norms measured, only norms for information sharing in negotiation were directly related to joint gains. This article explores and extends prior findings by investigating the strategies used by negotiators in the same six cultures. Cultures that maximized joint gains used direct information-sharing strategies or a combination of indirect and direct strategies. Power strategies may help or hurt joint gains, depending on a culture's values and norms for power and whether or not power-based influence is used in conjunction with sufficient information exchange. The findings suggest that understanding the other party's cultural characteristics and strategies can help negotiators plan how to focus on information exchange and deal with unusual power strategies that they may encounter.     

Revisiting Tiebout: Moving Rationales and Interjurisdictional Relocation

This article evaluates a key component of the model of localpublic expenditures put forth by Charles Tiebout and embracedby analysts in the public choice tradition. Central to thismodel is the assumption that citizens who are unhappy with localgovernment policies have an incentive to relocate to a differentjurisdiction that offers preferable taxes and services. Usingdata from a survey of actual movers in over fifty communities(including a large central city) located in the two largestcounties of a metropolitan area, we examined factors affectingboth the decision to move and the choice of a new residence.Empirical findings support the expectations of the Tiebout model,showing that tax and service factors significantly influencethe choice of a new residence for those who moved from one jurisdictionto another. The implications of the findings for central citiesare developed.     

Australia and the Secretive Exploitation of the Chatham Islands to 1842

The European discovery of the Chatham Islands in 1791 resulted in significant consequences for its indigenous Moriori people. The colonial Australian influence on the Chathams has received little scholarly attention. This article argues that the young colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land led the exploitation of the archipelago before its annexation to New Zealand in 1842. The Chathams became a secretive outpost of the colonial economy, especially the sealing trade. Colonial careering transformed the islands: environmental destruction accompanied economic exploitation, with deleterious results for the Moriori. When two Māori iwi (tribes) from New Zealand’s North Island invaded in 1835, Moriori struggled to respond as a consequence of the colonial encounter. Mobility and technology gained from the Australian colonies enabled and influenced the invasion itself, and derogatory colonial stereotypes about Aboriginal peoples informed the genocide that ensued. Hence this article writes the Chathams into Australian history and Australia into Chathams history, showing that discussions of the early colonial economy, environment, and genocide must consider the wider South Pacific context in conjunction with events internal to the colonies.