Courts and health policy: judicial policy making and publicly funded health care in Canada

The 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provided political actors with the opportunity to make rights-based challenges to public policy decisions. Two challenges launched by providers and consumers of health care illuminate the impact of judicial review on health care policy and the institutional capacity of courts to formulate policy in this field. The significant impact of rights-based claims on cross-jurisdictional policy differences in a federal regime is noted.     

Parental Socialization and Rational Party Identification

This article constructs a rational choice model of the intergenerational transmission of party identification. At a given time, identification with a party is the estimate of average future benefits from candidates of that party. Experienced voters constantly update this expectation using political events since the last realignment to predict the future in accordance with Bayes Rule. New voters, however, have no experience of their own. In Bayesian terms, they need prior beliefs. It turns out that under certain specified conditions, these young voters should rationally choose to employ parental experience to help orient themselves to politics. The resulting model predicts several well–known features of political socialization, including the strong correlation between parents' and children's partisanship, the greater partisan independence of young voters, and the tendency of partisan alignments to decay.     

Religiöse Diskurstraditionen

Die jüngere Forschung zum sozialen Handeln von Muslimen in westeuropäischen Einwanderungsländern hebt häufig die reflexive Individualisierung von Lebensformen und religiösen Gesinnungen vor allem junger Muslime hervor. Der folgende Beitrag hinterfragt die diesem Ansatz zugrunde liegende Annahme eines Wertekanons ziviler europäischer Gesellschaften und Öffentlichkeiten, in die sich in Europa sozialisierte junge Muslime vermeintlich einfügen und muslimische Identitäten ?europäisch“ rekonstruieren. Dieser Transformationsprozess wird in diesen Theorien sowohl im Hinblick auf die familiale Lebenswelt wie im Hinblick auf die öffentliche Sphäre, in denen Muslime agieren, unterschätzt. Im Rückgriff auf Ansätze der historisch-vergleichenden Soziologie und der Religionsanthropologie erarbeitet der Aufsatz zunächst einen Begriff von ?Tradition“, der die Konstituierung, Verwaltung und Transformation von religiösen Diskursen, Praxen und Subjekten diachronisch und transgenerationell erklärt und der Gleichzeitigkeit von sozialer Einbettung und diskursiver Autonomie von Tradition Rechnung trägt. Wir zeigen, dass die sozialen Praktiken von Muslimen in Europa eine Transformation erfahren, die ihre besondere Grundlage im muslimischen Reformdiskurs im kolonialen und postkolonialen Kontext mehrerer Zentren der islamischen Welt hat. Der Fall junger Kopftuch tragender Musliminnen in Deutschland und Frankreich, die der zweiten und dritten Migrantengeneration angehören, zeigt schließlich weder eine selbst-reflexive Identitätssuche noch das ?coming out“ der Heldinnen einer nicht-westlichen Modernität, sondern ein praxisorientiertes und wissensgestütztes Räsonieren der jungen Frauen über die Wiedereinbettung des Traditionsdiskurses in die sozialen Felder (Familie, Studium, Arbeit und islamische Vereine), in denen sie operieren. Ihr Streben, das von der Traditionsdynamik der Kohärenzsuche geleitet wird, konfiguriert eine ?Alltagspolitik“, in der die Frauen ihre islamisch inspirierten Lebensprojekte gleichzeitig von moralisch erstarrten familiären ?Lebenswelten“ und von normativ erstarrten politischen Öffentlichkeiten abkoppeln und kultivieren.     

Church attendance,meaningfulness of religion,and depressive symptomatology among adolescents

Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 451 adolescents at a public high school in Texas during the spring semester 1989. The instrument used contained the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and items to determine participants' gender, frequency of church attendance, and meaningfulness of one's religion. Based on social support research and the writings of Carl Jung and Viktor Frankl, it was predicted that those who attended church frequently and those who viewed their religions as providing meaning for their lives would have lower BDI scores than their classmates. The findings supported these predictions. Implications and a discussion of the results are included.Received Ed.D. in educational psychology from University of Illinois. Main research interests are substance abuse in adolescents, drug use prevention strategies, and suicidal ideation in adolescents.Received Ph.D. in general psychology from Boston University. Main research interest is psychology in interdisciplinary perspective, with a specialization in the psychology of religion.Pursuing a M.Ed, in school psychology at Southwest Texas State University. Main research interests are psychological testing and assessment.     

Modeling Duration Dependence

As applications of duration analysis have burgeoned in politicalscience, scholars have become increasingly aware of the potentialsubstantive importance of duration dependence: the extent towhich the conditional hazards of the events of interest arerising or falling over time. Here I discuss the issue of durationdependence, focusing on the distinction between "spurious" dependencedue to unobserved heterogeneity and "true" duration dependencedue to state dependence in the process of interest. I presenta simple extension of a commonly used parametric duration model—theWeibull model—which allows researchers to assess the influenceof causal variables on the nature and extent of duration dependencein their data. I then illustrate the application of this "generalizedWeibull" model using data on the duration of international alliances.