Federal labor protetons and the privatization of public transit

Federal transportation officials assert that labor protections in the Urban Mass Transportation Act inhibit the propensity of local transit agencies to contract with private firms for services. The authors present results from a survey of a large sample of transit managers and econometric analysis to support their conclusion that labor protections do not appear to reduce the incidence of contracting. The labor protections, however, may be costly to transit management in other ways. The authors recommend actions, aside from repeal of labor protections, to increase contracting by local transit agencies.     

Children in the environment: Forest day-care centers: Modern day care with historical antecedents

Some features of early child care are more prominent in Norway than in other countries, such as emphasis on the outdoor environment. Of general relevance and interest is the form of day care provided by forest day-care centers. Three ideas form the development of these centers placed in wild areas. First, throughout history, Norwegians have had a close attachment to nature and some parents want to provide their children with outdoor experiences at an early age. Second, urging children to play outdoors characterizes the image many parents have of a happy, healthy childhood. Third, provision of day care for children has always been restricted in western countries, forcing parents to invent types of service that can become part of an ecological system that promotes healthy development.The forest day-care centers developed recently represent a supplement to the wide typology of child care in the 21st century. The article outlines the connections between these ideas in general European and western history and Norwegian history and presents debate and decisions about a question dating from the last half of the 1980s. It concludes that the forest day-care centers are perhaps only a modern form of the original kindergarten concept, which started in Europe and America as gardens for children not gardens of children.     

Violence,fear, and development in Latin America: a critical overview

This introduction presents the core concepts that shape this special issue on the impact of violence and the processes of development in Central and South America. The understanding of development is considered in terms broader than the economic context alone, in order to assess wider social and political aspects. With a similarly expansive scope, forms of violence are addressed that range from direct physical harm and bodily attack to the often more subtle aggression of racialised abuse or the pressures on community-centred production from dominant market forces. In these contexts, violence, economic initiatives, and political allegiances form unintended and often dangerous networks of consequence for development matters. All the articles in this volume exemplify further the spatial environments of violence and diverse ‘landscapes of fear’ that shape our existence and help to define our actions, territories, and understanding of what happens around us.     

Effectiveness of Programs to Prevent School Bullying

Sixteen major evaluations of programs to prevent school bullying, conducted in 11 different countries, are reviewed in detail. Of these 16 evaluations, 8 produced desirable results, 2 produced mixed results, 4 produced small or negligible effects, and 2 produced undesirable results. These varying findings may reflect variations in programs, in implementation, in assessment methods, or in evaluation designs. It is concluded that high-quality evaluations are needed in the future, with randomized designs, theoretically grounded interventions, multiple measures of bullying, and attempts to disentangle the effectiveness of different program components.     

Veto Players and Civil War Duration

Civil wars show a remarkable variation in how long they last. Some end within days; others continue for decades. What explains the extreme intractability of some wars while others are resolved quickly? This article argues that conflicts with multiple actors who must approve a settlement (veto players) are longer because there are fewer acceptable agreements, information asymmetries are more acute, and shifting alliances and incentives to hold out make negotiation more difficult. This veto player approach to explaining variation in civil war duration is tested using a new dataset containing monthly data on all parties to each civil war begun since World War II. The statistical analysis shows a strong correlation between the number of veto players and the duration of civil war.     

Key longitudinal-experimental studies in criminology

Following the tradition of Joan McCord's work, this paper reviews longitudinal-experimental studies in criminology with community samples of at least 100 persons, follow-up periods of at least 5 years, personal interviews, and measures of offending. The main advantages of such studies are in investigating both the natural history of development (including the effects of risk/protective factors and life events) and the impact of interventions on offending. This paper also reviews advantages and problems of prospective longitudinal surveys, randomized experiments, and longitudinal-experimental studies in criminology. Four key longitudinal-experimental studies were conducted by Joan McCord, Richard Tremblay, Lawrence Schweinhart and David Olds. Other studies have been conducted, or are currently under way, but no criminological study has yet been published with several years of personal data on participants both before and after an intervention.Joan McCord Award Lecture given at the American Society of Criminology, Toronto, Canada.     

The UN Human Rights Norms for Corporations: The Private Implications of Public International Law

Though many years in the making, the UN Human Rights Norms forCorporations only registered on the radars of most states, corporationsand civil society organisations in August 2003 when they beganto move up the ladder of the United Nation's policy-making processes.Since then they have been subject to intense, and sometimesintemperate, debate, scrutiny and controversy. A particularlegal feature of the deliberations has been the focus on theclosely related questions of the legal standing of the Normsin their present format (namely, an imperfect draft, and therefore,of no direct legal force), and what they might become (possibly—thoughnot likely soon—a treaty that speaks to corporations butbinds states). A potent mix of distrust and suspicion, vestedinterests, politics and economics has given rise to a greatdeal of grand-standing and cant concerning these questions andhow they might be answered. In this article, the authors explorethe history of the Norms and the form and content of the debatethat surrounds them, in their attempt to disentangle the legalfrom the rest. That said, the article also focuses on the realpoliticking of the circumstances in which the Norms now findthemselves and it seeks to offer some guidance as to where theNorms—or at least their substance, if not their form—mightgo from here.