The poor in Singapore: issues and options

This article examines the changing patterns of poverty in Singapore. As Singapore's population ages, the poor increasingly includes the elderly. It appears that ascribed factors, such as gender and race, have significant influence on financial security at old age. As the population ages, the adequacy of existing anti-poverty policy is challenged.     

The precarious state of international order: Assessment and policy implications

The international order is becoming increasingly precarious as a result of the pressures of globalisation and inadequate policy responses by many states, most importantly the United States, which still holds a pivotal role in building and sustaining international order. The present state of affairs in global governance is characterised by 1) an overwhelming concentration of power at the level of interstate relations but 2) a diffusion of power if we look at the totality of international relations, 3) the erosion of state authority and political legitimacy, 4) the growing importance of markets and of 5) fundamentalist ideologies, 6) the declining utility and the paradoxical impact of force on political order, and 7) by the still indispensable but increasingly fragile base of international order in functioning statehood at the national level. Overall, this situation reflects a mismatch between political demands on and the actual supply of international order whose present state leaves much to be desired. By way of conclusion, the article offers some policy recommendations about how to change the present precarious situation.     

Coming to terms with the communist past: East Germany in comparative perspective

As so often after the collapse of authoritarian regimes, the post‐communist societies of eastern Europe confront the problem of dealing with alleged regime‐sponsored criminality by their predecessor rulers. This article examines the various approaches taken toward this problem in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and (east) Germany, with special emphasis on the anomalies presented by the latter case. It is argued that the different approaches taken in these countries can be explained by a combination of two main factors: the ‘weight of the past’ (the level of development of civil society before 1989) and the ‘politics of the present’.     

Transatlantic Institutions: Can Partnership be Engineered?

The transatlantic alliance is widely viewed as being in a state of decline. Conflict over the war in Iraq highlighted a growing divergence between the Bush administration and European Union governments in their attitudes towards multilateralism. The rift severely tested institutions created to manage bilateral EU–US relations in the aftermath of the cold war. This article examines how well this institutional architecture has held up. It scrutinises the limitations of networked governance in transatlantic relations and acknowledges the quandary of trying to manufacture partnership using imperfect institutions. The Brussels–Washington channel is only one among many through which transatlantic relations flow, but we argue that it continues to gain in importance. Despite the limits of institutional engineering, we conclude that the US and the EU remain each other's most important ally.     

Side-bets and reciprocity as determinants of organizational commitment among correctional officers

Organizational commitment is a particularly salient characteristic of the prison work climate due to the stressful working conditions and high rate of turnover among correctional officers nationwide, yet little is known about the factors that predict the level of organizational commitment among officers. Becker's (1960) side-bets hypothesis predicts greater commitment among those who develop additional investments in the job that would be lost with a change of jobs, and the reciprocity hypothesis predicts greater commitment among those who feel they are well treated, supported, and respected by the organization. This study used a sample of 546 correctional officers to examine the relative effects of side bets and reciprocity on two components of organizational commitment—affective commitment and continuance commitment. The results of a multivariate OLS regression analysis indicated that reciprocity had a greater effect than side bets on affective commitment but that side bets had a greater effect than reciprocity on continuance commitment. These findings, which provide partial support for the side-bet hypothesis and strong support for the reciprocity hypothesis, are discussed in terms of the link between organizational commitment and other work-related behaviors.