Race,gender, and jobs

In his influential indictment of the Great Society, Charles Murray focused upon young black males being unemployed as the result of government programs. He is correct in stating that the employment problems of young black males have worsened since 1965 but wrong in asserting that older black males and white males had no employment problems. Labor force participation for all males has dropped since 1965. The employment problems of young black males resulted from sweeping changes in the job market and, secondarily, the revolution in female employment. Blue-collar jobs and full-time jobs are a smaller portion of the job market, while white collar and part-time jobs have increased substantially. Women have obtained a far higher proportion of all jobs than ever before, and sometimes in occupational categories dominated by males. Both the restructured job market and the competition of men and women for jobs, issues ignored by, Murray, raise painful policy dilemmas. To what extent should a politically powerless group like young black males be directly assisted in their employment struggles? To what extent should they be encouraged to migrate or secure further education? To what extent should women's employment be publicly supported through programs such as day care?     

CHANGING NATIONAL RULES: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM THE NETHERLANDS (1960–2004)

This paper will empirically analyse the evolution of national rule changes for the domain of post‐war Dutch higher education. We focus on rule changes because in the life cycle of rules – births, changes and repeals – change is the most common event. Our theoretical framework is mainly based on the organizational ecology and top management demography literatures. We will be integrating these perspectives, adapting them to our research context. In so doing, we focus on rule density, a minister’s demographic characteristics (such as age and tenure) and cabinet features (for example, power and turnover) as deteminants of rule changes. The empirical results provide significant support for the majority of our theoretical predictions. Overall, the results suggest that the ecological processes are the most robust, followed by the characteristics of ministers and the features of cabinets.     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LAW VIOLATION AND DEPRESSION: AN INTERACTIONS ANALYSIS*

This paper integrates arguments from differential social control theory with sociological research on mental health to develop an interactionist explanation of the relationship between law violation and depression. We focus on the possibility that law violation and depression are related because they share common antecedents, as well as the possibility that these problems mutually influence one another over time. We test hypotheses derived from our theoretical perspective using covariance structure analysis and panel data. Our results show that the relationship between law violation and depression can be explained largely by common antecedents—social‐structural positions, stressful life events, and adolescent problems shape social relationships and identities, which together influence the likelihood of both early adulthood crime and depression. We also find limited support for mutual influence.     

The micro–macro interactive approach to political trust: Quality of representation and substantive representation across Europe

The relevance of the macro-context for understanding political trust has been widely studied in recent decades, with increasing attention paid to micro–macro level interactive relationships. Most of these studies rely on theorising about evaluation based on the quality of representation, stressing that more-educated citizens are most trusting of politics in countries with the least corrupt public domains. In our internationally comparative study, we add to the micro–macro interactive approach by theorising and testing an additional way in which the national context is associated with individual-level political trust, namely evaluation based on substantive representation. The relevance of both types of evaluation is tested by modelling not only macro-level corruption but also context indicators of the ideological stances of the governing cabinet (i.e., the level of its economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism), and interacting these with individual-level education, economic egalitarianism and cultural liberalism, respectively. As we measure context characteristics separately from people's ideological preferences, we are able to dissect how the macro-context relates to the levels of political trust of different subgroups differently. Data from three waves (2006, 2010, 2014) of the European Social Survey (68,294 respondents in 24 European countries and 62 country-year combinations), enriched with country-level data derived from various sources, including the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, are used in the multi-level regression analyses employed to test our hypotheses. We found support for the micro–macro level interactions theorised by the evaluation based on the quality of representation approach (with higher levels of trust among more-educated citizens in less corrupt countries), as well as for evaluation based on substantive representation in relation to cultural issues (with higher levels of trust among more culturally liberal citizens in countries with more culturally liberal governing cabinets). Our findings indicate that the latter approach is at least equally relevant as the approach conventionally used to explain context differences in political trust. Finally, we conclude our study with a discussion of our findings and avenues for future research.     

Songs of Young Bareback Riders

BAATAR DORJE, 13, was born of the Ewenki ethnic-ity in the central Hulun Buir grasslands of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. True to the Ewenki horse-riding tradition, Dorje has been riding bareback since age five, and helping to break horses since he was eight. Ewenki folk songs that have been sung for generations are an aspect of his daily life.