Reducing Aboriginal Over-representation in Prison

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody attributed the high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody to the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison. Most analyses of this over-representation focus on the issue of systemic bias in policing, the law or the operation of the criminal justice system. The present article contends that, while discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal people by police and the court system is an historical fact, the leading current cause of Aboriginal over-representation in prison is not systemic bias but high rates of Aboriginal involvement in serious crime. We argue that efforts to reduce Aboriginal imprisonment rates through policing or criminal justice system policy have failed and will continue to fail until they succeed in reducing crime in Aboriginal communities. Future efforts to bring down Aboriginal imprisonment rates should focus on this issue.     

Politics and Economic Growth

Traditional growth theory viewed economic growth as a resultant of economic factors, in particular capital investment. Development economics implied a broader approach, emphasizing social structure change and human capital. Finally, it was also hinted that political factors could influence the rate of change in the development of the economic system. Testing various theories of economic growth we find that institutional sclerosis is the basic political factor that is related to the process of economic growth. The next step is to analyse how political structures and public policy have an impact on the basic factor in economic growth, viz. investments.     

Democratic Party Systems in Europe: Dimensions, Change and Stability

if a party system is really a system, i.e. a set of objects with relationships between the objects and between their attributes, and not simply an unordered set of political parties, then it is a vital problem in party research to identify the systems properties of this kind of system. We argue that the semantically relevant properties of the party systems in European democracies may be derived from the observational outcome of the operation of a party system, i.e. the national elections since the introduction of democratic procedure. Thus we arrive at five systems dimensions: functional orientation, fractionalization, radical orientation, polarization and volatility. The problems of party system change and stability are analysed by estimating the occurrence of trends and fluctuations over time in these party system dimensions for the set of European democratic party systems. The finding is that the widely accepted thesis of stability in European party systems is not corroborated.     

Outside the brackets: Why school administrators fail to see gendered harassment within an antibullying law

Much of school bullying involves students policing the gender roles and sexuality of other students. The proliferation of antibullying laws presents an opportunity to formally punish and mark gendered harassment as unacceptable. However, when this form of peer policing involves girls, administrators often consider it to fall outside the purview of the law. We use bracketing theory to understand how middle school administrators in New Jersey assess whether student behavior violates a statewide harassment, intimidation, and bullying law. We find that, according to administrators, violations require relational asymmetry between an aggressor and victim: an imbalance of power and disproportionate participation. Administrators rarely see gendered harassment as bullying because of the relational stereotypes they attach to girl students, which often preclude interpretations of relational asymmetry. We discuss how gender beliefs among administrators and “bracketing failures” explain the ways antibullying laws allow hegemonic beliefs about gender and sexuality to remain untroubled.     

In the pursuit of a gender-equal society: do Japanese EFL textbooks play a role?

‘Womenomics’, a signature programme promoted by the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, aims to boost the country’s economy by attracting women, an under-utilized resource, to join the workforce. To achieve this aim, the Japanese Government has been promoting a gender-equal society in various areas, including education. This paper seeks to investigate whether the government’s endeavour to promote a gender-equal society is reflected in contemporary Japanese EFL textbooks. Three recently published popular textbooks were examined. The findings revealed evidence of the authors’ gender awareness, including common use of gender-neutral vocabulary and a neutral term of address, Ms, for women. Two textbooks also displayed a balanced distribution of male and female speakers and their amount of talk. However, underrepresentation of women and their achievements is still prevalent in contemporary Japanese textbooks. Other observations include the portrayal of men in a wider range of social roles than women, and the depiction of men using material and cognitive processes and women using relational processes, suggesting that men are more physically and cognitively active than women. A gender dichotomy was also noted in mixed-sex dialogues, with a tendency for men to provide information and for women to seek information.