Human Dignity in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and its Interpretation Before the European Court of Justice

This article argues that the EU Charter’s dignity provisions must be given a specific, expansive European meaning that underpins the importance the EU places on fundamental rights protection as a principle EU value. To this end, the article examines the EU Charter provisions on dignity and critically analyses the case law before the EU Charter had full legal effect and after it did. It finishes with looking at three areas in which the potential for an expansive interpretation of dignity could help bring the EU closer to its people and fully respect and protect dignity: asylum, criminal justice and sexual orientation.     

Dealing with the fall-Out: Identifying and addressing the role that relationship strain plays in the lives of girls in the juvenile justice system

Much research has found that girls and boys process strain differently. The purpose of this article, however, is to argue that a particular form of strain—relationship strain—explains why girls commit delinquency. The concept of relationship strain comes from combining key elements of feminist theories with Agnew's (1992) conception of strain which results when there is a presentation of negative or painful stimuli, or a loss of positive valued stimuli. To test our assertion, we examined data from 27 focus groups with delinquent girls, incarcerated women that were system-involved as adolescents and juvenile justice professionals that work with girls. We were interested in knowing what the participants believed got girls into trouble and whether there would be commonalties among their answers. Additionally, we wanted to know if their responses would be related to strain. A quasi-grounded theory approach was used to analyze the data. Findings indicated a great deal of congruency among groups. Nearly everything the focus group participants identified as leading girls into trouble (e.g., abuse and neglect, boyfriends, and fighting) was related to strain and boiled down to one thing—relationships. We concluded that it is likely the attempt to cope with relationship strain that leads to delinquency.     

Observations from practice: support group membership as a process of social capital formation among female survivors of domestic violence

This article explores the authors' practice observations of female domestic violence survivors' journey from first agency contact to active participation in a support group process. The authors have witnessed female victims of domestic violence challenging the social isolation imposed by their dominant partners as they search for meaning in their lives. As practitioners, they have observed women building trustful relationships and establishing supportive networks during the group process. In this article, the authors suggest that the support group process facilitates trust and network formation indicative of social capital.     

International Organisation as Coordination in N-Person Games

One major problem in global governance is the specification of decision-making rules for international and regional organisations to coordinate the states of the world. Various organisations use different decision-making rules, and the properties of these rules may be compared systematically in terms of the power index approach. The power index solution concept of N-person games may be employed to display a basic problem in global governance, namely, the fundamental trade-off between state veto on the one hand and the capacity of the organisation or groups of states to act, meaning its decisiveness, on the other hand. Thus, when states coordinate through the setting up and running of international organisations, they then face a trade-off between their own control over the organisation and the capacity of the organisation to act. States make this trade-off in different ways depending upon the nature of the international or regional organisation as they reflect upon what is most important, to wit, own control or the capacity of the group to act.     

Budget-Making for Social Purposes

A theory of the budgetary process within public resource allocation has to recognize two basic properties of budgetary behavior and budgetary interaction: variation over time and program variation. Our results indicate that the hypothesis of program variation is worthy of effort, as we find different decision mechanisms operating in the six programs studied, which belong to different categories of public resource allocation. Variation over time is particularly difficult to accommodate within the framework of incrementalist notions: incremental decision rules imply structural stability over time slices. We find the opposite to be true in two of the program types analyzed, the transfer programs and the service programs. Bureaucratic programs may look incremental; however, that may only be an appearance, as a closer analysis of the data indicates that the decision mechanism involves the occurrence of shift-points or non-incremental changes. A theory of the public expenditure process has to take into account both incremental decision strategies and non-incremental ones, which requires an econometric methodology based on the possibility of structural variability. Such a methodology includes the use of both test statistics and estimation techniques suitable to the occurrence of structural variability.     

Politics, Economics and the Measurement of Power

To what extent is political power fundamentally different from or, alternatively, comparable to economic power? While it is true that the basic institutions of democratic political life - the electoral arena and the sovereign representative assembly - differ from such capitalist economic institutions as the market and the joint-stock company, the logic of the power game which takes place in both settings is quite similar. In both institutions power will be a function of the capacity to enter decisive coalitions with other players: individuals, political parties, stockholders or groups of stockholders. Power indices may therefore be employed in order to reveal aspects of the strategic gaming that takes place both in representative assemblies and at yearly stockholders' meetings. This article discusses and compares various quantitative measures of voting power in the two kinds of voting bodies.     

Reviews

Rosalinde Sartorti, Pressefotografie und Industrialisierung in der Sowjetunion. Die Pravda 1925–33. Berlin and Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. 1981. 339 pp. 58 DM.

P. G. Hare, H. K. Radice and N. Swain (eds.), Hungary: A Decade of Economic Reform. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981. xiv+257 pp. £15.00.

Philip Hanson, Trade and Technology in Soviet‐ Western Relations. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1981. xiv + 271 pp. £20.

Peter Wiles (ed.), The New Communist Third World. London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982. 392 pp. £15.95.

Arthur J. Klinghoffer: The Angolan War: a study in Soviet policy in the Third World. Colorado: Westview Press Inc., 1980. viii + 229 pp. $22.50.

Morris Rothenberg: The USSR and Africa: new dimensions of Soviet global power. Washington: Advanced International Studies Institute, 1980. viii + 280 pp. $8.95 and $ 12.95.

Seweryn Bialer (ed.), The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy. Studies of the Research Institute on International Change, Columbia University. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press/London: Croom Helm, 1981. xviii + 441 pp. £14.95.

Igor Birman, Secret incomes of the Soviet state budget. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. 313 pp. DFL. 180.00, US $78.50.

James R. Millar, The ABCs of Soviet Socialism. University of Illinois Press, 1981. xvi + 215 pp. £8.72 paperback.

Adam B. Ulam, Russia's Failed Revolutions: from the Decembrists to the Dissidents. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981. vii + 453 pp. £10.00.

Richard B. Day, The ‘Crisis’ and the ‘Crash’: Soviet Studies of the West, (1917–1939). London: NLB, 1981. x + 300 pp. £9.50.

Bogdan Szajkowski (ed.), Marxist Governments: A World Survey, 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1981. xix + 822 pp. £20 per volume, £50 the set.

Thomas Remeikis, Opposition to Soviet Rule in Lithuania 1945–1980. Chicago: Institute of Lithuanian Studies Press, 1980. 680 pp. $15.00.