National Minorities and the International System

National minorities are collectivities who possess that trait which is the current normative underpinning of states, namely nationhood, and yet for practical purposes cannot enjoy outright political independence. Because national minorities bear these normatively significant characteristics they may be deemed to have legitimate international claims to certain special rights even if these fall short of statehood. Yet although this rationale may be logically sound and morally justified, pursuing it nevertheless raises serious problems with regard to state sovereignty.     

Integrating Rigor and Relevance in Public Administration Scholarship: The Contribution of Narrative Inquiry

A traditional view of scholarly quality defines rigor as the application of method and assumes an implicit connection with relevance. But as an applied field, public administration requires explicit attention to both rigor and relevance. Interpretive scholars' notions of rigor demand an explicit inclusion of relevance as an integral aspect of quality. As one form of interpretive research, narrative inquiry illuminates how this can be done. Appreciating this contribution requires a deeper knowledge of the logic of narrative inquiry, an acknowledgement of the diversity of narrative approaches, and attention to the implications for judging its quality. We use our story about community-based leadership research to develop and illustrate this argument.     

The Structure of Censorship Attitudes

Research about censorship attitudes across disciplines shares the normative goal of predicting and modifying attitudes perceived as either too permissive or too restrictive. Understanding attitude structure is important to achieving this goal. This study explores the intra-attitudinal structure of public censorship attitudes, specifically the general tendency to endorse particular government actions. For twenty-one scenarios, respondents indicated their agreement with each of five possible government reactions: prior restraint; subsequent punishment; time, place, manner restrictions; allow, and protect. Scale scores were computed for each government response. There are strong correlations between the two punitive restriction options and between the two permissive government responses. The time, place, manner response option related moderately to the other scales. Additional structural information is provided by examining scale relationships with other variables: gender, liberal-conservative self-rank, religiosity, need for cognition, authoritarianism, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion.     

Rethinking measures of democracy and welfare state universalism: Lessons from subnational research

ABSTRACT

Democracy and the welfare state are two of the most extensively studied concepts and themes in the field of comparative politics. Debate about how to best measure the two concepts has failed to contemplate the extent to which political and social rights are uniformly present across distinct regions of the national territory, despite the presence of substantial subnational research that underscores wide variation inside countries. We argue that this omission hampers our understanding of the two phenomena and we propose a new measure of democracy and healthcare universalism, which we call the Adjusted Measures of Democracy and Welfare Universalism. The new measures integrate territorial inequality into existing national-level indicators, providing a more accurate picture of country performance and opening the door to new, multi-level theory building.     

Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean

Land grabbing has gained momentum in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past decade. The phenomenon has taken different forms and character as compared to processes that occur in other regions of the world, especially Africa. It puts into question some of the assumptions in the emerging literature on land grabbing, suggesting these are too food-centered/too food crisis-centered, too land-centred, too centred on new global food regime players – China, South Korea, Gulf States and India – and too centred on Africa. There are four key mechanisms through which land grabbing in Latin American and the Caribbean has been carried out: food security initiatives, energy/fuel security ventures, other climate change mitigation strategies, and recent demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital. The hallmark of land grabbing in the region is its intra-regional character: the key investors are (Trans-)Latin American companies, often in alliance with international capital and the central state. Initial evidence suggests that recent land investments have consolidated the earlier trend away from (re)distributive land policies in most countries in the region, and are likely to result in widespread reconcentration of land and capital.