Telecommunications Reform in Mexico from a Comparative Perspective

This paper examines the process of reform in the Mexican telecommunications sector and makes comparisons with similar processes in the United States, New Zealand, and Brazil. Differences in policy responses are explained by the structure of the political institutions and the policy context in any given country. The policy lessons to be drawn from the regulatory experiences examined are that the sequence and the pace of reform influence policy outcomes. The speed with which the Mexican reform was carried out led to a lack of the institutional and legal support necessary to create a level competitive playing field. The permanence of a vertically integrated firm in the Mexican market, moreover, introduced consequential costs to the regulation of the industry. The results of this paper support the theoretical argument that privatization, in itself, does not guarantee the development of the sector and point to the need to attain a more effective regulation of competition in telecommunications.     

Agency Leaders, Gendered Institutions, and Representative Bureaucracy

This study examines three central questions: Do women state agency heads establish priorities that advance women's interests more frequently than men agency heads? Among state agency heads with women‐related top priorities, are there systematic differences between women and men in the influences on their priority choices? Do the organizational and political contexts in which agency leaders work explain variation in policy priorities? Analysis of data from a national survey of women and men department heads reveals that working in a redistributive agency affects whether a leader pursues a women‐centered policy agenda, regardless of the leader's gender, other personal characteristics, or reported influences on priority choice. The authors conclude that the way representative bureaucracy actually plays out can be more fully understood if the tenets of social science theory on gendered institutions are incorporated into analyses of how representative bureaucracy works.     

WELFARE TO WORK PROGRAMS: LESSONS ON RECENT STATE INITIATIVES

Since the federally supported public assistance program became law in 1935, many developments have challenged our perceptions about the employability of welfare mothers and the appropriate design of the AFDC program. A consensus has been building that the AFDC program should be redesigned with the view that employable women and men have a responsibility to work and support their families. The result has been proposals stressing some form of work requirement. Several years ago, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) began a five-year social experiment examining current state efforts to restructure the relationship between welfare and work. The MDRC demonstration addresses four questions. First, is it feasible to impose work-related obligations as a condition of reviewing welfare? Second, what do workfare-type programs look like in practice and how do welfare recipients themselves judge the fairness of mandatory requirements? Third, do these initiatives make a difference? Fourth, how do program benefits compare to costs? Issues, findings, and conclusions are related to these questions.     

Expert Approaches to Communicating Violence Risk

There has been virtually no empirical study of the way in which evaluating clinicians communicate their conclusions about the risk of violence toward others. Risk communication has become particularly important in recent years, serving as the link between empirical data from recent studies and the understanding and use of such data by evaluators and decision makers. The present study considered how psychologists and psychiatrists, identified as experts in violence risk assessment, responded to eight vignettes that systematically measured preferences for risk communication. The vignettes involved the presentation of the following factors in a 2 × 2 × 2 within-subjects design, counterbalanced for order: (1) risk model (prediction vs. management), (2) risk level (high vs. low risk of the individual being assessed), and (3) risk factors (the predominance of static vs. dynamic risk factors). A total of 71 individuals (41 psychologists, 2 sociologists, and 28 psychiatrists) responded to a survey mailed to 100 individuals, for a response rate of 71%. Participants were asked to rate the value of six forms of risk communication for each of the eight vignettes. There were few significant differences between the ratings assigned by psychologists and those assigned by psychiatrists. The most highly valued form of risk communication involved identifying risk factors applicable to the individual and specifying interventions to reduce risk. A repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance yielded a main effect for risk level and an interaction between risk level and risk factors. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.     

Feminism and Utopia: Irigaray Reading Kant

The student revolution of the late 1960s and the early 1970s was a major impetus for the development of new academic disciplines. Topics that had not been considered'proper academic material' only a few years earlier, such as women's studies and Holocaust studies, received recognition and began to be taught in American universities. Soon, universities throughout the world followed suit. Sometime during the early 1990s initial attempts were made in the United States and Israel to prepare courses that incorporated themes from women's studies or gender studies into the study of the Holocaust. The result was a number of courses dealing with women and the Holocaust located in the fields of history, sociology or literature. Taught initially in only a few institutions, the topic was slowly taken up by scholars throughout the world. After a decade of research and teaching the subject in academic institutions throughout the world, scholars of the Holocaust and gender suddenly found themselves facing opposition from historians and public figures. Baumel deals with the more common attitudes towards the subject, experienced by those dealing with the topic. She provides a short survey of the arguments used against scholars of the Holocaust and gender, an overview of the state of research on the topic and guidelines for future research.     

OUTCOMES OF FAMILY COUNSELING INTERVENTIONS WITH CHILDREN WHO RESIST VISITATION: AN ADDENDUM TO FRIEDLANDER AND WALTERS (2010)

Preliminary findings on the outcomes of family-focused counseling interventions for alienated and estranged children are presented based upon data from a longitudinal study of children in chronic custody disputes who were interviewed as young adults and from the clinical records of long-term therapy with these children who were resisting visitation.