Advocacy coalitions,beliefs and climate change policy in the United States

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) asserts that disagreement over policy core beliefs divides organizations into competing coalitions. We apply Discourse Network Analysis to 1,410 statements in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today to investigate what kinds of beliefs contribute to coalition formation in the climate change policy debate in the news media in the United States. We find that the beliefs concerning the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the importance of ecology over economy and desirability of governmental regulation divide organizations into three advocacy coalitions: the economy, ecology and science coalitions. Policy preferences such as cap and trade do not; they find support across coalition lines. Based on these findings, we suggest that ACF theory could be clarified to better account for how beliefs concerning policy instruments contribute to coalition formation. In some policy domains, policy instruments are where opposing coalitions find agreement. In others, they are more divisive.     

Emotional Awareness in Depressive and Anxiety Symptoms in Youth: A Meta-Analytic Review

Emotion regulation is assumed to play an important role in depressive and anxiety symptoms in youth. However, the role of core components of emotion regulation, such as emotional awareness, is not well understood so far. Thus this meta-analysis aimed to examine the relationship between depressive and anxiety symptoms with emotional awareness in youth. A systematic literature search (PsycINFO, Medline, Google Scholar) identified 21 studies, from which 34 effect sizes were extracted. Results from random effects models showed that difficulties in emotional awareness were significantly correlated with a medium effect size for each, depressive and anxiety symptoms separately, and for their combined effects (overall outcome). Additionally, further analyses revealed that age was a significant moderator of the relationship between emotional awareness with depressive and anxiety symptoms, with younger samples (mean age?≤?12 years) showing a stronger association between difficulties in emotional awareness and depressive and anxiety symptoms as compared to older samples (mean age?>?12 years). The results suggest that emotional awareness may be of relevance for depressive and anxiety symptoms in youth. Future work is required to examine longitudinal developments, moderators, and mediators in multi-method approaches. Moreover, children and adolescents may benefit from interventions that aim to enhance emotional awareness.     

Transnational Reception: Nordic Women Writers in Fin de Siècle Finland

Abstract

This article investigates the transnational and translingual reception of Nordic women’s writing (among authors writing in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish) in a multilingual country, Finland, around the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This contribution is a component of our work for the international Joint Research Project, Travelling TexTs. We concentrate on the presence of Nordic women’s writing in various languages in fin de siècle Finland by investigating a library collection from that time. We look at the complexities in the reception of Nordic women’s writing in translation in Finland, making use of the concept of the Nordic dimension of translation history, and introducing the notion of intranational reception. We emphasize the role of women translators as cultural transmitters, and the intertwining of national and transnational (or, even, in today’s terms, feminist) agendas. We also investigate the reception of Nordic women’s texts in the press of that time, by examining both literature written for adults and literature for girls. Working with large-scale digitized sources has enabled us to examine the question of reception broadly.     

Political Partisanship and Welfare Service Privatization: Ideological Attitudes among Local Politicians in Sweden

This article ties in with a growing international literature examining the link between party politics and welfare service privatization in modern welfare states. In recent decades, a central aspect of policy change in Sweden is that private actors have come to produce publicly financed welfare services on a more regular basis. This overall privatization trend is furthermore characterized by substantial geographical variation across Sweden's 290 municipalities. The ideological attitudes of local politicians have been recognized as particularly important for understanding this development. This article examines the extent to which local politicians’ ideological attitudes regarding welfare service privatization are best explained with a partisan approach emphasizing between‐party polarization as opposed to a critical perspective that points to the proclaimed significance of ideological consensus between left and right parties in certain municipal contexts. Using multilevel modelling and survey data collected from elected politicians in municipal governments, the empirical findings show substantial differences in attitudes between Conservatives and Social Democrats, irrespective of municipal characteristics – most notably the degree of welfare service privatization. Hence, the results strongly indicate that the partisan approach is much more fruitful compared to the consensus approach as a general explanation for local politicians’ attitudes towards welfare service privatization in Sweden. Accordingly, a conclusion is that comparisons at the subnational level within countries are important as a complement to country‐comparative studies when attempting to understand the link between political partisanship and welfare service privatization in modern welfare states.     

A 24-Year Follow-up Study on Recidivism in Male Mentally Disordered Sexual Offenders With and Without Psychotic Disorders

There is a lack of knowledge on mentally disordered sex offenders (MDSOs) targeting adult victims, especially regarding recidivism patterns and the specific subgroup with psychiatric disorders. This paper presents index offense data, clinical data, and recidivism patterns over up to 24 years in a cohort of 146 MDSOs, with and without psychotic disorders, sentenced in Sweden between 1993 and 1997. At the time of the offense, all offenders were affected by clinical, developmental, and criminal history factors. MDSOs with psychotic disorders only marginally differed from those without, the former being less likely to have been institutionalized during childhood, intoxicated during the index offense, or diagnosed with a personality disorder, substance use disorder, or paraphilic disorder. In the cohort, 3.4% of the MDSOs were reconvicted for a new sex offense over 2 years, 9.6% over 5 years, 13.0% over 10 years, and 17.1% over the entire follow-up period of 24 years. In MDSOs with psychotic disorders, no subjects were reconvicted during the first 2 years, while 2.6% were reconvicted over 5 years, 5.3% over 10 years, and 7.9% over 24 years. Recidivism rates for violent and general reoffenses were 39.0% and 37.7%, respectively, for the cohort of MDSOs, and subjects with psychotic disorders reoffended significantly later in general offenses. In conclusion, MDSOs with psychotic disorders showed the same recidivism pattern as MDSOs without psychotic disorders. Furthermore, recidivism research may preferably focus on follow-up periods of 5–10 years since most offenders appear to recidivate within this timeframe.     

Where Do I Belong? Narratives of Rodina among Russian-speaking Youth in Kazakhstan

Abstract

This essay engages critically with the personal narratives of rodina (home, motherland) among Russian-speaking youth in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It is argued that the concept of rodina as an important locus of belonging cannot be imbued with a single meaning; instead, it is characterised by internal conflicts and variations. Supported by empirical material, the essay moves beyond the confines of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ to illustrate the different ways in which Russian speakers frame their perception of rodina, and how such narratives can influence the construction of self- and community-identification.     

Overlapping zones of exclusion: carbon markets,corporate hydropower enclaves and timber extraction in Cambodia

ABSTRACT

This contribution looks at the interplay of different logics of governing the environment, resources and people in Cambodia that materialise in overlapping zones of exclusion, thereby co-producing new relations of resource control in a complex frontier constellation: a frontier for water, forest and carbon commodities and also for state control. Focusing on three Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) hydropower dams, the paper analyses a partly unintentional, but significantly consequential coalescence of distinct spaces of governing located in the Cardamom Mountains: a forest conservation zone, the CDM technological zone, an enclaved corporate hydropower zone and a semi-official timber logging zone. While the CDM element has exposed the projects internationally, it has obscured several problematic aspects and dynamics of resource politics connected to the dams that are revealed in this paper. These include the vulnerabilisation of local fisher communities, incarceral labour practices on the dams’ construction sites and accelerated logging in the conservation zone. The paper also shows how the interaction of the studied zones takes place through their distinct mechanisms of exclusion with the effects of more centralised resource control and the bracketing of the associated dispossessions.     

Sexual Difference as Nomadic Strategy

Lisa Folkmarson Käll's article “Sexual Difference as Nomadic Strategy” deals with Rosi Braidotti's attempt at rethinking sexual difference and female subjectivity in terms of nomadism. It explores how the idea of nomadism can function as a framework for understanding sexual difference which takes into account the multiple ways in which difference is configured, experienced, and contextually given meaning. Braidotti's account of sexual difference as nomadism captures difference in three interrelated dimensions, namely the difference between man and woman, differences between women, and differences within each woman. In all three dimensions, the central issue at stake is to bring forth an understanding of identity as a site of difference. Such an understanding allows Braidotti to locate sexual difference at the very core of subjectivity and recognize difference as constitutive of identity in a more fundamental way than as marking out its external limits. According to Käll, Braidotti's tripartite understanding of nomadism further opens up towards a rethinking of sexual difference beyond the confines of a strict exclusionary binary relation between man and woman. It locates sexual difference as a central element in the identification and becoming of subjectivity while at the same time recognizing that sexual difference is not the only central element, but one which intersects with others.     

The Conflicting Interests of Women's Organizations and the League of Nations on the Question of Married Women's Nationality in the 1930s

This article investigates the question of legal equality in citizenship and nationality in the inter-war years. The first conference for the codification of international law was hosted by the League of Nations in The Hague in 1930. One of the topics of the conference was married women's nationality, and international women's organizations did everything in their power to persuade the conference that married women deserved to be treated equally to non-married women and to men. Women lobbied the League, but they were ultimately unsuccessful. The study highlights the conflicting aims of a movement struggling for social and political change and the official aims of an international organization. Whereas previous research has focused on the actions of the women's organizations, this article directs its interest towards the interaction between the League of Nations and the women's organizations. In questions regarding women's rights and claims for equality the League of Nations adapted an overly cautious, even conservative, position. However, the article shows that the international discourse provided arguments and documents useful in national struggles. This will be illustrated by the debate on independent nationality in the Swedish feminist press.     

Anxiety about Whiteness in Joyce Carol Oates's Novel Blonde

Since the beginning of the 1990s Joyce Carol Oates's fiction manifests increasing interest in the issues of race and ethnicity. Her novel Blonde (2000), a fictional depiction of Marilyn Monroe's life, reflects critically the construction of white self, and displays racialization as a complex dialogue between social practices and individual subject constitution. Inspired by critical whiteness studies and feminist theories of intersectionality, this article examines how Oates's novel represents effects of racialization to a white female identity and aims to decipher questions about power and discursive conceptions concerning ideas of race and gender. By giving emphasis to the concepts formation and interface in the US context and American literary tradition, the analysis shows how the construction of the protagonist's gendered and racialized identity is represented as a complex and anxiety-ridden negotiation. The representation of the protagonist's engagement with the white ideal highlights both her desires and anxieties about the idea of race. In so doing, Oates's novel elicits how racialization works both as defining and limiting to white female identity.