Consequences of Forced Residential Relocation: Early Impacts of Urban Renewal Strategies on Forced Relocatees’ Housing Opportunities and Socioeconomic Outcomes

Policymakers have actively pursued urban renewal and dispersal programs to deconcentrate poverty in urban neighborhoods. Relocation strategies lead to new housing opportunities and may encourage employment opportunities for relocated residents if resourceful contacts and job information become more easily available after the move. This study provides an innovative evaluation of the early impacts of involuntary relocation programs in the Netherlands on the housing careers, earnings and employment rates of forced relocatees. It establishes a quasi-experimental design by employing unique longitudinal individual-level population registry data from Statistics Netherlands: forced relocatees are tracked and matched to a control group consisting of similar residents that were not forced to move. A difference-in-difference design shows that forced relocatees are living in less deprived neighborhoods after the move. However, we find no conclusive evidence that this upgrade in housing leads to more socioeconomic opportunities for the forced relocatees.     

The Reputational Impact of Investor-State Disputes

To what extent do alleged violations of international commitments damage state reputation? This article explore this question with specific reference to investor-state disputes arising under the protection of international investment agreements. Its main contributions are threefold. First, building on the political institutions literature, the study places the theoretical importance of information about the rules of the game, and the actions of the participants at the center of analysis. Second, in contrast to prior empirical research, the study systematically analyzes the costs of state involvement in investment treaty arbitration by examining all known disputes. Third, the study addresses the impact of investment disputes on both foreign investment flows and state reputational rankings. We show that the consequences of investment disputes vary with the transparency of the investor-state dispute settlement process. The central implication of these findings for the broader body of literature on international institutions is that reputational mechanisms for effective treaty enforcement cannot be taken as given but instead need to be explored on the basis of a nuanced approach that addresses the pivotal issues of institutional design and information costs.     

Bureaucratic institutional design: the case of the Italian NHS

We propose a model where a regional government’s choice of the number of bureaucratic agencies operating in a region depends upon the degree of substitutability and complementarity of the bureaucratic services being demanded. We show that, if the government perceives the citizens’ demand as a demand for substitutable services, it will choose provision by two independent agencies. If the government perceives the citizens’ demand as a demand for complementary services, it will choose provision by a single consolidated agency. Exogenous shocks to the number of citizens amplify these incentives. Evidence from the Italian National Health Service (NHS) supports this hypothesis. Results show a positive effect of proxies of substitutable services on the number of regional local health authorities and a negative effect of proxies of complementary services. The major immigration amnesties, taken as shocks to the number of citizens entitled to the service, magnify these effects.     

Intervention Theatre: performance,authenticity and expert knowledge in politicians’ travel to post-/conflict spaces

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of official travel activities by politicians to post-/conflict spaces in German foreign policymaking. Starting from the observation that official travel justifications stress the value of authentic insights and unfiltered information, while journeys in practice are meticulously planned and staged, it asks what kind of knowing is possible, how actors make sense of the staged nature of field trips, and how multiple performances create and/or undermine notions of authenticity and first-hand expertise. The article shows that official on-site visits are composed of multiple conscious performances by all actors involved, but that these performances do not undermine the notions of authenticity and expertise. On the contrary, knowledge authenticity—or truth claims on the basis of authentic insights—and related expert authority are produced through travel-as-performance. The emphasis policymakers put on on-site presence and (the performance of) localized knowledge contradicts intervention literature’s generalized finding of a prioritization of technocratic over localized knowledge. The article draws on politics and performance scholarship and authenticity theories in tourism studies to make sense of a wealth of empirical material on the claims, practice and functions of German MPs’ journeys to post-/conflict spaces as part of broader political struggles over policy knowledge.     

How people organise cultural attitudes: cultural belief systems and the populist radical right

Political scientists generally agree that all individuals structure their cultural attitudes in the same unidimensional fashion. However, various populist radical right parties remarkably combine moral progressiveness with conservatism regarding immigration-related issues. This suggests that the structuring of cultural attitudes among the electorate may also be more complex than typically assumed. Applying Correlational Class Analysis to representative survey data, the study uncovers three cultural belief systems. For individuals adhering to an integrated one, all cultural attitudes are interdependent, as typically assumed. However, two alternative belief systems are also uncovered: intermediate and partitioned. In the latter, positions on one cultural attitude (e.g. ethnocentrism) are barely related to positions on others (e.g. rejecting Islam or opposing homosexuality). The existence of multiple cultural belief systems challenges the widely held assumption that all people organise their cultural attitudes similarly. Both political party agendas and individuals’ education level and religion appear key to understanding variation in belief systems.     

Socio-economic differentiation and shea globalization in western Burkina Faso: integrating gender politics and agrarian change

In this paper, we examine the way a local manifestation of the globalization process, the boom in the shea trade in western Burkina Faso, has fueled socio-economic differentiation in shea activity as part of a wider differentiation process. We refer to the gender politics and agrarian change literatures to inform both within- and across-household mechanisms of differentiation. We analyze both the mechanisms of change and the resulting inequalities. Our results reveal the interplay between multiple drivers of change, and nuance the analysis of the winners and losers of globalization of shea activity.     

Longitudinal Associations of Electronic Aggression and Victimization with Social Standing During Adolescence

Prior empirical work has documented that the dynamics of social standing can play a critical role in the perpetration and receipt of aggression during adolescence. Recently, investigators have emphasized the emergence of new, electronic modalities for aggressive acts. Our longitudinal project therefore considered electronic forms of aggression and victimization as correlates of social standing. We recruited 415 ninth grade students (53 % female) from a high school in Southern California. In the spring of two consecutive school years, participants completed peer nominations assessing their social standing, aggression, and victimization. More popular youths were concurrently more electronically aggressive and victimized than their peers. Popularity also was associated with increases in electronic aggression over time. In turn, electronic aggression was related to increases in popularity for girls and decreases for boys. We additionally found concurrent, positive associations between social acceptance and electronic forms of aggression and victimization, although these effects held only at the first time point. Among adolescent males, social acceptance also was related to increases in electronic victimization over time. Overall, our results suggest that adolescents may rely on electronic aggression to establish and maintain a privileged position in their peer hierarchy. Our results additionally highlight that popular and accepted youths, who likely possess a large, digitally-connected social network, may be at increased risk for electronic victimization.