Loyalty or Competence: Political Use of Performance Information and Negativity Bias

This article explores how political principals weigh loyalty and competence in public personnel decisions. Exploiting the abrupt shift in political leadership following the impeachment of President Park Geun‐hye of Korea, the authors examine how the newly elected president made the decision to retain or dismiss 118 agency heads appointed by the previous administration. The evidence shows the importance of loyalty in managerial survival: those who had a political patronage relationship with the ousted president were less likely to survive in the new administration. However, the authors also demonstrate the relevance of competence, as measured by the outcomes of agency performance evaluation. Further, the article shows the existence of negativity bias: the punishment for low performance is greater than the reward for high performance. Finally, the authors provide support for the idea that political principals reward loyalists, but only if they show acceptable levels of competence.     

Direct Democracy and Women's Political Engagement

What are the conditions that promote gender equality in political participation? In this article, I propose that the presence of direct democracy expands gender equality in political participation by signaling the system's openness to women's voice, confirming their political competency, and highlighting their stake in political decisions. To test this argument, I leverage a quasi‐experiment in Sweden in the aftermath of the introduction of universal suffrage, where the type of municipal political institutions was determined by a population threshold. My findings lend strong support to the effect of direct democracy on the political inclusion of women. I find that the gender gap in electoral participation was smaller in municipalities using direct democracy than in similarly sized municipalities that only had representative institutions.     

Self-control,Mental Health Problems,and Family Functioning in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: Between-person Differences and Within-person Effects

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Adolescents’ self-control develops in the context of mental health and family functioning, but it is unclear how the interplay of self-control, mental...     

Breastfeeding Duration and Reported Child Maltreatment in a Population-based Alaskan Birth Cohort

Journal of Family Violence - Research suggests that breastfeeding may reduce child maltreatment risk. Alaska has high rates of both breastfeeding initiation and maltreatment reports to Child...     

Family Environment,Heritage Language Profiles,and Socioemotional Well-being of Mexican-origin Adolescents with First Generation Immigrant Parents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Although Mexican-origin youth with first-generation immigrant parents are relatively good at retaining their heritage language of Spanish, limited research has...     

A note on the non-maximality of the optimal fines when the apprehension probability depends on the offense rate

This paper reconsiders the problem of optimal law enforcement when the apprehension probability depends on the offense rate as well as policing expenditures. A natural consequence of such an apprehension probability is the possible multiplicity of the equilibrium due to strategic complementarity, and the actual offense rate is realized by the self-fulfilling nature of the offense rate. If people believe that lowering the fine will lead to a lower offense rate, each individual will be less inclined to commit an illegal activity due to their expectation of a higher apprehension probability. Thus, the maximal fine is not socially optimal in this case.     

Employment versus empowerment: A case study of the nature of women's work in Ecuador

This research re‐evaluates the female marginalisation thesis through an examination of the changing nature of work in Latin America and of women's incorporation into paid employment. We combine labour market segementation theory, which explains the emergence of low level occupations in terms of capitalist restructuring, with feminist theory, which explains why women become concentrated in inferior positions. We operationalise this reconceptualisation through an empirical analysis of women's and men's relative occupational position across economic sectors and through time in Ecuador. A key finding is that women's and men's occupations are differentiated in terms of control over economic resources and control over the labour process and that this worsens over time.