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.     

Lessons from the Asian Economic Crisis: A View from South Korea

Ha and Kim present a new reading of the East Asian crisis, focusing particularly on South Korea's experience. They argue that previous studies have ignored the political environment that paved the way for such an event. Neoliberal economists, according to the authors, were so enamoured with the example of the 'Asian tigers' and the ideal of unregulated markets that they were blind to the many warnings of an ensuing disaster. Economic systems can thus no longer rest on such a free-market capitalist ideal where no one controls the global economy, but must instead have a secure political base. As the financial crisis has shown, such international anarchy must be checked by a new set of international institutions. While the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) organisation did attempt to handle the crisis, it, along with Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), proved unable to do so. East Asia's leaders and theorists have been presented with the challenge of reforming this region's institutions and political orders in order to avoid another crisis, complete with all its social and political ramifications.