"We Have A Consensus": Explaining Political Support for Market Reforms in Latin America

By the 1990s, to the astonishment of many ob0servers, most Latin American countries had reformed their systems of national economic governance along market lines. Many analysts of this shift have assumed that it circumvented normal political processes, presuming that such reforms could not be popular. Explanations emphasizing economic crisis, external assistance, and politically insulated executives illustrate this approach. Through a qualitative investigation of the reform process in the region's four most industrialized countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, this study argues, to the contrary, that reforming governments found or created both elite and mass political support for their policies.     

Sexual problems found in users of a student mental health clinic

The authors were interested in discovering the spectrum and prevalence of sexual problems among young adults. With this goal in mind, they devised a Sexual Problems Check List as a comprehensive instrument utilizable by both clinicians and researchers. The Sexual Problems Check List was derived by reviewing therapists' treatment summaries and 146 recent answers to applications written by patients themselves as the first step in applying for treatment at a university mental health clinic. Data were then obtained from 52 subsequent student mental health clinic patients; such patients were selected as the sample because they were late adolescents and young adults thought likely to exhibit a broad range of clinically significant probelms. General patterns of concerns were noted which indicated that the sexual revolution has not been as liberating as the respondents were led to believe.Received his M. D. from Yale University School of Medicine in 1963. Psychiatric Residency at Yale, 1964–1967. Main interests include psychiatry residency training, psychoanalytic study of peotry, student mental health.Receved his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1971. Psychiatric Residency at University of Chicago, 1972–1975. Main interests include hospital psychiatry and group treatment for rheumatoid arthritis.Received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1968. Main interests include urban problems, socialization, and deviance.     

The Role of Protective Factors in Supporting the Academic Achievement of Poor African American Students During the Middle School Transition

In this study of 62 African American families living in poverty, we examined the main and interactive effects of psychological, family, and school factors on students' grade point average across the middle school transition. Both parent interviews and student surveys were collected, resulting in three major findings. First, students experienced a significant decline in grade point average across the transition from elementary to middle school. Second, students who felt more academically efficacious had higher grade point averages across the transition than did their peers. Third, significant interactions were found between family and school factors. These results suggest that rather than focusing exclusively on either parental involvement or the school environment, the combination of both family and school factors may be most effective in supporting the academic achievement of poor African American students during the transition to middle level schools.     

Unequal Pay: The Role of Gender

Pay disparities between men and women persist in the U.S. workforce despite comparable pay legislation, advocacy, and social change. This article discusses theories of gender pay disparities, such as the glass ceiling, position segregation, agency segregation, and human capital. Using an online national survey, 1,600 responses were collected for four groups of public procurement professionals. The gender wage gap ranged from $5,035 to $9,577. Multiple regression of the data show that gender continues to play a major role in predicting the salaries of public officials in similar positions. Gender and human capital variables predicted between 36.5 percent and 53.9 percent of the variance in pay.     

Analyzing the turnout-competition link with aggregate cross-sectional data

Numerous papers by Public Choice oriented scholars and others have sought to test the hypothesis inspired by Downs (1957) that, ceteris paribus, turnout should be higher when elections are close. Most look in cross-sectional terms at variations in turnout at the constituency level for elections of a given type. By and large the results have been disappointing (see, e.g., Foster, 1984). We are skeptical of these weak findings and argue that a complete portrait of the turnout-competition link requires us to examine that link for at least three different types of turnout (turnout among potential eligibles, turnout among registrants, and turnout for a given office relative to other offices such as top of the ticket), and to take into account longitudinal changes in turnout. For recent off-year elections to the U.S. Senate and also for off-year elections to the U.S. House of Representatives in states where there was no gubernatorial or senatorial contest on the ballot, we find strong evidence for higher turnout among eligibles in close contests. For these elections to the U.S. Senate we also find evidence for an ecological effect that leads to turnout being maximized at values of competition other than 50–50. Moreover, when we look at turnout for office relative to top of the ticket voting in the California Assembly and the U.S. Senate in presidential years, we again find some evidence for an ecological effect in which turnout is maximized at a value of Republican vote share above 50 percent and find further strong evidence for a clear link between competition and turnout for office among those at the polls.     

Personnel practices in careers of women at the top in government and business in Nicaragua and Costa Rica

This article, which is the first empirical study of upper-level female managers in Central America, extends the exploration of similarities and differences between public and private sectors in human resource management to the context of developing countries. A comparison of work hours, recruitment and selection practices, mentoring, political pressure, gender discrimination and sexual harassment, reported by female managers in public and private organizations in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, yielded no sector-based differences and few country-based differences. We conclude, therefore, that the public sector is not a more supportive or more fair employer for women in management than the private sector in these two countries, contrary to the assumption in the women-in-management literature that the public sector is a more hospitable environment. Improvements in human resources practices are appropriate in both sectors.     

Competing paradigms in policy discourse: The case of international human rights

This article analyzes the different paradigms of human rights policy discourse that characterize non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments. Focusing on Canadian-based human rights NGOs and the Canadian government, it uses a five-fold classification scheme to make sense of these competing paradigms of discourse: (1) process: how actors define themselves, and how they define their roles within the international human rights machinery; (2) objectives: perceptions of the purpose of the international human rights system and goals to be pursued therein; (3) scope: the breadth of issue definition and consequent action; (4) evidence: the standards whereby empirical claims are filtered, constructed and judged; and (5) action strategies: the enduring patterns of practical action founded upon the preceding categories. The article shows that despite shared objectives and a common commitment to human rights, NGO and government discourses differ sharply and yield markedly different action strategies. Progress in international human rights will continue to depend on NGO-government collaboration, however, and the article ends with some observations on how these differences in discourse might be addressed.