The global rail revival

She is an analyst of urban transport and land use. She is co-author of five of the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World reports, and author of the reports Alternatives to the Automobile: Transport for Livable Cities;and Shaping Cities: The Environmental and Human Dimensions.     

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis: A New Approach to Measuring Conflict in Legislative Speeches

Comparative scholars of legislative politics continue to face the challenge of measuring a key theoretical concept: conflict at the level of legislative bills. We address this challenge with a multilingual sentiment‐based approach and show that such a measure can effectively capture different types of parliamentary conflict. We also demonstrate that an automated translation of the dictionary yields valid results and therefore greatly facilitates comparative work on legislatures. Our applications show that a sentiment approach recovers government‐opposition dynamics in various settings. The use of a simple, translatable sentiment dictionary opens up the possibility of studying legislative conflict in bill debates across languages and countries.     

Disunited in ethnicity: the racialization of Chinese Mainlanders in Hong Kong

In the current climate of increasing antagonisms and populist discontents surrounding the visible presence of mainland mobilities in postcolonial Hong Kong, there is an acute need to understand how those from Mainland China are racialized. Lowe and Tsang's article provides an examination of the campaign against Mainlanders prevalent in Hong Kong society. The emergent conflicts between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese migrants overlap with the duality of time or differing time-inflected cultural habits of Mainlanders and Hong Kongers. As Hong Kong's citizenry and Mainlanders contest the status of the former colony and claim rights over it in ways aberrant to both factions' national consciousness, discrimination increases as Mainlanders are castigated by Hong Kongers for grazing their territory with mannerisms deemed unsettling to Hong Kong's everyday notions of time and space. Hong Kongers' sense of collective identity is shored-up as they reject the People's Republic of China’s favoured concept of pan-Chinese ethnicity by constructing Mainlanders as the inverse of themselves.     

Bystander reaction to women fighting: developing a theory of intervention

This article explores accounts of bystanders to female-on-female public violence. Group interviews with participants in the night-time economy are carried out. Whereas men tend to respond to the discussion topic of female-on-female violence with laughter, this laughter reveals ambivalence and discomfort as much as amusement. Men seem to negotiate the tension between the expectation that they should intervene in emergencies and a catalogue of costs that attend intervention. Female bystanders appear to have a different set of concerns. They talk about feelings of shame at the interpersonal and the group level. Women cite the public spectacle, and the opportunity for men to demean or sexualize women, as reasons for intervention. The article concludes with some recommendations about the importance of exploring female violence in its own terms, beginning with a series of identified moral and social dilemmas incurred within possible third-party intervention.     

And the question is? Knowledge growth in welfare policy research

This study examines how federally sponsored research questions about welfare policy have evolved from 1981 to 2001, through a content analysis of Requests for Proposals (RFPs). We treat the RFP as a document that identifies what information is sought as well as what is treated as established knowledge. Results show that research questions represent a mixture of constancy and change. The greatest similarity in research questions is in the areas of employment and earnings/income, with greater variability in the areas of family formation and child outcomes. The research questions, notwithstanding their sophisticated terminology, often boil down to who the poor are, how welfare recipients can be coaxed or forced into the labor market, whether fundamental work supports such as health insurance and reliable childcare are helpful in sustaining employment, and whether welfare is implicated in pregnancy, marital behavior and multi-generational poverty. We interpret these findings in relation to concepts on research utilization.

Regulation, deregulation and public bureaucracy

Abstract. In 1982, a new Liberal-Conservative government launched a grand deregulatory campaign as part of its programme for restoring the Danish economy. After some initial success, the campaign lost momentum. The government gradually realised that it was difficult to mobilise both economic interests and public opinion for the cause of deregulation. Bureaucratic resistance and disinterest among economic interest organisations together with the erosion of political commitment to deregulation after a couple of years stopped the campaign. Still, some results were reached where least expected.