‘Why do we need all this?’ A call against genetic engineering and reproductive technology

The central argument of this article is that the discussion on the new reproduction technology should not start with these technologies as such and their possible benefits and abuses but with the basic question whether we need this technology at all, whether the fundamental problems of women in capitalist-patriarchal societies can be solved by technology. According to the author, genetic engineering and reproductive technology are not only not capable of solving any of these questions, they are destructive to a human relation to our bodies, nature, other peoples. Exploitative and oppressive relations cannot be overcome by more sophisticated technology-even if it were in the hands of women—but only by a revolutionizing of these relations.     

Federal laboratory missions,products, and competitiveness

A number of initiatives over the past decade have tried to increase the federal laboratory system's impact on U.S. competitiveness, largely based on assumptions that the system is a reservoir of readily available technology appropriate to industry's competitive needs. However, there is a virtual absence of empirical data on the nature of research and development in the national laboratory system and the character of its R&D “products.” This paper reviews the limited data on R&D in the national laboratory system available from the General Accounting Office, the National Science Foundation, and the National Comparative Research and Development Project. The findings suggest that technologies available within the system are likely to emerge from the most strongly mission-oriented R&D, and are therefore the least likely to spin off and diffuse throughout the industrial base. Once the hardware needs of the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are excluded, most of the system's R&D output is fundamental knowledge, which flows through public domain literature and requires substantial additional processing to become commercial products. The implications are (1) there is no reason to believe the current federal laboratory system can directly enhance U.S. competitiveness; (2) in order for labs to contribute to competitiveness, they must have more explicit missions to do so; and (3) policy expectations of commercial impacts are inconsistent with policy requirements that labs conduct precommercial basic and applied research.     

Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market

Why do some parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork‐ridden political systems? This article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others. We explain such differences by focusing on political parties' access to resources (supply side) and voters' dependence on fiscal largesse (demand side). We show how these differences affect the patron's choice of public sector wages and employment. We use subnational level data to show different electoral returns from patronage for the two major political coalitions in Argentina—Peronism and the UCR‐Alianza—and their effect on preferences over public sector wages and employment.     

Una aproximació bourdieuana a tres plataformes de difusió de poesia a Mallorca (1974–1990)

Abstract

En aquest article em propòs analitzar tres plataformes de difusió de poesia sorgides en el context mallorquí dels anys 70, 80, i 90, aprofitant l’aportació del sociòleg francès Pierre Bourdieu al voltant de la teoria del camp literari. La pretensió és establir un diàleg amb aquesta proposta teòrica i il·lustrar-la amb casos com el dels quaderns de poesia Domini Fosc (1974–1975), la revista L’Ombra Vessada (1979–1981), i les Edicions Atàviques (1985–1990), tenint en compte, per una banda, que els productes literaris que examinaré s’inscriuen en una línia experimentalista i, per l’altra, que la literatura catalana és institucionalment deficitària – a diferència de la francesa, en la qual es basa Bourdieu.     

Family Shelter Entry and Re-entry During the Recession in Hennepin County: The Role of Race,Residential Location,and Family Earnings

This article examines the extent to which shelter entry and re-entry increased during the Great Recession (December 2007–December 2009) in Hennepin County, Minnesota. Among successive cohorts of families entering the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Black families were 23% more likely to enter shelter if they were in the 2008–2009 cohort and 28% more likely to enter shelter if they were in the 2010 cohort than if they entered SNAP in 2004–2005. In addition, families who left shelter in 2009 were 39% more likely and families leaving shelter in 2010 were 63% more likely to re-enter shelter than those leaving shelter in 2004–2006. Only a small part of the increases in shelter entry and shelter re-entry was explained by reductions in family earnings. This suggests that the increases in shelter entry and re-entry may have been caused by other factors, such as the decline in the availability of affordable housing.     

Does corruption suppress voter turnout?*

This paper investigates to what extent voters’ perceptions of political corruption affect turnout. In previous research, two opposing views are put forward with regards to the relationship between corruption and turnout. On the one hand, corruption increases turnout because voters either are bought off to participate or because they are mobilized on clean government issues. On the other hand, corruption decreases turnout because presence of corruption corrodes the political system which leads to general cynicism, distrust and voter apathy. In this paper, we contribute to the existing research by adopting a multi-level approach to the relationship between corruption and turnout. We test the hypothesis that voters’ perceptions of corruption dampens turnout but that the effect is conditional upon the corruption context. We test our hypothesis by combining individual-level data and country-level data from 26 countries from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and country-level data from the Quality of Government Data Set. The findings show that perceiving corruption negatively affects turnout, but only in countries with low to medium levels of system corruption.