Parental involvement in adolescent romantic relationships: patterns and correlates

This study examined dimensions of mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in adolescents’ romantic relationships when offspring were age 17. Using cluster analysis, parents from 105 White, working and middle class families were classified as positively involved, negatively involved, or autonomy-oriented with respect to their adolescents’ romantic relationships. Patterns of parental involvement were generally not associated with parent–offspring relationship quality at about adolescent age 13, but earlier parent–offspring relationship quality moderated the associations between parental involvement and adolescent romantic experiences at about age 18. Positive parent–offspring relationship quality buffered the effects of negative parental involvement, whereas poorer parent–offspring relationship quality was a more adaptive context for adolescents of autonomy-oriented parents. Discussion focuses on the importance of parenting practices in adolescent romantic relationships and the emotional climate of parent–offspring relationships as a developmental context for those practices.

Gender,Culture and the Law: Approaches to ‘Honour Crimes’ in the UK

This article examines the debate on whether to analyse ‘honour crimes’ as gender-based violence, or as cultural tradition, and the effects of either stance on protection from and prevention of these crimes. In particular, the article argues that the categorisation of honour-related violence as primarily cultural ignores its position within the wider spectrum of gender violence, and may result in a number of unfortunate side-effects, including lesser protection of the rights of women within minority communities, and the stigmatisation of those communities. At the same time it is problematic to completely dismiss any cultural aspects of violence against women, and a nuanced approach is required which carefully balances the benefits and detriments of taking cultural factors into account. The article examines the issues within the context of the legal response to cases involving honour-related violence, arguing that although the judiciary has in a number of cases inclined towards viewing ‘honour’ as primarily cultural rather than patriarchal, in some cases they have begun to take a more gender-based or ‘mature multiculturalism’ approach.

Institutions and Economic Performance: The Use and Abuse of Culture in New Institutional Economics

Important research programs within New Institutional Economics advance culturalist arguments to explain failures of economic development. Focusing on the work of Douglass C. North and Avner Greif, this article argues that such arguments rely on an essentialist conception of culture that is both historically inaccurate and analytically misleading. Greif’s work in particular rests on a selective use of empirical data that ultimately distorts the deductive models that are at the core of his work. As a result, both scholars use culture to account for outcomes that are more adequately explained as the product of social conflict and political struggles—struggles in which culture plays a far more contingent and destabilizing role than the one they attribute to it. What is needed, I argue, is to link arguments about the persistence of inefficient institutions with a sociologically informed conception of culture as an ensemble of resources that enhance rather than constrain the scope of individual agency. To come to terms with the effects of culture on institutional formation and change it is necessary to replace the essentialism articulated by North and Greif with a strategic-instrumentalist view in which culture is compatible with a wide spectrum of economic behaviors, individual actions, and thus institutional trajectories.

Empowerment,Deliberative Development,and Local-Level Politics in Indonesia: Participatory Projects as a Source of Countervailing Power

The salience of the concept of “empowerment” has been deductively claimed more often than carefully defined or inductively assessed by development scholars and practitioners alike. We use evidence from a mixed methods examination of the Kecamatan (subdistrict) Development Project (KDP) in rural Indonesia, which we define here as development interventions that build marginalized groups’ capacity to engage local-level governing elites using routines of deliberative contestation. “Deliberative contestation” refers to marginalized groups’ practice of exercising associational autonomy in public forums using fairness-based arguments that challenge governing elites’ monopoly over public resource allocation decisions. Deliberative development interventions such as KDP possess a comparative advantage in building the capacity to engage because they actively provide open decision-making spaces, resources for argumentation (such as facilitators), and incentives to participate. They also promote peaceful resolutions to the conflicts they inevitably spark. In the KDP conflicts we analyze, marginalized groups used deliberative contestation to moderately but consistently shift local-level power relations in contexts with both low and high preexisting capacities for managing conflict. By contrast, marginalized groups in non-KDP development conflicts from comparable villages used “mobilizational contestation” to generate comparatively erratic shifts in power relations, shifts that depended greatly on the preexisting capacity for managing conflict.

Institutions and Development in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis

We review the theoretical literature on the concept of institutions and its relationship to national development, propose a definition of the concept, and advance six hypotheses about institutional adequacy and contributions to national development. We then present results of a comparative empirical study of existing institutions in three Latin American countries and examine their organizational similarities and differences. Employing the qualitative comparative method (QCA) proposed by Ragin, we then test the six hypotheses. Results converge in showing the importance of meritocracy, immunity to corruption, absence of “islands of power,” and proactivity in producing effective institutions. Findings strongly support Peter Evans’ theory of developmental apparatuses.

Life and death

Advances in science are altering what it means to be human. So why aren't the candidates talking about it?     

The More Assertive and Pragmatic New Energy Policy in Putin’s Russia: Security Implications for Northeast Asia

The article examines Russia’s New Energy Policy (NEP) and its impact on Northeast Asian security and the development of the Russian Far East. In contrast to analyses highlighting competition between China and Japan for Russian resources, to the contrary it is argued here that greater cooperation among consumer states in Northeast Asia would be beneficial for Russia. Although the NEP has resulted in changes in the composition of foreign investors in Russian energy projects, the author suggests that Moscow is interested in multinational cooperation in the energy sector because it would help diversify the regional energy market and contribute to the development of the Russian Far East and eastern Siberia.