Class Dealignment in Britain Revisited

Recent tranformations in voting patterns have made Britain one of the best known examples of electoral dealignment in Western Europe. But recently Heath, Jowell and Curtice have defended older accounts of class voting by questioning whether there has been any change at all in relative class voting, as measured by a particular index, the odds ratio. This article first outlines the innovative elements in Heath el al.’s argument. Second, it demonstrates that the odds ratio is a highly volatile and hard‐to‐interpret statistic. Third, it shows that other elements of Heath el al.’s empirical analysis do not substantiate their case. Fourth, it disputes the strategy of focusing only upon ‘relative class voting’, and argues that the growth of third‐party voting is a symptom of class dealignment, rather than a factor which must be discounted in advance before assessing trends in class voting.     

Family Unification Program: Housing Services for Homeless Child Welfare–Involved Families

The Family Unification Program—a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development initiative to facilitate interagency collaboration between the child welfare and public housing service systems—aims to stabilize families at risk for parent–child separation by addressing housing needs. Findings from a randomized controlled trial suggest that families referred to the program experienced lower risk for homelessness and out-of-home placement compared with child welfare services as usual. The findings suggest that housing services offer an effective alternative to foster care.     

Debt,Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: from Moody’s macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinance mashonisas

The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the ‘scale jumping’ required from South Africa’s national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interest rates, in turn leading to unpayable levels of consumer debt, and at a time when microfinance is suddenly discredited as a development strategy. Macro- and micro-financial problems fused in the course of the Marikana Massacre of August 2012, reflecting the local and global powers of the Moody’s rating agency and ‘mashonisa’ loan sharks. The over-indebted Marikana mineworkers, who led a strike which catalysed many wildcat strikes elsewhere, confronted the local crisis by displacing it into the national economy. This only heightened the contradictions that Moody’s punished with its September 2012 credit-rating downgrade. Without a genuine ‘debt relief’ solution at both scales, society will continue to unravel, as financialisation reaches its limits within one of the world’s most extreme cases of uneven and combined development.     

Participatory Development and Reconstruction: a literature review

In the past decade researchers and development experts have been preoccupied by participatory development and reconstruction. Despite criticisms of its potential, it has been at the centre of development practices. This review of both published and unpublished literature aims to assess the importance of participatory development and reconstruction, especially its positive and negative characteristics. The paper shows that, despite its potentially transformative role, its main drawback rests in the power relations between elites and non-elites and that creating comprehensible ways through which non-elites can deal with these relations is one issue that needs additional research. Other issues that need more research are related to how to sustain the participatory development and reconstruction outcomes by increasing local ownership, and how to better involve existing structures and institutions (both state and non-state actors) in development and reconstruction efforts for poverty alleviation.     

Oiling the Machinery: The Lord Chancellor's Office and the County Court Bench, 1927–44

This article makes extensive use of recently opened documents in the PRO to explore the appointment and management of the county court judiciary between the wars, with particular emphasis on the role of the permanent officials in the Lord Chancellor's Office. It concludes that during this period the selection process, having already been largely de-politicised, became bureaucratised, ensuring the officials a dominant role. As a result the county bench became more homogeneous. The officials are also shown to have engaged in more systematic and ambitious attempts to manipulate vacancies so as to fit judges to districts both in terms of aptitude and other attributes.     

Party,State, and Socialism in Guinea-Bissau

Suicide is generally regarded as an anti-social behavior. It is, perhaps, for this reason that sociologists and psychologists, among other experts, have been interested in studying the incidence of suicide in many societies. Most modern theories on suicide, however, do not emphasize the idea of “heroic suicide.” Epitomizing this “genre” of suicide are the high profile, politically motivated suicides in early colonial Ibadan examined here. This article suggests that the key to understanding these suicide cases is to be found not only in these people’s multilayered pasts — the general Yoruba past and Ibadan’s nineteenth-century military heritage — but also in their conception of honor and in their social norms. The ideals of honor thus carried over into the twentieth century were so strong that they survived the first three decades of colonial rule despite the intrigue-laced nature of Ibadan chieftaincy politics and the official interference of the colonial authorities. This article concludes that politically motivated suicide, though self destructive was actually meant to serve an honorable purpose such that those involved became heroes even in death. There is therefore the need for suicide theorists to highlight exceptions like these.     

Small-Business Participation in the Informal Sector of an Emerging Economy

We investigate the characteristics of the owners of small businesses that participate in the informal sector of an emerging economy and their perception of the risk of detection by tax authorities while doing so. Data are gathered from a survey covering 1027 small businesses in Trinidad and Tobago. Results suggest that small business owners are motivated to participate in the informal sector when they believe that the risk of detection by the tax authorities is low and that government regulations are burdensome, but there is no evidence that the tax rate itself is an issue. Their perception of the risk of detection by the tax authority is determined largely by the time they spend and the income they earn in the formal sector.