The practice of birth control and historical fertility change: Introduction

This introduction discusses the contributions in the special issue. The articles present results concerning the practice of birth control, mainly at the family level. They represent different analytical approaches where both interviews, letters, surveys and micro-level data have been used. The European fertility decline has made a fundamental change to the societies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Birth control spreads rapidly. Research in this field requires both qualitative and quantitative studies, where both approaches contribute to different perspectives on the transition. The articles in the issue discuss several themes in relation to birth control, of which three are developed in the introduction. These are gender and fertility, gender and health and finally how to control fertility. The presented results demonstrate the importance of including gender in the analyses of the fertility decline. A gender perspective makes it natural to consider historical persons as agents. It is also necessary to acknowledge that we should not treat the married couple as a single unit. They may have conflicting interests, something that several of the articles illustrate. One aspect we would like to emphasize is how health problems can influence the will to have more children and this affects birth control. This is a theme that in different forms is taken up by several of the authors. Finally, families practiced birth control with several different methods that also changed throughout the married years, thus demonstrating a flexibility that is often overlooked in conventional methods for the analysis of fertility.     

NPM Reforms and Professionals in Health and Higher Education in Portugal

The aim of this article is to analyze comparatively how academics, physicians, and nurses positioned themselves in relation to the reconfiguration of power structures and decisional processes, under New Public Management influence, in the hospitals, and higher education institutions. The empirical data are gathered from a survey applied to the three professional groups. Quantitative results show that the three groups have similar positions concerning power concentration at institutions’ top governance. However, relevant differences emerge in their views concerning the organization and control of the social division of work and also of their professional practices.     

Sexual Offences in Vanuatu under the Light of Custom and Law: “An Avenue for Restorative Justice”

This paper will focus on the Republic of Vanuatu’s society and customs relevant to this topic. I will consider the laws made by the legislature to deal with sexual offences in Vanuatu and how they are being implemented or enforced. I will also discuss the different provisions under the law whereby accused persons have an option to actually compensate the victim of the offence and how it is being used in Vanuatu in relation to sexual offences. This paper will also look at how Vanuatu’s culture influences the prosecution or the sentencing of sexual offences or dealing with such crimes in the first place. This will reveal whether Vanuatu’s customary approaches to sexual offences actually support the state’s laws to punish such offenders and if a more fair and just process is needed where the voices of the offender as well as the victim are heard. Custom usually does not allow the victim to speak, and the victim’s parents and the elders of the community decide how the offender should be dealt with. Neither the formal court process nor the customary reconciliation process seem to take into account the wishes and interests of the victim and the offender. The flaws within the legal system and customary laws in addressing victims’ and offenders’ issues will be examined and an alternative process of restorative justice will be discussed.     

Systemic Explanations, Divergent Outcomes: The Politics of FinancialLiberalization in France and Spain

This article challenges the adequacy of prevalent market-driven models of regulatory change, and more specifically, the stipulation that international market integration will lead governments undertaking financial liberalization in formerly interventionist states to carry out adequate market reforms. It does so through an analysis of financial regulation in two European countries: France and Spain. The article offers an integrated historical perspective on regulatory change which suggests that the market-driven convergence thesis does not adequately capture the political dynamic behind financial interventionism and liberalization in the two countries. The introduction of dirigisme and its later-day abandonment were driven less by the "state vs. market” dynamics emphasized in much of the literature than by macroeconomic policy choices on the part of postwar elites. Focusing on similarities and differences in the timing and pattern of reform, the article argues that dirigisme was abandoned in France and Spain not because of changing sectoral pressures or the lack of viability of external controls, but because it raised the political costs of monetary austerity for elected authorities. This link between regulatory choices and the politics of macroeconomic adjustment has implications that are likely to be critical in any country undergoing financial liberalization.     

The Italian Democratic Party from Merger to Personalism

Abstract

The Partito Democratico (PD) was born as an original Merger Party on the cusp of the economic crisis in October 2007. The party’s genesis and formative years were critical to the party’s failure to institutionalise around a new common ideology or vision, as a result of the persistence of two party souls which could not find unity. Rather than a genuinely ‘new’ reformist party, the PD resembled an organisational vehicle through which the two former parties could continue their struggle. This weakened the organisational nature of the PD and made it a candidate for takeover by a dominant, personal leader such as Matteo Renzi. He set about establishing a personal party whose existence has in many ways confirmed the failure, if not exhaustion, of the PD’s mission to become the reformist party of the majority.     

Learning in practice for becoming a professional forensic expert

The study explores the professional development of future forensic experts. Specifically, it investigates how the forensic expert trainees learn through the internal training program at the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science with a focus on the supervision at work. The findings are drawn from an ethnographical study where five trainees and their supervisors have been observed and interviewed. By drawing on a socio cultural perspective on learning, the results show that supervision is crucial for professional development. Two types of activities and relations define how supervision is implemented. There is a "transitional movement" in how supervision is staged depending on the trainees' gradual changes in participation in the work practice and increased experience. Forensic experts need skills and know-how to make wise and impartial judgments, i.e. a kind of tacit professional practical knowledge, as well as the skill to communicate with other professionals. However, the development of a professional language is somewhat unspoken or planned. Becoming a forensic expert is a learning process in practice where supervision plays a decisive role in maintaining the professional knowledge in the judicial system. Therefore, supervision for supervising might be a valuable support for supervisors.     

La presse ‘constitutionnelle’ pendant la révolution napolitaine de 1820–1821

SUMMARY

The two pioneers in introducing direct democratic instruments in modern Europe were France and Switzerland from the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the First World War different kinds of referendums and popular initiatives were also adopted by other countries. The Weimar Republic and the Republic of Estonia had the most noteworthy practice with direct democracy. This article examines the regulation and practice of popular rights in these two countries focusing on their function in the political system and on the relation of direct democracy and representative state organs. It seeks an answer to the question of how Parliaments were challenged by popular initiatives and how representative power reacted to direct democratic events.     

The Non-Random Nature of Terrorism: An Exploration of Where and How Global Trends of Terrorism Have Developed Over 40 Years

We examined the geographic concentration and persistence of terrorism using the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The GTD logs all terrorist incidents worldwide using open-source media, and, for 1970–2013, includes over 125,000 incidents from over 200 countries and territories. We examined regional and country-level data; different terrorism forms, severity levels, and timeframes (entire period, five-year periods, and annual); and multiple definitions of “elevated” terrorism. The findings reveal that terrorism is concentrated geographically and temporally. Most countries experience peace or very low levels of terrorism; only a few experience substantial outbreaks; very few experience prolonged terrorism; and even fewer, prolonged severe terrorism.     

International Capital Mobility and Domestic Institutions:Corporate Finance and Governance in Four European Cases

This article considers the impact of international capital mobility on thecharacter of corporate finance and corporate governance in four European countries (Germany, France, Spain, and Italy). We take issue with the widespread view that the growth of international financial markets and the lifting of capital controls will in themselves produce convergence in national systems of corporate finance and governance. Although we find evidence of convergence in specific aspects of financial regulation (e.g., the abandonment of selective credit regulation and the dismantling of barriers to universal banking), these regulatory changes have not produced any clear convergence toward either the Anglo-Saxon model of corporate finance and governance predicted in much of the literature or the alternative German bank-based model. The reasons for this, we suggest, have much to do with the way in which the politics of financialreform are likely to differ from those postulated in market-driven models of regulatory change and the fact that countries are susceptible to international pressures in different ways.