After Gold,What＇s Next？——Chinese Athletes in Retirement

WHEN Chinese badminton player Zhang Ning won gold for a second time in the women＇s singles at the Beijing Olympics, she knelt on the ground and cried. Tears were still running down her cheeks when she mounted the podium. No doubt this was partly because the victory was also a farewell： soon after successfully defending the Olympic championship, the 33-year-old Zhang announced her retirement, bringing her 23- year badminton career to an end.     

China＇s Gold Medal Potentia

Cui Dalin, deputy director general of General Administration of Sport in China, confirmed at a recent press conference： ＂It is estimated that a record 550 to 570 Chinese athletes will compete at the Beijing Olympics. ＂     

Comparing political systems: Establishing similarities and dissimilarities

Abstract. Comparative political analysis at the macro-level of political systems can reduce the inevitably high complexity of such comparisons by the systematic matching or contrasting of cases, depending on the particular problem. Such 'most similar systems' or 'most different systems' designs, in Przeworski & Teune's terminology, thus constitute one of the major ways out of the usual 'small N—many variables' dilemma. This paper proposes a detailed and comprehensive method to establish such similarities and dissimilarities in a systematic and at all stages transparent way. The examples chosen refer to an analysis of the conditions of survival or breakdown of democratic systems in the inter-war period in Europe.     

AID'S CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY: CURRENT PROPOSALS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS

Aid to Africa is less threatened by the current foreign policyand fiscal pressures than by a complex crisis of legitimacyregarding the enterprise. Despite official rhetoric to the contrary,most aid insiders are disappointed by the current achievementsof aid. The current malaise has resulted in a considerable fermentof thinking about how to make aid more effective. This articledescribes four sets of proposals that have been advanced. Theseinclude proposals to make aid more selective, as well as toadopt a more need-based approach, which includes proposals topromote government ownership, and to focus aid on non-governmentalactors in the private and voluntary sectors. It is argued thateach of these proposals is desirable, but that together theyare probably incompatible, certainly difficult for the donorsto implement and unlikely to address the real problems thathave plagued aid and African development these last thirty-fiveyears. The real challenge, not addressed by most current reformproposals, is to change how donors and recipients manage aid,so that it contributes to a sound development strategy. Thearticle concludes that the main impulse for reform must comefrom African countries themselves, rather than from the donorcountries.     

Decentralization in France

In France decentralization of the government was part of the socialist platform for the 1981 presidential election. The issue was immediately put on the agenda by the minister in charge of “interior and decentralization.” The law was published on March 2nd 1982. Ten years later, decentralization is considered a decisive reform toward the modernization of the state. Local governments are engaged in the process of learning the politics of autonomy. But the law maintained the prefet. Therefore the institutional pattern establishes two authorities in charge of the same territory at the level of “département” and “région.” It could be said that the goal of the 1982 reform was to authorize the expression of a local demand while the equality and qualify of public services would be preserved, thanks to deconcentration of the national apparatus. This scheme implies dramatic changes both in the local political system and in the national bureaucracy. The latest is reluctant to assess the evolution. In 1994 public administration in France is in transition. Its centralized structure and rationale has offen led to strategies directed toward the conservation of the old habits and privileges. The role of the prefect is still unsettled. Perhaps more important, serious institutional limits have been imposed on the process of change.     

Aspirations,Expectations and Delinquency: The Moderating Effect of Impulse Control

Although prior research finds a robust link between delinquent behavior and expectations, or an adolescent’s perceived likelihood of obtaining one’s future goals, fewer studies have evaluated aspirations, or the perceived importance of achieving one’s goals. In addition, few studies consider how individual traits such as impulsivity affect the degree to which expectations and aspirations motivate or deter delinquent behavior. We contribute to this body of research by evaluating the independent effects of expectations and aspirations, and the aspiration-expectation gap (i.e., strain) on delinquent behavior during the year following an adolescent’s first arrest using a large (N?=?1117), racially/ethnically diverse sample of male adolescents (46.55% Latino, 35.81% Black, 14.95% White, and 2.69% Other race). In addition, we considered how impulse control interacts with expectations, aspirations, and strain to motivate behavior. Our results indicated that both aspirations, expectations and strain uniquely influence criminal behavior. Importantly, aspirations interacted with impulse control, such that aspirations affected delinquency only among youth with higher impulse control. Our findings suggest that aspirations may only influence behavior if youth also have the psychosocial capabilities to consider their future aspirations when behaving in the present.     

Individual in Context: The Role of Impulse Control on the Association between the Home,School, and Neighborhood Developmental Contexts and Adolescent Delinquency

Social ecological theories and decades of supporting research suggest that contexts exert a powerful influence on adolescent delinquency. Individual traits, such as impulse control, also pose a developmental disadvantage to adolescents through increasing risk of delinquency. However, such individual differences may also predispose some youth to struggle more in adverse environments, but also to excel in enriched environments. Despite the prominence of impulse control in both developmental and criminological literatures, researchers are only beginning to consider impulse control as an individual characteristic that may affect developmental outcomes in response to environmental input. Using a racially diverse (Latino 46?%; Black 37?%; White 15?%; other race 2?%) sample of 1,216 first-time, male, juvenile offenders from the longitudinal Crossroads Study, this study examined key interactions between baseline impulse control and the home, school, and neighborhood contexts in relation to delinquency within the following 6 months. The results indicated that even after accounting for prior delinquency, youth in more negative home, school, and neighborhood contexts engaged in the same amount of delinquency in the following 6 months regardless of their level of impulse control. However, the effects of positive home, school, and neighborhood contexts on delinquency were stronger for youth with moderate or high impulse control and minimally affected youth with low impulse control. The findings suggest two risk factors for delinquency: low impulse control as a dispositional vulnerability that operates independently of developmental context, and a second that results from a contextual vulnerability.     

Maturity of judgment in adolescence: Psychosocial factors in adolescent decision making

To date, analyses of differences between adolescents' and adults' judgment have emphasized age differences in cognitive factors presumed to affect decision making. In contrast, this article examines research and theory on threepsychosocial aspects of maturity of judgment: responsibility, temperance, and perspective. For several psychosocial dimensions of maturity that are likely to affect judgment, the existing pvidence, while indirect and imperfect, indicates that the greatest differences are found in comparisons between early adolescents versus middle and late adolescents. Developmental research on maturity that focuses specifically on mid-and late adolescence, that simultaneously examines both cognitive and noncognitive factors, and that investigates the relation between these factors and the ability to make good decisions is greatly needed.