So Close,but so Far? The Davies Commission and the Contested Politics of UK Airport Expansion

Aviation expansion and the construction of a third runway at Heathrow airport is firmly back on the political agenda. Yet, the stark fact remains that a growing list of British governments has been unable to engineer a partial or temporary policy settlement in aviation. In exploring the challenges of reaching such a settlement, this article characterises the shifting and contested political and policy contexts of UK aviation. It begins by exploring the ‘wicked issue’ of aviation expansion before foregrounding how the politics of air travel is riven by competing policy frames, fragmented governance and the absence of gatekeepers. It argues that the Davies Commission and its efforts to remove aviation from the domain of partisan politics provided little more than a temporary respite for government. It thus concludes by questioning whether the May government's expansion proposals will succeed this time around, outlining how the contributions in this collection address the themes and issues of this overriding policy puzzle.     

Adolescent Agentic Orientations: Contemporaneous Family Influence,Parental Biography and Intergenerational Development

Agentic orientations developed in adolescence have been linked to better health, well-being, and achievements in the years following. This study examines longitudinal parental influences on the development of adolescent children’s agentic orientations, captured by the core constructs of mastery beliefs and generalized life expectations. Drawing on multigenerational panel data from the United States (1991–2011), the study examines contemporaneous family factors, but also how parental biographies (their own transition to adulthood) and parents’ own adolescent agentic orientations influence their adolescent children. Study adolescents were 46% male, 52% white, and 15.6 years old on average. The findings indicate that parents’ early orientations and experiences in the transition to adulthood have little effect on their children’s mastery beliefs, but that parents’ generalized life expectations (in adolescence) and having married before having the child were associated with their children’s more optimistic life expectations. Contemporaneous family income and optimistic expectations among parents-as-adolescents were somewhat substitutable as positive influences on adolescents’ optimistic life expectations. The findings contribute to our understanding of intergenerational and over-time influences on these key adolescent orientations.     

Racial animosity and political party partisanship in South Africa: the case of the African National Congress and the Black African majority

As it is in many countries, racial rhetoric is a feature of South African national government elections. The use of such rhetoric provokes the question, how much is political party support in the country driven by interracial animosities? Using the nationally representative public opinion dataset, the South African Social Attitudes Survey, this article looks at party closeness to the African National Congress (ANC) amongst the black African population. The ANC is one of the oldest and most powerful political parties on the African continent and currently dominates South Africa’s parliamentary government. Constructing four indexes of racial attitudes and behaviours, the article investigates whether partisanship with the ruling party can be predicted by racial animosity. The period under investigation is 2010–2014. Bivariate and multivariate quantitative techniques are employed to test the relationship between ANC partisanship and racial animosity. The results of this investigation show that racial enmity in the country is troublingly widespread. Public opinion analysis, however, found no correlation between racial acrimony and ANC partisanship. Other factors are driving black African identification with the country’s ruling party. The implications of these results for the study for political party support in South Africa are discussed and future avenues of research presented.     

A nexus between labour movement and labour movement: the Knights of Labor and the financial side of global labour history

The rise of global and transnational labour history has revolutionised the study of working-class movements and individuals and the global forces that shaped them. Some of the more mundane considerations of these movements, however, have so far been neglected in this rapidly growing field. One of the most important of these considerations was money, or in other words the financial affairs of transnational movements such as trade unions and political parties. This article is a call to write the financial side of global labour history. It focuses on a global working-class movement that is itself often neglected in the historical literature, the Knights of Labor, and their outposts in Britain and Ireland. It examines the history of the British and Irish Knights through the prism of their financial history, so far as we can reconstruct it from the scanty sources that are available. This article argues that their financial ties with the United States and a series of embezzlement cases became major causes of their decline and, ultimately, their dissolution. Finally, this article draws conclusions from the financial misadventures of the British and Irish Knights of Labor that are relevant to the study of other international working-class movements and to the writing of global labour history in general.     

The Impact of Natural Resources: Survey of Recent Quantitative Evidence

Abstract

The cross-country empirical evidence for the natural resource curse is ample, but unfortunately fraught with econometric difficulties. A recent wave of studies on measuring the impact of natural resource windfalls on the economy exploits novel datasets such as giant oil discoveries to identify effects of windfalls, uses natural experiments and within-country econometric analysis, and estimates local impacts. These studies offer more hope in the search of quantitative evidence.     

Sleep Disturbance and Depressive Symptoms in Adolescence: The Role of Catastrophic Worry

Depression is a common and debilitating disorder in adolescence. Sleep disturbances and depression often co-occur with sleep disturbances frequently preceding depression. The current study investigated whether catastrophic worry, a potential cognitive vulnerability, mediates the relationship between adolescent sleep disturbances and depressive symptoms, as well as whether there are gender differences in this relationship. High school students, ages 16–18, n = 1,760, 49 % girls, completed annual health surveys including reports of sleep disturbance, catastrophic worry, and depressive symptoms. Sleep disturbances predicted depressive symptoms 1-year later. Catastrophic worry partially mediated the relationship. Girls reported more sleep disturbances, depressive symptoms, and catastrophic worry relative to boys. The results, however, were similar regardless of gender. Sleep disturbances and catastrophic worry may provide school nurses, psychologists, teachers, and parents with non-gender specific early indicators of risk for depression. Several potentially important practical implications, including suggestions for intervention and prevention programs, are highlighted.     

Economic and Security Regionalism among Patrimonial Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Central Asia

The ‘new regionalism’ has spread to Central Asia; yet there has been little success in implementing most regional initiatives there. Security regionalism has had greater success than economic regionalism, even though economic initiatives would bring great benefits to the economy and population. I propose a connection between patrimonialism and regionalism. Central Asia's patrimonial leaders are driven by survival and personal enrichment, and are beholden to informal vested interests. Since economic regionalism involves liberalisation that adversely affects these actors, the result is ‘virtual’ economic regionalism at best. In the case of security regionalism, some regional organisations progress because they bolster patrimonial regimes, with negative consequences for democracy.