Predictors of the quality of the home environment that adolescent mothers provide for their school-aged children

The primary question addressed in this study is, What factors distinguish between adolescent mothers with school-aged children who are providing relatively supportive home environments for their children, and their peers who are providing less supportive care? Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth merged mother- child data set were used to address this question. Variables from four major categories were useful in identifying mothers who were at greatest risk for providing less supportive environments: (1) characteristics of the mother, (2) characteristics of the family of origin, (3) current SES level, and (4) the composition of the mother's household.     

Die Alpenkonvention – Inhalt und Konsequenzen für das nationale Umweltrecht

Bereits seit 1991 existiert das übereinkommen zum Schutz der Alpen (Alpenkonvention, AK). Allerdings sind erst Ende 2002 die acht Durchführungsprotokolle zur AK und ein Zusatzprotokoll über die Streitbeilegung in Kraft getreten, weil drei Vertragsstaaten, darunter Deutschland, diese ratifiziert haben. In der Rahmenkonvention verpflichten sich die Vertragsparteien, „unter Beachtung des Vorsorge-, des Verursacher- und des Kooperationsprinzips eine ganzheitliche Politik zur Erhaltung und zum Schutz der Alpen unter ausgewogener Berücksichtigung der Interessen aller Alpenstaaten, ihrer alpinen Regionen sowie der Europ?ischen Union unter umsichtiger und nachhaltiger Nutzung der Ressourcen“ sicherzustellen (Art. 2 Abs. 1 AK). Nun geht es darum, die AK und ihre Protokolle umzusetzen, d.h. auf der Ebene des V?lkerrechts, aber auch auf nationaler Ebene durch Anpassung der nationalen Rechtsvorschriften sowie durch Anwendung und Auslegung der Konvention seitens der nationalen Beh?rden und Gerichte zu verwirklichen. Der nachfolgende Beitrag liefert einen überblick über Inhalt und Bedeutung der AK und ihrer Protokolle, ordnet die Konvention in das Umweltv?lkerrecht ein und befasst sich mit den Konsequenzen für das innerstaatliche Recht.     

Opposites Do Not Attract: The Impact of Domestic Institutions, Power, and Prior Commitments on Alignment Choices

States that choose to involve themselves in an ongoing dispute do so by choosing to align with or against one of the original disputants. What factors lead states to prefer to help one side over the other? We consider the effect of the disputants' power, political and economic institutional similarities between each disputant and the aligning state, and formal alliance commitments between each disputant and the aligning state on these alignment choices. We evaluate these expectations empirically by examining the alignment choices of states that joined with one side or another in a Militarized Interstate Dispute during the period of 1816 to 1986. The results indicate that regardless of regime type, institutional similarities matter to the aligning state's decision. We also find that power concerns matter only to autocracies; democracies do not seem to base their alignment choices on the power of the sides in the dispute. Finally, the evidence indicates that the alignment choices of democracies cannot be anticipated by their prior alliance commitments, although the alignment choices of autocracies can. These results suggest interesting implications for research on the democratic peace, the determinants of threat in the international system, and the impact of selection effects. The consistent empirical evidence that institutional similarity affects alignment decisions also increases our confidence that future investigations of institutional similarity generally, rather than an exclusive focus on joint democracy, will prove fruitful.     

The Employment of People with Criminal Records in the European Union

This paper summarises a large-scale research project, jointly funded by the European Commission and the Northern Ireland Office, about the legislation, policies, and practices which act against the employment of people with a criminal record in the European Union. The disparity of legal guidance between countries effectively restricts the opportunities for people with a criminal record to work in the country they choose. This paper intends to increase awareness of the policies across Europe which affect the employment of people with a criminal record with a view to addressing the marginalisation of this group and thereby encouraging the re-integration of ex-offenders into society. Details of the work undertaken by a project based in Northern Ireland, 'Coping with Convictions' which endeavours to tackle some of the existing barriers to ex-offender employment are described. In addition, the recent introduction of UK legislation, allowing employers greater access to criminal record information, and the implications this may have for ex-offenders seeking employment are also discussed.     

Is informalization equalizing? Evidence from Kinshasa (DRC)

As a consequence of a concatenation of external and internal events, the economy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has informalized to an unprecedented level over the last few decades. A comparison of budget surveys carried out in 1975 and 2004 respectively allows us to ascertain the effect of this process on income inequality and poverty in Kinshasa. We find that the extent of inequality in the capital city of the DRC has remained largely unchanged, which strongly suggests that informalization has been a viable survival strategy for those at the lower-income end of society. Unexpectedly, whereas distinctions such as gender and age lost much of their profiling power in the period considered, other cleavages such as education and geography, which may be assumed to be much more intimately related to the formal sector, continued to play an important role in structuring inequality in Kinshasa’s deeply informalized economy.