Care and Justice in the Global Context

Abstract. Morality is often dismissed as irrelevant in what is seen as the global anarchy of rival states each pursuing its national interest. When morality is invoked, it is usually the morality of justice with its associated moral conceptions of individual rights, equality, and universal law. In the area of moral theory, an alternative moral approach, the ethics of care, has been developed in recent years. It is beginning to influence how some see their global responsibilities.     

Community Involvement as a Vehicle for Integration: A Study with Young Immigrants

ABSTRACT

Immigrants are often exposed to conditions of economic deprivation or to hardships of a social nature connected to their status. These factors increase their feeling of impotence, thus slowing down the integrative process. An element that could counter these disadvantaged conditions is participation in an association that promotes immigrants’ demands on a socio-political level. The first aim of this study is understanding the relationships between involvement and integration. The authors hypothesize that youth engaged in community are more integrated than not engaged immigrant youth. The second aim is to investigate the relationship between the type of activity, type of association and integration. The participants were 644 immigrant youth (Age range 19–35, 56.2%) that were involved in the community. The results show that involved immigrant youth report higher levels of both ethnic and national identity compared to not involved youth. Regarding the type of activity carried out, there is a statistically significant difference between activity of a social type, which obtains higher means, and of a civic type, which rather obtains lower means. While exploratory, the study shows and confirms the relationship between community engagement, young immigrants’ integration process and construction of identity.     

Indians are drunks and drunks are Indians: alcohol and indigenismo in Guatemala, 1890–1940

This article explores the ways in which the use of alcohol articulated with the discourse of indigenismo in Guatemala between the late 1890s and the late 1930s. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the public language of alcoholism merged with that of indigenismo. By the early 1930s, during presidency of Jorge Ubico (1931–1944), the theoretical conflation of alcoholism and indigenismo was fully evolved, providing a seamless paradigm for those who would place the credited Guatemala's‘drunken’and‘racially degenerate’indigenous majority with the nation's underdevelopment. The article utilises indigenista literature, newspapers, contemporary legislation and judicial records on the alcohol contraband trade and drunkenness to construct this argument.     

Removing and identifying drug contamination in the analysis of human hair

The procedure used in this laboratory for removing and identifying contamination of hair specimens with drugs is demonstrated by its application to hair contaminated by various experimental models. The models include soaking; coating with drug followed by sweat conditions for 6 h; and soaking in a very high concentration of cocaine followed by storage and multiple shampoo treatments. A multi-part wash procedure along with a wash criterion is applied to all samples containing drug above the cutoff. The failure of the wash criterion is a signal that the sample may be positive due to contamination rather than use, and in the absence of other over-riding evidence, the sample would be considered to be negative for drug use. This Wash Criterion has also been tested with hair from subjects demonstrated to be drug users by one or more drug-positive urines; in these studies, all hair samples from demonstrated users passed the Wash Criterion test.     

The Impoundment Control Act of 1974: Restraining or Reviving Presidential Power?

The power to impound allows the president to cancel or postpone the spending of appropriated funds. Over the years Congress has struggled with the challenge of maintaining some control over impoundment actions while still allowing sufficient discretion for the president during budget implementation. This article examines the events leading up to the passage of the Impoundment Control Act as Title X of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, and the framework established by the law. It provides some analysis of data on rescissions and deferrals in the period from 1975–1995 and reviews efforts to grant the president expanded impoundment authority, culminating in the passage of the Line Item Veto Act of 1996. On April 10, 1997, the new law was found unconstitutional by a district court, but on June 26 the Supreme Court set aside that earlier decision on jurisdictional grounds, ruling that the plaintiffs (six members of Congress) lacked proper legal standing to bring the case ( Raines v. Byrd , 96–1671). However, the Supreme Court decision was confined to this technical issue and did not address the underlying constitutional questions. Whatever the further legal developments relating to the Line Item Veto Act, the article suggests that the issue of restraining or reviving presidential impoundment power will remain unsettled.     

How some rules just don't matter: The regulation of lobbyists

Brinig, Holcombe, and Schwartzstein (1993) have argued recently that lobby regulation restricts entry into the population of lobbying organizations, and that the number of lobbying organizations then influences legislative activity. However, they analyze only the relationship between the restrictiveness of lobby regulation and legislative activity, thereby assuming that regulation actually reduces numbers of registered interest organizations. We test this assumption with data on state interest organization populations and find little support for it. We consider several other explanations and comment more generally on the status of institutions and their rules in the study of political phenomena.     

Reconsidering The Counter-Mobilization Hypothesis: Health Policy Lobbying In The American States

Despite its widespread use since the concept was introduced by David Truman (1951. The Governmental Process. New York: Alfred A. Knopf), counter-mobilization by organized interests has remained theoretically ambiguous and rarely studied empirically. We more fully develop the concept of short-term counter-mobilization, distinguish it from long-term counter-mobilization, specify the conditions under which we might observe short-term counter-mobilization, and test the resulting hypotheses with data on health care lobby registrations in the American states during the late 1990s. We find little evidence of short-term counter-mobilization among health interest organizations, which leads us to more fully consider several null hypotheses about the limits of strategic behavior on the part of organized interests.An earlier version of this paper was prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 2004. This research was supported by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research (ID#047727).