US politics and World Bank IDA-lending

Abstract

This paper studies the role of US political factors in the allocation of World Bank concessional lending, where US political interests are proxied by voting similarity in the United Nations General Assembly on issues identified as important by the US Department of State. In contrast to previous studies we find that the US exerted a significant influence on IDA lending during the period 1993–2000. We demonstrate that the influence was both statistically as well as economically significant. Finally, we demonstrate that our result is robust with respect to the omission of the IDA Country Performance Rating index.     

Development's Denial of Social Justice

Abstract

American public administration as a field is “mature” in terms of its identity, roles, knowledge, and open-system nature. Yet it lacks maturity in the sense of an adequate sense of self-worth. This “inferiority complex” is revealed by the field's obsession with two intertwining, persistent themes: a perceived state of societal illegitimacy and of permanent need for reform.     

Morton's Fork: “Democracy” Versus Neopatrimonialism in Developing Countries

It is argued that conditions for social justice in developing countries are deficient under both state capitalism (“democracy”) and neopatrimonialism. Development assistance is similarly constrained, but it also has shortcomings in relation to “democracy” promotion. Political economy analyses can provide authentic insights into how poor people negotiate for public goods, but such interactions seem unlikely to yield sustainable social justice for most citizens. The assessment calls for a reconfiguration of power relations and a more egalitarian distribution of public goods within and between countries, which is what most people are predisposed to want and are entitled to expect and enjoy.     

East Asia and the world economy

Abstract

The contrast between Japan's emergence from the late nineteenth century as an industrializing nation and China's continued relative stagnation during the same period constitutes a puzzle that has provoked many attempts at solution. To heighten the sense of paradox, a number of observers have echoed the view of the late Alexander Eckstein that

an informed observer appraising the prospects of economic development and modernization in Asia from the vantage point of 1840 might well have picked China—rather than Japan—as the most likely candidate. China was a vast empire more populous than Japan, much better endowed with mineral resources and large internal markets. Even in terms of social and political institutions, China might have appeared to be in the better position [etc.]     

Staying Out: Reentry Protective Factors Among Rural Women Offenders

The current study examines protective factors for women who transition from county jails to rural Appalachian communities, areas with limited health and behavioral health services. The study included drug-using women recruited from three jails in rural Appalachia and followed-up at 12-months post-release. Analyses focused on differences between women who remained in the community and those who returned to custody, as well as a multivariate model to determine protective factors for reentry success. At the bivariate level, staying out of jail was associated with being older, having a job, not using drugs, stable housing, receiving health treatment, and having prosocial peers. In the multivariate model, the most robust predictors of staying out of jail were drug use abstinence, health care utilization, and prosocial peers. Most research on criminogenic needs associated with reentry success have focused on men, and most focused on reentry to urban communities where services and resources are more accessible. These findings have important implications for criminal justice systems to implement reentry programs for women offenders during the transition to the community.     

Children's and adults’ realism in their event-recall confidence in responses to free recall and focused questions

Abstract

Two experiments examined the realism in the confidence of 8–9-year-olds, 12–13-year-olds and adults in their free recall and answers to focused questions after viewing a short video clip. A different video clip was shown in each experiment and the focused questions differed in difficulty. In both experiments the youngest age group, in contrast to the two other age groups, showed no overconfidence in their confidence judgements for the free recall. The free recall results also showed that the youngest group had lower completeness but similar correctness as the adults. There was a tendency, over both experiments, for the participants to show poorer realism for the focused questions than for the free recall, especially when questions with content already mentioned in the free recall were excluded from the analyses of the focused questions in Experiment 1. The study shows the importance of question format when evaluating the credibility of the confidence shown by 8–9-year-old children in their own testimony.     

Is the Impact of Alcohol Consumption on Violence Relative to the Level of Consumption?

Two ideas concerning the link between bullying in school and violence on the streets are investigated. (1) Bullying and victimization in school is a product of the school situation and people's inability to choose their levels of exposure to others. According to this hypothesis, bullying is largely a phenomenon that is isolated to the school context. (II) Bullying behaviour in school and inflicting damage to others outside school is a reflection of a more general aggressive behaviour pattern and, hence, bullying in school and violence on the streets will, to a great extent, involve the same individuals. The literature offers suggestions that either could be the case. Participants were 2915 14-year-olds in a medium-sized county in Sweden who responded to a self-report questionnaire.Theresults showed that bullying others in school was strongly linked to violent behaviour and weapon-carrying on the streets, both among boys and girls. It was also found that bullying others in school was related to being violently victimized on the streets. The findings remained the same when statistically controlling for loitering and nights spent away from home, which were both related to bullying behaviour. It is concluded that bullying behaviour in school is in many cases a part of a more general violent and aggressive behaviour pattern and that preventive efforts targeting individuals with bullying behaviour in school could, according to the present study, decrease violence among adolescents out in the community as well.     

From the Wagner Act to the Human Rights Watch Report: Labor and Freedom of Expression and Association, 1935-2000*

This paper examines the legal restrictions on the labor movement's right to picket and strike since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or Wagner Act in 1935. The NLRA was seen as a statutory equivalent of the First Amendment for the labor movement, guaranteeing workers rights of association and expression they had been denied historically through the use of court injunctions, criminal conspiracy prosecutions, and extra-legal violence. Supreme Court decisions of the late 1930s, often arising out of labor conflicts, also significantly expanded rights of freedom of association and expression. Yet a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2000 concluded that US workers lacked the basic rights to organize, bargain, and strike required by international human rights standards. It found that US labor laws permitted employers to fire, harass, and intimidate workers with impunity. This paper examines the decline of these rights since the Wagner Act, seeing the roots of the legal decline in the ambivalent legacy of the Act itself. On the one hand, both the Act and the Court legally recognized unions as legitimate political organizations and extended to them many of the associative and expressive freedoms that had been available to other groups. On the other hand, the legal price for this recognition of legitimacy was the restriction of a range of expressive activities. Subsequently, labor's rights came to be treated more under the framework of industrial relations and economic policy than of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. This gradual legal retrenchment, along with political and economic developments, left the labor movement severely weakened by the end of the century, with significantly less legal protection than its counterparts in other economically advanced countries. I explore these developments by relating them to the literatures on American exceptionalism and industrial relations. Theoretically, I rely on work which examines the relationship between institutional structure and human agency to understand the strategic choices made by corporations, state actors, and the labor movement. The paper concludes with an assessment of recent calls for labor law reform as a strategy for reviving the labor movement.