Political or Financial Benefits? Ideology,Tenure, and Parliamentarians’ Choice of Interest Group Ties

This article develops and tests a parliamentarian‐centred decision model of the collaboration between interest groups (IGs) and parliamentarians. We posit that parliamentarians face a trade‐off when deciding on IG ties that offer them either political (policy support and votes) or financial benefits (additional income). We theorise the balance in this trade‐off to be moderated by ideology and tenure because both introduce variations in IG ties’ utility across politicians. Using Swiss longitudinal data from 1985 to 2015 on 743 parliamentarians and their 5,431 IG board positions, we show that parliamentarians become more financial benefit‐seeking over time. This holds in particular if they belong to right‐leaning parties. We also find self‐imposed restrictions for new and left‐leaning parliamentarians on seeking financial benefits. This highlights that parliamentarians are responsive to their partisan constituents when building their IG tie portfolio.     

Evaluation of Topics in Utah's ONE‐HOUR Divorce Education Program

Divorce education programs are mandatory in most states. Despite the ongoing debate in the field regarding the appropriate duration of these programs, the goal of the current study was to identify the following five content areas in divorce education that may be most relevant for predicting favorable outcomes: (1) impact of divorce on children, (2) impact of divorce on family relationships, (3) financial responsibilities of divorcing parents for children, (4) benefits of positive coparenting, and (5) impact of domestic violence on children and family relationships. Using divorcing parents' self‐reported data (N = 3,275) from a one‐hour online divorce education program in Utah, we examined participants' post‐divorce intentions to treat each other respectfully, especially in front of the child(ren), and engage in positive coparental practices. The results showed that the program was effective in obtaining these objectives. We discuss these findings in depth and offer suggestions for future programs.     

Remaking markets in the mountains: integration,trader agency and resistance in upland northern Vietnam

As part of an ongoing agenda by Vietnamese lawmakers and local state officials to accelerate market integration in the northern mountains, rural marketplaces are being physically and managerially restructured according to standard state-approved models. Moreover, these market directives are coherent with the ‘distance demolishing technologies’ that James Scott (2009 Scott, J.C. 2009. The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]) suggests the state has implemented to bring these uplands more directly under its panoptic gaze. This integration strategy seldom meshes well with upland livelihood needs. In this paper we examine a number of power contestations currently unfolding as upland market traders – both Vietnamese and ethnic minorities – negotiate or resist these developments while striving to maintain meaningful livelihoods.     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.