Sexual Attraction, Sexual Identity, and Psychosocial Wellbeing in a National Sample of Young Women During Emerging Adulthood

Identity-based conceptualizations of sexual orientation may not account adequately for variation in young women’s sexuality. Sexual minorities fare worse in psychosocial markers of wellbeing (i.e., depressive symptoms, anxiety, self esteem, social support) than heterosexual youth; however, it remains unclear whether these health disparities exclusively affect individuals who adopt a sexual minority identity or if they also may be present among heterosexually-identified youth who report same-sex attractions. We examined the relationship between sexual attraction, sexual identity, and psychosocial wellbeing in the female only subsample (weighted, n = 391) of a national sample of emerging adults (age 18–24). Women in this study rated on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely) their degree of sexual attraction to males and females, respectively. From these scores, women were divided into 4 groups (low female/low male attraction, low female/high male attraction, high female/low male attraction, or high female/high male attraction). We explored the relationship between experiences of attraction, reported sexual identity, and psychosocial outcomes using ordinary least squares regression. The results indicated sexual attraction to be predictive of women’s psychosocial wellbeing as much as or more than sexual identity measures. We discuss these findings in terms of the diversity found in young women’s sexuality, and how sexual minority status may be experienced by this group.     

Power and property: commercialization,enclosures, and the transformation of agrarian relations in Ethiopia

The transnational agrarian social movement Vía Campesina is campaigning to have the United Nations negotiate and implement a Declaration, and eventually an International Convention, on Peasants' Rights. This article analyzes the origins and demands of the campaign and the place of the claimed rights in international law. Peasant organizations hope to follow in the footsteps of indigenous peoples' movements that participated in the negotiations preceding the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The peasants' rights campaign has succeeded in linking its demands to discussions of the right to food in the United Nations, where concern is growing over the approach of the 2015 target for realizing the Millennium Development Goals, in particular the halving of the numbers of people suffering from hunger. The campaign is likely to face stiff resistance from powerful UN member states, but could achieve substantial advances even if the path to a convention is difficult or never completed.     

‘Letting the Beasts Out of the Cage’: Parole in the Post-Stalin Gulag, 1953–1973

After a lapse of 15 years under Stalin, parole was reintroduced into the Soviet Gulag in 1954. For justice officials anxious to expunge Stalin's repressive legacy, the resurrection of parole signalled a return to correctionalism, societal oversight over the Gulag, and a vastly reduced rate of incarceration. In practice, though, parole exposed significant continuities with the Stalinist Gulag, including endemic corruption, overwhelming concern with production, suspicion of outside interference in penal affairs, and constant upward pressure on the inmate population. In the broader view, the experience of parole in the post-war USSR aligned closely with that of the Western world.     

Psychological Distress and Student Engagement as Mediators of the Relationship between Peer Victimization and Achievement in Middle School Youth

Peer victimization is a well-known national and international problem, contributing to a range of emotional, social, and behavioral consequences. Using structural equation modeling, the authors tested a theoretical model suggesting that psychological distress and student engagement mediate the association between the experience of victimization and concurrent academic achievement. Participants were 469 (46.4 % male, 53.6 % female) 6th to 8th grade students, from randomly selected classrooms in 11 middle schools in a southeastern school district. Structural equation models of the hypothesized effects demonstrated adequate fit to the data, with both symptoms of psychological distress and engagement mediating the relationship between victimization and academic achievement. In general, the results suggest that victimization predicts diminished academic achievement by way of psychological distress and poorer engagement in classroom and academic tasks. However, the direct relationship between victimization and measures of achievement lacked significance across many correlational and path analyses conducted. These findings have implications for researchers and practitioners in understanding how psychological distress and student engagement are associated with the academic performance of students who experience peer victimization.     

Public Administration Research in Mainland China: A Systematic Review of Chinese Public Administration in English Language Journals (1996–2016)

This study provides a systematic review of the development of Chinese public administration in English language journals. An analysis of articles in the top 25 English-language public administration journals worldwide from 1996 to 2016 confirmed increases in both the number and significance of studies of Chinese public administration. A systematic content analysis of abstracts of previous studies was performed and showed that social development and administrative reform were among the most important topics. With respect to the methodology of this study, qualitative methods were more frequently used than quantitative or mixed methods. Finally, implications for future research on Chinese public administration are discussed.     

Parliamentary immunity in imperial Russia 1906–1917

SUMMARY

In this article Valeria Ferrari analyses the conflict between the executive and the parliamentary majority during the nine-month period referred to as the nonimestre costituzionale (1820–21), in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in terms of the future institutional organization of the periphery. Indeed, the deputies who were militant members of the Carbonari movement intended to subject this issue to radical revision because of their refusal of the centralist model, introduced into the Kingdom by the French sovereigns Joseph Bonaparte and Joachim Murat, and maintained by the restored Bourbon dynasty. This explains the provincial Carbonari members' preference for the Spanish Constitution of 1812 which, in contrast with the centralized model of Napoleonic origin, called for a significant margin of autonomy for local administrations. Based on this Constitution, a decree of July 1820 abolished the Provincial and District Councils and established the Deputations—collegial bodies elected directly by citizens without property-related limits—which had broad and important functions. An entirely different configuration emerged unequivocally quite rapidly between the parliamentary majority and the executive as regards the actual role to be attributed to the provincial Deputations. Indeed, while these local institutions were to represent for most of the deputies adhering to the Carbonari movement the first important step towards a complete form of administrative decentralization, from the point of view of the majority of the government, these new peripheral institutions would instead have to coexist with the administrative system already in place.     

Federal‐provincial overlap and civil servants: The case of occupational training in Quebec and Ontario

Abstract: Over the years, many analysts concerned with how federations work have presented the reduction of federal‐provincial overlap and duplication as a way of decreasing intergovernmental tensions. While some have presented such overlap and duplication as inevitable or even beneficial, few have tried to establish how overlap really works and whether it is a real problem or one created mostly by the provincial governments who wish to take issue with problems of federal funding, joint management and accountability. Despite the fact that, ultimately, public officials are in the best position to determine whether federal‐provincial overlap is causing inefficiencies, even fewer studies have focused on how they manage their relationship in areas where two orders of government are involved. Thus, the best possible source of information on how overlapping sectors are managed has been left out. This article examines how federal and provincial officials in Quebec and Ontario have managed their relationships in a particularly contentious sector: occupational training. Sommaire: Plusieurs auteurs intéressés au fonctionnement des fédérations ont, au fil des années, eu tendance à présenter la réduction des empiètements et recoupements fédéraux‐provinciaux comme une façon de décroître les tensions intergouvememen‐tales. Certains auteurs ont présenté de tels chevauchements et dédoublements comme inévitables, voire bénéfiques, mais peu d'entre eux se sont penchés sur le véritable fonctionnement de ces empiètements et s'ils sont un problème réel ou principalement créé par les gouvernements provinciaux désireux d'engager une contro‐verse sur des questions de financement, de gestion commune et d'imputabilité. Bien que les fonctionnaires soient, ultimement, les mieux placés pour évaluer si les recoupements fédéraux‐provinciaux constituent des sources d'inéfficience, peu d'écrits font état de la façon dont les fonctionnaires gèrent leurs relations lorsque les deux ordres de gouvernement sont impliqués. Ainsi, la meilleure source d'information sur la gestion de ce type de recoupements nous manque. Dans cet article, nous examinons comment des fonctionnaires fédéraux et provinciaux au Québec et c'n Ontario ont géré leurs relations dans un domaine particulièrement conflictuel: la formation de la main‐d'æeuvre.