The Effect of Social Conformity on Collective Voting Behavior

This article investigates the effect of social conformity onvoting behavior. Past research shows that many people vote toconform with the social norm that voting is a civic duty. Thehypothesis here is that when conformity motivates people tovote, it also stimulates conformist behavior among some voterswhen they decide which party to vote for. This produces a distinctiverelationship between voter turnout and the distribution of votesamong parties—a relationship not anticipated by rationalchoice theory. I test a mathematical model of this behaviorwith linear and nonlinear regression analyses of state-leveldata for presidential elections in the United States from 1904to 1996, longitudinal data on parliamentary elections in WesternEurope over most of the twentieth century, and cross-sectionaldata for recent elections in Western Europe, Eastern Europe,and Russia. The results generally validate the model.     

People and Performance: Challenges for the Future Public Service— the Report from the Wye River Conference

What are the key challenges for the public sector at present, and what will the future public service look like if it is to meet these challenges? These questions were put to public‐sector leaders at a conference at the Wye River Plantation in June 1999. The leaders agreed on aspects of a broad vision for the future and the urgent need for a detailed debate on the transition questions that arose.     

Innovative Programs in Israel for Prevention & Responding to Parental Alienation: Education,Early Identification and Timely,Effective Intervention

There is substantial research and documentation showing that behavior of a parent which alienates a child against the other parent (PA) and other family members may cause serious, and sometimes permanent, damage to the child. Building on the work that defines maladaptive parental gatekeeping (MG) and PA, and on identifying typologies of behavior, and their effects on the alienated child, the need for prevention of children in these cases is well established. This paper describes programs and responses in Israel, some already in place and others under development, almost all of which require multidisciplinary collaboration between professionals. The programs include: primary prevention; early identification, so as to allow prompt secondary intervention by advice and treatment of parents and child; and immediate tertiary intervention when alienation has led to contact failure or is about to do so. Prevention and early intervention can reduce the need for the massive investment of resources needed for attempts to restore contact, and also for treatment of those affected by PA.     

Motivational Interviewing as Governmentality: Shaping Victims of Men’s Violence into Responsible Subjects?

Motivational interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based counselling method that has spread rapidly in Sweden during the last two decades. It is a technique designed to empower individuals to change an unwanted life situation. Through interviews with a strategic sample of persons engaged in work with men’s violence against women, this article critically examines the use of MI in this context. By analysing the interviews from a governmentality perspective, it is suggested that MI is a technique to produce a knowledgeable, strong, and self-animated feminine subject, capable of making the “right” choices and subsequently “choosing” to avoid violence. Although this may be beneficial to some, the analysis suggests that this places primary responsibility on the woman subjected to violence for her predicament and future. This may in turn increase the risk of self-blame for those who cannot follow through with their commitment, and obscure and renounce the role and responsibility of both the counsellor and the rationalized neoliberal welfare state. In addition, the one-sided focus on the individual largely ignores the surrounding context, which may obscure men’s responsibility for violence. This may ultimately undermine the collective formation of a political subject from women’s shared experience of violence.     

Untimely Economies of Survival

This article takes the recent turn against hope in breast cancer activism as a point of entry into a broader examination of speculative economies of science that creatively imagine, materialize, and manage futures in the present. It argues that untimeliness – anticipatory, simultaneous, porous, and prognostic in its articulation – captures these alternate arrangements of life and action as they are mobilized in cancer research that hails healthy women as experimental subjects to participate in clinical studies.