Role perceptions and attitudes toward discretion at a decentralized regulatory frontline: The case of organic inspectors

The complexity of decentralized regulatory contexts can threaten program fidelity, particularly if it results in divergence between program goals and the intents of regulatory inspectors. This paper investigates how inspectors negotiate the conflicting demands of a decentralized program by examining how they perceive their regulatory roles – the primary responsibilities that inspectors ascribe to their functions and the entities to which they feel responsible – and how these role orientations are related to inspectors' attitudes toward the use of discretion. The study findings indicate that in the decentralized administration of United States organic food regulations, inspectors experience multiple, and sometimes conflicting, role orientations. The presence of multiple role orientations, however, does not seem to affect how inspectors approach their responsibilities. The combined strengths of quantitative and qualitative data are leveraged to offer explanations for the study findings and identify avenues for future research.     

Just the Two of Us? Civil Conflicts,Pro-State Militants,and the Violence Premium

Quantitative literature discussing violence in civil conflicts tends towards a typical model of engagement between governments and revolutionaries. Whilst recent work has shown the significant impact of multiple anti-government groups, a further feature remains understudied—the role of pro-state militants. This article theorizes a “violence premium” when such groups arise, which leads to all connected groups devoting greater energy to conflict than they would in isolation. Employing duration analysis and data from The Troubles in Northern Ireland, where Republicans act as revolutionary insurgents, Loyalists as pro-state militants, and the British Army as government forces, the violence premium is empirically confirmed. Both Loyalists and Republicans deviate from their underlying strategies to attack more frequently when violence by their rivals increases, with Republicans and the British Army engaging in the same way. An extended analysis, accounting for the status of the victim, shows that the violence premium resulting from interaction between Loyalists and Republicans targeted only the civilian population of Northern Ireland, elucidating the sectarian component of The Troubles. These results show that including all conflict parties and considering how they are linked are important features in studies that aim to determine the net level of violence in civil conflicts.     

Whole-person health and development: two South Indian initiatives

ABSTRACT

In responding to the 2016 reformulation of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, the development community’s efforts are focused on a sweep of initiatives aiming to promote whole-society, sustainable development. The ambition of the SDGs is inspiring, but also daunting, and does not always sit easily within national models of economic development. This viewpoint profiles two organisations in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, that have decades of experience in whole-person development among scheduled tribes and disability communities. Both organisations serve as timely examples of ongoing holistic, whole-person health and development in the context of new ideals and economic realities.     

How Americans Think About Trade: Reconciling Conflicts Among Money, Power, and Principles

Trade has again emerged as a controversial issue in America, yet we know little about the ideas that guide American thinking on these questions. By combining traditional survey methods with experimental manipulation of problem content, this study explores the ideational landscape among elite Americans and pays particular attention to how elite Americans combine their ideas about commerce with their ideas about national security and social justice. We find that most American leaders think like intuitive neoclassical economists and that only a minority think along intuitive neorealist or Rawlsian lines. Among the mass public, in contrast, a majority make judgments like intuitive neorealists and intuitive Rawlsians. Although elite respondents see international institutions as promising vehicles in principle, in practice they favor exploiting America's advantage in bilateral bargaining power over granting authority to the World Trade Organization. The distribution of these ideas in America is not arrayed neatly along traditional ideological divisions. To understand the ideational landscape, it is necessary to identify how distinctive mentaal models—mercantilist, neorealist, egalitarian, and neoclassical economic—sensitize or desensitize people to particular aspects of geopolitical problems, an approach we call cognitive interactionism.     

Political Consequences of the New Inequality

This article proposes agendas for teaching and research about shifting global patterns of equality and inequality, a very different agenda than was appropriate when the last undergraduate professor was president of ISA, almost forty years ago. Today, unlike in that Cold War world, formal democracy is flourishing, state power is diminishing, gender inequality has diminished, and income inequality has risen. Consequences of these new patterns that demand our attention as teachers and scholars include: (1) more frequent protracted social conflicts, (2) a newly politicized sphere of international public health, (3) the new global gender politics, (4) the new global politics of the super-rich, and (5) the new politics and ethics of the world's privileged, a group that includes most ISA members and most of our students. Our responsibilities as teachers have grown, in part, because popular media present a decreasingly coherent picture of each of these patterns; and that incoherence, itself, may help sustain global inequalities.     

The collapse of the fisheries sector in Kyrgyzstan: An analysis of its roots and its prospects for revival

The disintegration of the Soviet Union had profound economic and social effects on many of the newly independent transition economies. Nowhere was this more so than in the fisheries sector – with one of the biggest production shortfalls occurring in Kyrgyzstan, following the collapse of lake capture and pond-culture production. In 2005, aggregate landings were just 48 tonnes – barely 3 per cent of the catch level recorded in 1989. This article has two objectives. First it analyses the extent to which the dissolution of the Soviet Union can explain the collapse of the fisheries sector in Kyrgyzstan. Second, in the light of these findings, it considers what practical steps, if any, might be taken to revitalize the sector.     

Critical Hopefulness Among Urban High School Students

Psychological empowerment encompasses several key aspects of youth civic and sociopolitical development. Most research has focused on psychological empowerment’s emotional component, which entails learned hopefulness about one’s own ability to participate in and lead community change efforts. Fewer studies have assessed critical awareness of how social power operates—psychological empowerment’s cognitive component. The confluence of these two components has been termed critical hopefulness. A complex relationship exists between these two components, and previous research has found relatively small proportions of participants reporting both high levels of critical awareness and simultaneously high levels of hopefulness about their ability to exert influence in the sociopolitical domain. The current study of urban high school students in the Northeastern U.S. (n?=?389; 53.5% female) investigates heterogeneity according to these two components of psychological empowerment. Latent class cluster analyses were conducted and seven distinct groups of participants emerged. Students identifying as Hispanic/Latinx were more likely to be classified into a profile group exhibiting critical hopefulness. Differences were observed between psychological empowerment profile groups on self-reported levels of psychological sense of community, civic engagement, and social justice orientation. Furthermore, a larger proportion of this overall sample was classified into groups that exhibited critical hopefulness than in a previous study of adults. These findings provide useful insights for efforts to engage young people in civic life and to promote sociopolitical development.     

Roads of change: political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts

This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the district scale to entrench or transform dominant cultural codes and sedimented histories of socio-economic inequality. Preliminary research identifies specific sectors of local governance that have emerged as significant sites of struggle over the shape and meaning of ‘democracy’, namely forest management and infrastructure development. The primary contribution of the paper lies in specifying an analytical approach to the study of ‘post-conflict’ governance at the local scale via three conceptual terrains of inquiry – governance and planning, political subjectivity, and cultural politics. The ultimate objective is to develop a framework for assessing the conditions of possibility for a democratic restructuring of economy and society to accompany the official political institutions of liberal democracy.     

The isolation of spermatozoa from sexual assault swabs using proteinase K

The most common examination in sexual offences is the identification of spermatozoa in aqueous extracts from swabs. Using Proteinase K with sodium dodecyl sulphate, it is possible to digest all the cellular material apart from the spermatozoa, resulting in a quick and effective method of their isolation. Spermatozoa were detected in 18 extracts using this treatment when the normal method had failed to reveal all but one of them.     

Autopsy findings in the eyes of fourteen fatally abused children

The eyes of fourteen fatally abused children and sixteen control cases were examined histopathologically. Ten of the abused children showed intraocular change. The most common ocular changes were subdural hemorrhage of the optic nerve and retinal hemorrhage which involved all the layers of the retina, but most commonly the nerve fiber layer, ganglion cell layer and inner nuclear layer. The presence of blood cavities within the retina partially supported the hypothesis of traumatic retinoschisis. The control cases of non-abused children rarely showed intraocular hemorrhage.