Helping to Break the Glass Ceiling? Fathers,First Daughters,and Presidential Vote Choice in 2016

Political Behavior - Throughout her 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton crafted messages intended to appeal to fathers of daughters and to highlight the...     

Learning from each other: causal inference and American political development

Public Choice - Within political science, a movement focused on increasing the credibility of causal inferences (CIs) has gained considerable traction in recent years. While CI has been...     

The determinants of democracy: a sensitivity analysis

Public Choice - Numerous studies—operating with diverse model specifications, samples and empirical measures—suggest different economic, social, cultural, demographic, institutional and...     

Preventing radicalism in educational institutions: Pakistan a case in point

With the recent drastic shifts in societies, thinking styles, and most importantly, the degree of online‐and‐offline exposure, it is easy for the young and developing mind to fall prey to radical or extremist ideas. Radical organizations direct their recruiting efforts toward those who have yet to reach adolescence and are incapable of forming well‐informed and educated decisions. Since it is in human nature to target the weak and the vulnerable, these organizations look for dissatisfied, isolated and friendless young people. They are especially allured when these organizations promise to get them all they lack. As there have been incidents recently reported on young students' involvement in terror activities, the study proposes alternatives to prevent them from falling prey to radical thoughts. The proposed alternatives are judged through TOPSIS (Technique of Order Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution) and the ideal alternative is singled out after mathematical calculation. Out of the five proposed alternatives, the study, through TOPSIS analysis, proposes that parents may be trained to handle their children in order to keep them from radical thoughts. In addition to the ideal alternative, the study also suggests that the government take preventive measures to curb the evil of radicalism.     

Productive specialization,peaceful cooperation and the problem of the predatory state: lessons from comparative historical political economy

Public Choice - This paper reconceptualizes and unbundles the relationship between public predation, state capacity and economic development. By reframing our understanding of state capacity theory...     

Publishing while editor: Transparency and behaviour in public administration journals

Journal editors serve as gatekeepers of knowledge, a role critical to preserving the quality and standards of good research. Some scholars have questioned whether editors have taken advantage of their position to publish their own work. To understand the extent to which editors of public administration journals self-publish, we examined publishing patterns over a 20-year period. We collected the names of editors from the mastheads of 13 generalist public administration journals from 1997 to 2016 and used data indexed from Web of Science to look at articles published in those journals during the same time. We found that while self-publishing behaviour is not common across the entire field, it is a trend for certain journals and individuals. We also found the practice of self-publishing is influenced by whether an individual served in a primary editorial role (e.g., editor-in-chief), length of editorial service, and overall scholarly productivity. We discuss appropriateness and ethical implications of the practice.     

Zhengqing Zhang,Intellectual Property Rights in China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) 298 P. $54.58 Hardback

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

The Final Frontier: China,Taiwan, and the United States in Strategic Competition for Central America

China’s rise as a global power corresponded with a diminution of Taiwanese diplomacy, which has left Central America as the last region to host a continuous bloc of countries that recognize the ROC. In this article, we argue that China’s success in gaining diplomatic recognition from Taiwan’s former allies has largely resulted from China's economic policy, specifically its promises of large-scale infrastructure projects and the integration of Central American economies with Chinese markets. However, there are limits to how far China has advanced in gaining full recognition from the region. The competing political and economic interests of China, Taiwan, the United States, and the Central American countries themselves, continue to influence patterns of diplomatic switching. More specifically, we argue that the threat of punitive measures from the United States combined with a turn in Taiwanese diplomacy toward assistance efforts to combat Covid-19 may deter future switching in the short to medium-term. Our analysis offers case studies of four Central American countries (Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and Nicaragua) to illustrate the multi-year processes by which China’s economic strategy leads to diplomatic switching and examine the paths ahead for the remaining holdouts facing the prospect of economic and political penalties by the United States.

     

A structural equation model relating unemployment stress,spiritual intelligence,and mental health components: Mediators of coping mechanism

This study aimed to evaluate a hypothesized structural model that reflects the relationship between unemployment stress, spiritual intelligence and mental health components. The sample of the study consisted of (761) unemployed adults (412 males and 349 females), their ages ranged between 30 to 48 year. They were divided into two samples: the first consisted of (352) unemployed adults to test the validity and reliability of the scales used in this study. And the second sample consisted of (409) unemployed adults to evaluate the hypothesized structural model. Researcher prepared the unemployment stress scale, and used the spiritual intelligence scale‐27, as well as prepared the short version of the mental health components scale based on the mental health scale‐50. In order to find how unemployment stress and spiritual intelligence predict the mental health components, the hypothesized model was examined using structural equation modeling. The results of test the proposed structural model concluded that the independent variable: unemployment stress contributed statistically significant directly to predict of the five dimensions of mental health components: mental mindfulness, flexibility, self‐efficiency, social support and happiness as dependent variables. At the same time, the independent variable: unemployment stress contributed statistically significant indirectly and proportionally to the prediction of the five dimensions of mental health as dependent variables through the dimensions of spiritual intelligence: spiritual mindfulness, spiritual abilities, spiritual presence as median variables. The proposed model of unemployment stress, spiritual intelligence and mental health components has a good fitness with the data were collected, and able to predict mental health among unemployed adults.