Two Mothers in Law and Fact

What is the proper balance between legislative and judicial innovation and between formal and functional family recognition once legislatures have addressed gay men’s and lesbians’ families? In the civil-law jurisdiction of Quebec, legislative reforms allow two women to register as a child’s mothers. But judges have recognized a second mother ‘in fact’ by orders sharing custody where the parties had not used the new legislative channels. Such judicial creativity is reconcilable with the civil law and comparative scholars should flag it as a valuable resource. But it risks undermining legislative choices about family recognition. Perhaps the option to give a child a second mother includes the choice for a lesbian birth mother not to do so. Once two women become thinkable as spouses and mothers, judges risk inappropriately pressing a rich range of queer kinship possibilities into standard models.     

New Thinking in Financial Market Regulation: Dismantling the “Split Share Structure” of Chinese Listed Companies

China’s distinctive set of stock market institutions was introduced in 1990. Among the characteristics of China’s stock markets was a strict separation between different categories of investors. Listed companies issued different categories of shares to state shareholders, domestic corporate investors, domestic individual investors, and foreign investors. By 2005, the barriers segmenting China’s stock market had been significantly relaxed. Domestic investors were allowed to purchase shares previously reserved for foreign investors, and approved foreign investors were allowed to purchase shares previously earmarked for domestic individuals. Nevertheless, a crucial barrier remained. An ongoing debate among Chinese academics, investors, and policy makers focused on how to resolve the “split share structure” (guquan fen zhi) in which a minority of shares were tradable while the majority of shares (namely those reserved for domestic corporate and state shareholders) were excluded from the market. The split share structure was blamed for distorting prices and inhibiting development of the stock market. This paper analyzes the policy adopted to address the split share structure. To what extent does this policy change reflect new thinking on the part of China’s market regulators? This paper argues that analysis of policy making in China’s capital markets can help to distinguish between two competing assessments of China’s political economy. One account sees China pursuing a gradualist strategy, slowly but steadily expanding the role of markets. Another account sees China trapped in a semi-marketized and increasingly corrupt development pattern. The implementation of the split share structure reform program provides evidence to support the gradualist account of incremental, but persistent, reform. Mary Comerford Cooper is an assistant professor in political science at the Ohio State University. Her recent research focuses on the politics of financial markets in China and Taiwan. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Comparative Politics Research Workshop/ Globalization, Institutions and Economic Security Workshop at Ohio State University in May 2007, and at the annual meeting of the Association for Chinese Political Studies in July 2007. I benefited greatly from the constructive and insightful comments of Bj?rn Alpermann, Melanie Barr, Jean-Marc Blanchard, Sarah Brooks, Joseph Fewsmith, Sujian Guo, Dane Imerman, Ryan Kennedy, Marcus Kurtz, Xiaoyu Pu, James Reilly, Alex Thompson, Daniel Verdier, Jianwei Wang, Alan Wiseman, Bin Yu, and an anonymous reviewer. I am also grateful for Lan Hu’s exceptional research assistance. All remaining flaws are purely my own.     

Regional councils of governments at the crossroads: implications for intergovernmental management and networks

Councils of governments (COGS) have been subjected to powerful forces of change in the 1980s, due principally to drastic reductions in federal financial support. To survive, the councils have had to become more entrepreneural, to extend themselves in new directions They have scanned their local and regional task environments intensively for opportunities to form and/or join new networks and to provide more services in traditional and in new areas. The new style of council is described in this paper, using a market model. The model emphasizes opportunistic scanning of the regional task environment, and the assessment of issue networks as an iterative process in COG direction setting and implementation efforts.     

Book review/dangerous offenders and endangered justice

Mark H. Moore, Susan R. Estrich, Daniel McGillis, and William Spelman, Dangerous Offenders: The Elusive Target of Justice Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, vi + 252 pp.