The medical licensing examination debate

National licensing examinations are typically large‐scale examinations taken early in a career or near the point of graduation, and, importantly, success is required to subsequently be able to practice. They are becoming increasingly popular as a method of quality assurance in the medical workforce, but debate about their contribution to patient safety and the improvement of healthcare outcomes continues. A systematic review of the national licensing examination literature demonstrates that there is disagreement between assessment experts about the strengths and challenges of licensing examinations. This is characterized by a trans‐Atlantic divide between the dominance of psychometric reliability assurance in North America and the wider interpretations of validity, to include consequences, in Europe. We conclude that the debate might benefit from refocusing to what a national licensing examination should assess: to achieve a balance between assessing a breadth of skills and the capacity for such skills in practice, and focusing less on reproducibility.     

Too much choice,too little impact: a multilevel analysis of the contextual determinants of preference voting

Abstract

Despite the rich and growing body of research addressing how turnout and party choice depend on the institutional context, far less is known about the impact of the political environment on voters’ propensity to vote for candidates – not parties. Recent single-country studies have focused almost exclusively on individual-level resource- and identity-based differences in preference voting. Combining data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and Participation and Representation in Modern Democracies (PARTIREP) election studies in six countries, this article provides the first comprehensive, cross-national test of the impact of macro-contextual factors on a voter’s decision to indicate a candidate preference, instead of simply casting a party list vote. It demonstrates that both the failure of preference votes to affect the allocation of seats and choice overload dissuade voters from marking a candidate name on the ballot. These contextual factors affect informed and uninformed voters differently, moreover. The findings have important implications for electoral scholars and political practitioners when designing electoral systems.     

The Quality of Representation and Satisfaction with Democracy: The Consequences of Citizen-Elite Policy and Process Congruence

Citizen-elite congruence has long been considered an important yardstick for the quality of democracy. The literature on citizen satisfaction with democracy, however, has reduced congruence almost exclusively to one of its components, policy congruence. Just as citizens are considered to have positions on policy issues, there is growing scholarly interest in the preferences they have about the process of representation. Yet studies inquiring into the impact of the divergent preferences that citizens and elites have regarding the representational process thus far have been few and their results inconclusive. Combining new, unique data from the 2014 Belgian Election and Candidate Studies, we seek to address this lacuna. Our findings indicate that we cannot understand citizen satisfaction without also taking process into account—even as the policy gap has the greater effect. They should be of interest to scholars of democracy, those concerned about citizen disengagement from politics, and political practitioners.     

Whose lives are worth more? Politicising research safety in developing countries

This article develops the ‘safety–emotion–power’ nexus and highlights the role of emotion in research by politicising the unequal power relationships between researchers and NGO staff members in defining danger and negotiating safety in their fieldwork. Drawing on the author's research experiences in Bangladesh and Ghana, it argues that research touching on emotion-laden topics can inflict stress and pain on NGO staff members and their families. The ‘right to safety’ of NGO staff members is often compromised by researchers' ‘right to know’. The norms of conflict-avoidance also deter NGO staff members from negotiating safety. In addressing these issues, the article suggests three principles for taking account of emotional aspects of safety in research ethics.     

Capitalism,uneven and combined development and the transhistoric

What is the status of Trotsky's notion of uneven and combined development within Marxist theory and how might it be fruitfully employed by Marxists in international relations? Is uneven and combined development a transhistoric general abstraction or does it need rooting in the relations, processes, tendencies and counter-tendencies of a particular mode of production? This article rejects Justin Rosenberg's recently drawn conclusion that uneven and combined development is usefully understood as a transhistoric general abstraction that potentially offers the basis of a transhistoric theory of the international. Instead it questions the value of transhistoric categories for Marxist theory and pursues the argument that uneven and combined development is best understood within the relations, processes and tendencies of the capitalist mode of production, arguing that capitalist social relations and political forms are historically unique in their capacity to generate both combination and unevenness.     

关于中越关系及南宁-谅山-河内-海防经济走廊建设的一些看法

我十分高兴能来到凭祥参加这个非常有意义的研讨会.我将对南宁-谅山-河内-海防经济走廊的建设和中越经济关系发表一些看法.     

feminism and futurity: revisiting Marge Piercy’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Woman on the Edge of Time</Emphasis>

This article considers the question of feminist futurity through Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). While dominant readings of this novel have focused on its relationship to the feminist utopian genre and feminist theory from the 1970s, this essay aims to critically reframe the novel through contemporary feminist theorising on time and futurity. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory that suggests that the future might most productively be figured through more nuanced and renewed engagements with the past, I argue that readings of Piercy’s novel that frame it only through its contemporary moment obscure the novel’s critique of singular, linear models of time. The novel represents the future through the themes of loss, mourning and haunting, which I argue resist a model of time that moves linearly from past to future and instead bring the past and future into complex relation with each other. In this regard, Piercy’s novel is read as representing a form of feminist futurity that engages with progress in time as necessarily uneven, discontinuous and fractured, speaking to contemporary demands for a feminist futurity that might require more nuanced accounts of the past.     

Three decades of agrarian reform in Zimbabwe

This article examines the empirical facts about the actual outcome of Zimbabwe's land reform, based on years of field research. It shows that the popular assumption about failed land reform in Zimbabwe is wrong on several counts: the character of Zimbabwe's land reform has been redistributive, and the extent of this has been wide enough to trigger significant progressive changes in the agrarian structure. This is despite some elites having benefited from the process and foreign-owned agro-industrial estates and conservancies being retained. The distribution of land among land reform beneficiaries has been relatively uneven, with some receiving larger land allocations than others, and this in turn influenced the differentiated access of these groups to farming services and infrastructure. Yet the productivity of small producers has grown slowly with output escalating recently. Three decades of land reform has recast land-based social relations in important ways, with the poor gaining more than previously believed.