So Close,but so Far? The Davies Commission and the Contested Politics of UK Airport Expansion

Aviation expansion and the construction of a third runway at Heathrow airport is firmly back on the political agenda. Yet, the stark fact remains that a growing list of British governments has been unable to engineer a partial or temporary policy settlement in aviation. In exploring the challenges of reaching such a settlement, this article characterises the shifting and contested political and policy contexts of UK aviation. It begins by exploring the ‘wicked issue’ of aviation expansion before foregrounding how the politics of air travel is riven by competing policy frames, fragmented governance and the absence of gatekeepers. It argues that the Davies Commission and its efforts to remove aviation from the domain of partisan politics provided little more than a temporary respite for government. It thus concludes by questioning whether the May government's expansion proposals will succeed this time around, outlining how the contributions in this collection address the themes and issues of this overriding policy puzzle.     

Domestic labour,masculinity and social change: insights from working-class young men’s transitions to adulthood

Abstract

Drawing on a seven-year longitudinal qualitative study in England, this paper presents evidence of how engagement with housework and childcare is regular and normalized for contemporary working-class young adult men. I explain this development with reference to inclusive masculinity theory, but supplement this by incorporating Mannheim’s concept of social generation, as recently adopted by scholars of youth sociology. The paper thus further augments other research that has documented considerable change in the construction and performance of contemporary masculinities – such as an opening up of gendered behaviours and a decrease (but not erasure) of homophobia – among young men across multiple contexts in English-speaking countries.     

How Social and Mass Media Relate to Youth’s Self-Sexualization: Taking a Cross-National Perspective on Rewarded Appearance Ideals

Although media exposure has been related to cognitive preoccupation with appearance, research rarely investigated adolescents’ behavioral self-sexualization. To address this gap, the present study among 12- to 16-year-olds (N?=?1527; 50.2% girls) in Austria, Belgium, Spain, and South-Korea (1) investigates whether different types of media use relate to self-sexualization, (2) explores the explanatory value of rewarded appearance ideals, and (3) considers culture and gender as moderating factors. Despite cultural variation, a general trend of increasing self-sexualization with social media use and magazine reading appeared across the countries. Moreover, women’s magazine reading and rewards were related to self-sexualization among all the girls across the countries, which suggests that girls may be more vulnerable to the examined effects. Overall, this study provides a better understanding of the unique contribution of specific media genres to youth’s self-sexualization and points at the importance of social media use in girls’ and boys’ engagement in sexualizing appearance behaviors across four countries.     

Pacifists and Revenge-Seekers in Response to Unambiguous Peer Provocation

In order to better understand why some children retaliate when they feel provoked and others do not, the present study identified “pacifistically-oriented” children who made negative interpretations in response to unambiguous provocations, yet did not endorse revenge goals, and compared them to “revenge-seeking” children who also made negative interpretations but did endorse revenge goals. Groups were identified based on seventh graders’ (N?=?367; 54.77% male; 22.89% racial/ethnic minority) responses to hypothetical situations in which a peer excluded and insulted them. Comparing these groups revealed that Pacifists endorsed relationship-maintaining goals and emotion regulation goals more highly than Revenge-Seekers. Revenge-Seekers reported more anger and endorsed beliefs about negative reciprocity and aggression being legitimate more highly than Pacifists. Additionally, Revenge-Seekers were more disrespect sensitive than were Pacifists, based on a measure of vigilance for signs of disrespect and expectations that others would disrespect them. Together these findings point to social-cognitive and emotion-related processes that may inhibit revenge-seeking in unambiguous provocation situations, even when children interpret the peer’s behavior quite negatively.     

Racial animosity and political party partisanship in South Africa: the case of the African National Congress and the Black African majority

As it is in many countries, racial rhetoric is a feature of South African national government elections. The use of such rhetoric provokes the question, how much is political party support in the country driven by interracial animosities? Using the nationally representative public opinion dataset, the South African Social Attitudes Survey, this article looks at party closeness to the African National Congress (ANC) amongst the black African population. The ANC is one of the oldest and most powerful political parties on the African continent and currently dominates South Africa’s parliamentary government. Constructing four indexes of racial attitudes and behaviours, the article investigates whether partisanship with the ruling party can be predicted by racial animosity. The period under investigation is 2010–2014. Bivariate and multivariate quantitative techniques are employed to test the relationship between ANC partisanship and racial animosity. The results of this investigation show that racial enmity in the country is troublingly widespread. Public opinion analysis, however, found no correlation between racial acrimony and ANC partisanship. Other factors are driving black African identification with the country’s ruling party. The implications of these results for the study for political party support in South Africa are discussed and future avenues of research presented.     

A nexus between labour movement and labour movement: the Knights of Labor and the financial side of global labour history

The rise of global and transnational labour history has revolutionised the study of working-class movements and individuals and the global forces that shaped them. Some of the more mundane considerations of these movements, however, have so far been neglected in this rapidly growing field. One of the most important of these considerations was money, or in other words the financial affairs of transnational movements such as trade unions and political parties. This article is a call to write the financial side of global labour history. It focuses on a global working-class movement that is itself often neglected in the historical literature, the Knights of Labor, and their outposts in Britain and Ireland. It examines the history of the British and Irish Knights through the prism of their financial history, so far as we can reconstruct it from the scanty sources that are available. This article argues that their financial ties with the United States and a series of embezzlement cases became major causes of their decline and, ultimately, their dissolution. Finally, this article draws conclusions from the financial misadventures of the British and Irish Knights of Labor that are relevant to the study of other international working-class movements and to the writing of global labour history in general.     

The Impact of Natural Resources: Survey of Recent Quantitative Evidence

Abstract

The cross-country empirical evidence for the natural resource curse is ample, but unfortunately fraught with econometric difficulties. A recent wave of studies on measuring the impact of natural resource windfalls on the economy exploits novel datasets such as giant oil discoveries to identify effects of windfalls, uses natural experiments and within-country econometric analysis, and estimates local impacts. These studies offer more hope in the search of quantitative evidence.     

Adolescent Agentic Orientations: Contemporaneous Family Influence,Parental Biography and Intergenerational Development

Agentic orientations developed in adolescence have been linked to better health, well-being, and achievements in the years following. This study examines longitudinal parental influences on the development of adolescent children’s agentic orientations, captured by the core constructs of mastery beliefs and generalized life expectations. Drawing on multigenerational panel data from the United States (1991–2011), the study examines contemporaneous family factors, but also how parental biographies (their own transition to adulthood) and parents’ own adolescent agentic orientations influence their adolescent children. Study adolescents were 46% male, 52% white, and 15.6 years old on average. The findings indicate that parents’ early orientations and experiences in the transition to adulthood have little effect on their children’s mastery beliefs, but that parents’ generalized life expectations (in adolescence) and having married before having the child were associated with their children’s more optimistic life expectations. Contemporaneous family income and optimistic expectations among parents-as-adolescents were somewhat substitutable as positive influences on adolescents’ optimistic life expectations. The findings contribute to our understanding of intergenerational and over-time influences on these key adolescent orientations.