Fair Treatment in a Divided Society: A Bottom‐up Assessment of Bureaucratic Encounters in Latvia

In real‐world bureaucratic encounters the Weberian goal of perfect impersonal administration is not completely attained and unfairness sometimes results. Theories of bias attribute unfairness to social characteristics such as income, education, ethnicity, and gender. A random theory characterizes unfairness as the result of idiosyncratic conditions that give everyone an equal probability of being treated unfairly regardless of their social characteristics. In Latvia, bias would be expected on grounds of ethnicity as well as social characteristics, since its population is divided politically by citizenship, language, and ethnicity as well as socioeconomic characteristics. Survey data from the New Baltic Barometer shows that a majority of both Latvians and Russians expect fair treatment in bureaucratic encounters and multivariate statistical analysis confirms the random hypothesis. Insofar as unfair treatment occurs it tends to be distributed according to idiosyncratic circumstances rather than being the systematic fate of members of a particular social group. The evidence indicates that the professional norms and training of service deliverers are more important in bureaucratic encounters than individual attributes of claimants, even in a clearly divided society.     

Three conditions under which experiments and observational studies produce comparable causal estimates: New findings from within‐study comparisons

This paper analyzes 12 recent within‐study comparisons contrasting causal estimates from a randomized experiment with those from an observational study sharing the same treatment group. The aim is to test whether different causal estimates result when a counterfactual group is formed, either with or without random assignment, and when statistical adjustments for selection are made in the group from which random assignment is absent. We identify three studies comparing experiments and regression‐discontinuity (RD) studies. They produce quite comparable causal estimates at points around the RD cutoff. We identify three other studies where the quasi‐experiment involves careful intact group matching on the pretest. Despite the logical possibility of hidden bias in this instance, all three cases also reproduce their experimental estimates, especially if the match is geographically local. We then identify two studies where the treatment and nonrandomized comparison groups manifestly differ at pretest but where the selection process into treatment is completely or very plausibly known. Here too, experimental results are recreated. Two of the remaining studies result in correspondent experimental and nonexperimental results under some circumstances but not others, while two others produce different experimental and nonexperimental estimates, though in each case the observational study was poorly designed and analyzed. Such evidence is more promising than what was achieved in past within‐study comparisons, most involving job training. Reasons for this difference are discussed. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Mortgaging Security for Economic Gain: U.S. Arms Policy in an Insecure World

Similar to other consumer sectors of the global economy, the transfer of advanced conventional weapons and military technologies has entered the globalization process, a process that has qualitatively and quantitatively altered the composition and structure of U.S. national security policymaking. By injecting the decisionmaking process governing arms transfers into the global market place, U.S. policy makers must now reconcile maintaining economic competitiveness within the global system without jeopardizing U.S. national security interests. By subordinating national security interests to global economic imperatives, U.S. decisionmakers are at risk of mortgaging the political, societal, and security welfare of its citizenry for profit.     

Military Power and Food Security: A Cross-National Analysis of Less-Developed Countries, 1970–1990

Addressing the long-standing debate over the social impact of military power and recent discussions of military-induced famine, we conduct a panel analysis of aggregate food supply and child hunger rates in 75–79 less-developed countries (LDCs). Distinguishing between militarization , as the growth of military resources, and militarism , as the use of military force to handle political conflicts, we show that militarization is both beneficial and detrimental to food security, whereas militarism is consistently detrimental. Arms imports and associated increased military spending plus praetorianism and military repression reduce food security, whereas increased military participation and arms production boost food security. Increased food supply reduces child hunger and is largely confined to the more developed of the LDCs. These military power effects show net economic growth, which "trickles down" to improve food supply and reduce child hunger among the more developed LDCs, reflecting the growth of global economic inequality. Contrary to views that see militarization as a single unified process, use of armed force is not strongly rooted in either praetorianism or militarization.     

Killing Time: The World Politics of Civil War Duration, 1820–1992

Policymakers often trumpet the potential for third parties to stop the killing associated with civil wars, yet third parties as strategic actors also have incentives to encourage longer civil wars. We argue that in order to assess the influence of third parties on civil war duration, it is necessary to consider the interdependent nature of third party interventions as they are distributed across the set of civil war combatants. We also argue that it is important to consider the geopolitical context in which civil wars occur, rather than focusing solely on characteristics internal to these conflicts. To test our hypotheses about the impact of third parties and geopolitical factors on civil war duration, we rely on event history analysis and a sample of 152 civil wars for the period 1820–1992. We find empirical support for the idea that extremely long civil wars correspond to the equitable distribution of third party interventions—stalemates prolong wars. The analysis also indicates that separatist civil wars and ongoing civil wars in states proximate to the civil war state result in civil wars of longer duration. Finally, we find that when third parties raise the stakes of the conflict by engaging in the use of militarized force against the civil war state, the duration of these conflicts is reduced. In general, our analysis underscores the importance of modeling the interdependent and dynamic aspects of third party intervention as well as the world politics of civil wars when forecasting their duration and formulating policy.     

forbidden tastes: queering the palate in anglophone Indian fiction

We examine pregnant women’s experiences with routinised obstetric ultrasound as entailed in their antenatal care during planned pregnancies. This paper highlights the ambiguity of ultrasound technology in the constitution of maternal–foetal connections. Our analysis focusses on Australian women’s experiences of the ontological, aesthetic and epistemological ambiguities afforded by ultrasound. We argue that these ambiguities offer possibilities for connecting to the foetus in ways that maintain a kind of unknowability; they afford an openness and ethical responsiveness irrespective of the future of the foetus. This suggests that elucidating women’s experience has implications for theorising ethics across maternal–foetal relations and, more specifically, for the ‘moral pioneering’ (Rapp, 2000) that reproductive technologies can demand of women. Moral pioneering cannot be reduced to moments or processes of decision-making; it must allow for greater recognition of the affective commitments entailed in and incited by ultrasound. Furthermore, focussing on experiences of the ambiguity of ultrasound allows for understanding the ways in which affectivity circulates across domains commonly understood as medical or social, public or private. In doing so, it contributes to undermining a series of tensions that currently shape feminist analysis of obstetric ultrasound, often at the expense of the experience of women.