Inter‐level Trust in a Multilevel Political System

The aim of this article is to study political representatives in a multilevel government system and their level of political trust in relation to institutions in their own and other tiers of government. The results show that two factors are essential for understanding variations in their trust: Representatives tend to trust institutions in other tiers less than those in their own tier (the tier‐association effect), and they trust institutions more where their own party is in a governing position (the home‐team effect). Of the two, the home‐team effect is by far the most dominant factor. Multiple mandates serve to increase inter‐level trust, but divided loyalties possibly make representatives with multiple mandates less trusting towards political institutions in their own tiers than more partisan single mandate representatives. The study builds on data from surveys conducted among all elected representatives in Sweden in 2012 (local and regional councillors) and 2014 (national MPs).     

Maintaining Perspective on the Economic Issues of Today

As the new administration takes office it is important to maintain some perspective on the economicchallenges facing the nation. The situation is far better today than when President Obama took office in2009 and 2013. Unemployment is close to pre-Great Recession levels, incomes are rising and poverty ratesfalling. We face economic challenges but the most important ones are not international trade or immigration.Sluggish economic growth, a fiscal crisis in our entitlement programs, high inequality in incomes andwealth, and climate change are what should demand our attention.     

How much detail do we need to see? High and very high resolution photography,GAMBIT, and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory

This article examines the requirements for high and very high resolution photography of the USSR and other denied areas during the Cold War. It discusses the partial success of GAMBIT-1 and the much greater success of GAMBIT-3 beginning in 1966 in acquiring the former. The article reviews the development of the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) in the same period to collect very high resolution photography, the rationale for it, and the major technical and financial problems the program soon experienced. It then describes the debate beginning in 1968 over the value of this imagery considering the MOL’s costs and the growing success of GAMBIT-3, and these and the other factors that led President Richard Nixon to cancel the program the following year.     

Diversity in times of austerity: documenting resistance in the academy

What happens to feminism in the university is parallel to what happens to feminism in other venues under economic restructuring: while the impoverished nation is forced to cut social services and thereby send women back to the hierarchy of the family, the academy likewise reduces its footprint in interdisciplinary structures and contains academic feminists back to the hierarchy of departments and disciplines. When the family and the department become powerful arbiters of cultural values, women and feminist academics by and large suffer: they either accept a diminished role or are pushed to compete in a system they recognize as antithetical to the foundational values of feminist priorities of social justice. Collaborative work to nurture diversity and interdisciplinarity does not register as individual accomplishment. This paper considers the necessity of this type of academic work to further the vision of a society committed to the collective values espoused by feminism and other areas in social justice.     

Feminism,activism and academe: a personal reflection

How the political project of feminism entered academe and how it became an educational project is the subject of this article. It is based upon personal reflection about undertaking the study for a book, Feminism, Gender and Universities: politics, passion and pedagogies. In the book, three successive generations or cohorts of feminists in academia are discussed, starting with those who are now considered ‘second-wave feminists’. In this article the notion of ‘second-wave feminism’ is examined and also how successive cohorts see feminist knowledge in relation to their own education through doctorates or wider forms of learning.