Gender Differences in Resistance to Schooling: The Role of Dynamic Peer-Influence and Selection Processes

Boys engage in notably higher levels of resistance to schooling than girls. While scholars argue that peer processes contribute to this gender gap, this claim has not been tested with longitudinal quantitative data. This study fills this lacuna by examining the role of dynamic peer-selection and influence processes in the gender gap in resistance to schooling (i.e., arguing with teachers, skipping class, not putting effort into school, receiving punishments at school, and coming late to class) with two-wave panel data. We expect that, compared to girls, boys are more exposed and more responsive to peers who exhibit resistant behavior. We estimate hybrid models on 5448 students from 251 school classes in Sweden (14–15 years, 49% boys), and stochastic actor-based models (SIENA) on a subsample of these data (2480 students in 98 classes; 49% boys). We find that boys are more exposed to resistant friends than girls, and that adolescents are influenced by the resistant behavior of friends. These peer processes do not contribute to a widening of the gender gap in resistance to schooling, yet they contribute somewhat to the persistence of the initial gender gap. Boys are not more responsive to the resistant behavior of friends than girls. Instead, girls are influenced more by the resistant behavior of lower status friends than boys. This explains to some extent why boys increase their resistance to schooling more over time. All in all, peer-influence and selection processes seem to play a minor role in gender differences in resistance to schooling. These findings nuance under investigated claims that have been made in the literature.     

Getting to Sweden,Part II: Breaking with Corruption in the Nineteenth Century

Issues about corruption and other forms of ‘bad government’ have become central in large parts of the social sciences. An unresolved question, however, is how countries can solve the issue of systemic corruption. In this article, based on Elinor Ostrom's theory of common pool resource appropriation, a new theoretical model for explaining this type of institutional change is developed. Sweden during the nineteenth century is used as an illustration of the model by showing how the country made a transition from being largely patrimonial, nepotistic and corrupt to a modern, Weberian, efficient and impartial state structure. Building upon a companion article about the importance of losing a war as a precondition for breaking systematic corruption, this article stresses the importance of three additional factors in Sweden: previous changes in courts and the legal system; recognition of the problem by the main contemporary political actors as shown in debates in the Diet; and the new liberal ideology that made an important impact on the Swedish political scene during this period.     

Disability and Its Correlates in a Developing Country Context: Evidence from Multiple Datasets and Measures

Disability profiles showing how the magnitude of disability differs across subgroups of a population are important tools in designing effective policies. Yet little is known about the sensitivity of the correlates of disability to the way disability is measured. This study uses an unprecedentedly large amount of nationally representative survey data from Indonesia. Based on 13 different datasets that were collected between 2000 and 2014, and which together contain disability information on more than 1 billion individuals, we assess how robust disability profiles are to measurement issues. Our findings suggest that irrespective of the dataset and measure used, disability is disproportionally more common among the poor, the elderly and rural areas in the country. Hence, Indonesian policies on poverty reduction, population ageing, and rural development should pay particular attention to how they reach and affect persons with disabilities. Our research further reveals that the gender gap in disability is highly sensitive to measurement issues with different datasets and measures reaching different conclusions about the size and direction of the gap.     

Belgian civil servants in the European Union: A tale of two cultures

This article analyses the performance of Belgian civil servants in the working groups of the European Council of Ministers. If one takes the evaluation by their peers and the success of their networking efforts as criteria, one has to conclude that they perform comparatively well. This is all the more surprising because these ‘Euro‐Belgian’ civil servants have been recruited and socialised into the vertical (bureaucratic) networks of the Belgian civil service before being transferred to the horizontal (negotiation) networks of the working groups. Their professional routines are of little use when making the transition and neither is their political culture, which proves to be ill adapted to their new work setting. In spite of these cultural and organisational handicaps they perform as well, sometimes even better than other civil servants in the working groups. Why? This question might be of some relevance to the functioning of the growing internationalised administration of the European Union.     

Email Fraud: Language,Technology, and the Indexicals of Globalisation

This paper investigates a corpus of email messages known as “419 scams”: a form of financial fraud in which huge offers of money are being made to people provided they pass on bank details and other personal information to the perpetrators. This kind of message presents us with a typical instance of “globalized” communication: they are produced in the margins of the world (the term “419 scam” is Nigerian) and sent to other places; they are electronically mediated; and they are written in varieties of “world languages”, mostly English. In the messages, authors claim particular identities and relationships, and have to do so using specific, generically regimented forms of communication. Investigating such forms yields a complex view of what it takes to communicate in a globalized environment: at least three different forms of communicative competence seem to be blended. First, authors require technological competence, the capacity to control, explore and exploit the communicative opportunities offered by global email systems. Second, they require cultural competence: they need some awareness of genres and genre expectations among their addressees in order to stand a chance of success. And thirdly, they need linguistic competence: the capacity to actually produce linguistic messages that are congruent with the projected identities and relationships in the transaction. We see that whereas the first two forms of competence appear to be well developed, the third is often problematic, yielding rich indexical signals pointing towards fraud. The genre of email fraud thus yields insights into the changing nature of communication in the age of globalization.     

The socio‐economic structure of European democracies

The article presents the findings of a factor analysis concerning socio‐economic structure and socio‐economic development in sixteen European democracies. The socio‐economic structure of these nations consists of three dimensions: level of affluence, level of industrialisation and degree of urbanisation. A prominent feature in the change of the contemporary social structure of Western Europe is the weakening of the relationship between affluence and industrialisation. Statements about the implications for political life of socio‐economic structure and socio‐economic development entering into theories about modernisation and social mobilisation may be clarified and tested only if socio‐economic concepts are made operational in terms of a set of indicators, the interaction between which can be stated by means of factor analysis and used in the construction of indices.     

More Money,Fewer Problems? Cross-Level Effects of Economic Deprivation on Political Representation

While equal political representation of all citizens is a fundamental democratic goal, it is hampered empirically in a multitude of ways. This study examines how the societal level of economic inequality affects the representation of relatively poor citizens by parties and governments. Using CSES survey data for citizens’ policy preferences and expert placements of political parties, empirical evidence is found that in economically more unequal societies, the party system represents the preferences of relatively poor citizens worse than in more equal societies. This moderating effect of economic equality is also found for policy congruence between citizens and governments, albeit slightly less clear-cut.     

Beyond ‘Terrorism’ and ‘State Hegemony’: assessing the Islamist mainstream in Egypt and Malaysia

International networks of Islamic ‘terrorism’ have served as the most popular explanation to describe the phenomenon of political Islam since the 11 September attacks. This paper argues that both the self-proclaimed doctrinal Islam of the militants and Western perceptions of a homogeneous Islamist threat need to be deconstructed in order to discover the often ambiguous manifestations of ‘official’ and ‘opposition’ Islam, of modernity and conservatism. As a comparison of two Islamic countries, Egypt and Malaysia, which both claim a leading role in their respective regions, shows, moderate Islamic groups have had a considerable impact on processes of democratisation and the emergence of civil society during the quarter century since the ‘Islamic resurgence’. Shared experiences like coalition building and active participation within the political system demonstrate the influence and importance of groups such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Youth Movement of Malaysia (abim) or the Islamic Party of Malaysia (pas). These groups have shaped the political landscape to a much larger extent than the current pre-occupation with the ‘terrorist threat’ suggests. The gradual development of a ‘culture of dialogue’ has rather revealed new approaches towards political participation and democracy at the grassroots level.     

The Geopolitics of Water in the Middle East: fantasies and realities

Most expert and public discourse on Middle Eastern water politics holds that water scarcities are of great, if often under-recognised, geopolitical importance. Pessimists and optimists alike tend to assume that water has, or soon will have, profound geopolitical implications. In this paper I argue to the contrary. Specifically, I contend that water problems should neither be understood in naturalistic nor in liberal?–?technical terms, but instead as questions of political economy; that water is structurally insignificant within the political economy of the modern Middle East; that in consequence water is generally unimportant as a source of inter-state conflict and co-operation; and that, notwithstanding this, water supplies are a crucial site and cause of local conflicts in many parts of the region. I submit also that given the worsening state of economic development within the Middle East, these local conflict dynamics are likely to further deteriorate.