Ethics by Design: The Impact of Form of Government on Municipal Corruption

While trust in government at all levels is at an all‐time low, actual corruption at the municipal level has been declining. One factor often credited with this decline is the introduction of the council‐manager form of government. One of the key reasons the council‐manager form was created in the early 1900s was to act as an antidote to the corruption prevalent in the big‐city machine politics of the era. Despite this, no one has tested whether the council‐manager form has in fact influenced the decline in corruption rates. This article uses a rare events logit model to analyze corruption convictions in municipalities between 1990 and 2010 to determine which factors, including form of government, affect the probability that a corrupt act will occur. The findings indicate that municipalities with the council‐manager form are 57 percent less likely to have corruption convictions than municipalities with the mayor‐council form.     

Rejecting the gift horse: international politics of disaster aid refusal

This is a study of the increasingly common phenomenon of developing states refusing some or all international aid following serious natural disaster. Aid refusal by the Myanmar junta following a 2008 cyclone is only the most recent prominent example of this practice, and I present here an original dataset of all cases of disaster aid refusal occurring between 1982 and 2006. Through quantitative analysis, I show that although poorer states are indeed less likely to refuse aid than wealthier states, recipient need does not alone drive the decision-making process. Nor are autocratic regimes any more or less likely to refuse aid than democratic regimes. Rather, just as recently transitioned states have been shown by other scholars to be particularly likely to engage in military conflict, I find that they are also particularly likely to publicly and explicitly refuse aid and insist on their own ability to handle disaster relief and recovery. Aid refusal, much like aid provision, is at its core a political act.     

Mapping the road to development: a methodology for scaling up participation in policy processes

Understanding local variability in context and mobilising local participation to define development agendas are widely accepted development strategies. There remain, however, significant challenges to the systematic and effective inclusion of local communities and households. Projeto MAPLAN, a pilot project in Ceará, Brazil, is a joint effort of the public sector and civil society designed to create a process of participatory development planning which integrates local-level contextual variations. In this effort, the use of a Participatory Geographic Information System (PGIS) stimulates the participation of community members in analysing their needs, goals, and priorities. The visualisation of these factors through easily understood maps facilitates communication and contributes to a democratic and transparent planning process, thus permitting the articulation of local priorities with the state-level planning apparatus. MAPLAN represents part of a shifting paradigm for rural development planning in the state and provides the tools for the effective inclusion of citizen voice in development policy.     

Parenting in Emerging Adulthood: An Examination of Parenting Clusters and Correlates

The changing nature of the transition to adulthood in western societies, such as the United States, may be extending the length of time parents are engaged in “parenting” activities. However, little is known about different approaches parents take in their interactions with their emerging-adult children. Hence, this study attempted to identify different clusters of parents based on the extent to which they exhibited both extremes of control (psychological control, punishment, verbal hostility, indulgence) and responsiveness (knowledge, warmth, induction, autonomy granting), and to examine how combinations of parenting were related to emerging adult children’s relational and individual outcomes (e.g. parent–child relationship quality, drinking, self-worth, depression). The data were collected from 403 emerging adults (M age = 19.89, SD = 1.78, range = 18–26, 62% female) and at least one of their parents (287 fathers and 317 mothers). Eighty-four percent of participants reported being European American, 6% Asian American, 4% African American, 3% Latino, and 4% reported being of other ethnicities. Data were analyzed using hierarchical cluster analysis, separately for mothers and fathers, and identified three similar clusters of parents which we labeled as uninvolved (low on all aspects of parenting), controlling-indulgent (high on both extremes of control and low on all aspects of responsiveness), and authoritative (high on responsiveness and low on control). A fourth cluster was identified for both mothers and fathers and was labeled as inconsistent for mothers (mothers were above the mean on both extremes of control and on responsiveness) and average for fathers (fathers were at the mean on all eight aspects of parenting). The discussion focuses on how each of these clusters effectively distinguished between child outcomes.     

Breaking gridlock: the determinants of health policy change in Congress

Prior to the 2010 health care reforms, scholars often commented that health policy making in Congress was mired in political gridlock, that reforms were far more likely to fail than to succeed, and that the path forward was unclear. In light of recent events, new narratives are being advanced. In formulating these assessments, scholars of health politics tend to analyze individual major reform proposals to determine why they succeeded or failed and what lessons could be drawn for the future. Taking a different approach, we examine all health policies proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1973 and 2002. We analyze these bills' fates and the effectiveness of their sponsors in guiding these proposals through Congress. Setting these proposed policies against a baseline of policy advancements in other areas, we demonstrate that health policy making has indeed been far more gridlocked than policy making in most other areas. We then isolate some of the causes of this gridlock, as well as some of the conditions that have helped to bring about health policy change.     

Applying Functional Analysis to the Case of a Malfunctioning Education System: Addressing System Complexity and Tangled Causes

A 4-year decline culminating in a collapse of school leaver exam results sent shockwaves through the Tanzanian state education system. Students and citizens attribute the collapse to visible deficiencies in classroom teaching, which is the product of a complex, government-administered system of teacher training colleges, schools, schools inspectorate, an examinations council, and a curriculum development institution. A model of the system is constructed and ‘interrogated’ to establish a research framework of key questions and propositions for functional analysis and evaluation of the system.     

Horror Films Face Political Evils in Everyday Life

Studies of cognition show that Americans get much of their political information from audiovisual media. Therefore, attention to popular films can help us learn how genre conventions communicate politics. The popular genre of horror uses subtexts to help people face political evils in their everyday lives. Many of the evils lately concern the politics of communication, and this is evident in a wide range of horror films, recently including Phone Booth (2003), The Ring (2002), and The Mothman Prophecies (2001).