Dealing with natural disasters

Over the past two decades, natural disasters have severely hit the Southeast Asian region causing dramatic environmental, economic and social consequences. Through the lens of Beck's risk society framework and the theory of reflexive modernization, this article attempts at empirically taking stock of how the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is addressing disaster risk through the creation of new regional institutions and mechanisms. In particular, it argues that the accumulation of the experience of catastrophes is leading ASEAN members towards the development of new precautionary initiatives to deal with disasters, and to forge a new way forward for the promotion of disaster cooperation and joint emergency response. The article is divided into five sections, which will only consider initiatives endorsed within the ASEAN framework. The first introduces risk societies as forms of modern societies and of the insecurities of the present world. In the second section attention is drawn to natural disasters as a paradigmatic example of Beck's risk society. The third section explores how ASEAN normative governance is evolving to include the issue of disaster management within its security and social agenda. Then the main institutional and operational innovations and tools through which ASEAN is preparing to deal with disaster risk are explored. Finally, the article suggests that despite ASEAN overall institutional innovations, the practice of cooperation still is effected by several factors, above all the lack of adequate resources and the difficulty of reconciling principles of solidarity with national sovereignty, which hinder ASEAN effectiveness in this area.     

The 2015 Catalan Election: The Independence Bid at the Polls

This paper examines the context, campaign and main determinants of how Catalans voted in the 2015 regional election. The elections were exceptional because the incumbent and the remaining Catalan nationalist parties framed the contest as a de facto referendum on secession. In this paper we scrutinise whether attitudes towards independence affected vote choice and whether they eclipsed other traditional significant vote-driving factors such as the state of the economy or government performance. Results show that, although the independence issue became a major determinant of vote choice, the elections did not become a pure plebiscite on secession, since voters also used their vote to hold the regional government accountable for its past performance.     

Kenya's foreign policy in context (1963–2015)

Kenya matters regionally and globally. It is the economic powerhouse of East Africa and a long-standing hub for multilateral diplomacy; its positioning in a turbulent region has fashioned its profile as an anchor state in African peace and security. Until recently, Kenya's foreign policy orientation has situated it as a benign regional leader, but pressing developments in the regional and international environments have edged it towards a more assertive foreign policy position. This study constitutes a multilevel review of Kenya's foreign policy in the period 1963–2015, beginning with Jomo Kenyatta through to the current president, Uhuru Kenyatta. After evaluating contexts pertinent to the analysis of Kenya’s foreign policy, the fundamental principles, objectives and pillars of the current foreign policy are unpacked.     

The Impact of News Photos on Support for Military Action

Drawing on two experiments embedded in online surveys, this article examines the impact of news photos on support for military action. In 2011, respondents were asked about support for ongoing military involvement in Afghanistan while being randomly exposed to one of two photos—one of a soldier with a child, the other of a soldier with a gun. The former photo increased expressed support for war; and the effect was greater for those who self-identify as being very interested in international affairs. Three years later, a follow-up experiment was fielded that looked both at the past intervention in Afghanistan and ongoing interventions in Syria; results were very similar. Both experiments speak to the potentially profound role of mass media in generating support (or not) for foreign military engagements, and the increased impact of frames on those who are more attentive to the issue domain.     

Is President Obama’s Race Chronically Accessible? Racial Priming in the 2012 Presidential Election

A vast literature indicates that racial animosity has a pervasive influence on the public’s evaluations of U.S. President Barack Obama. Can political communications enhance and/or defuse the link between White Americans’ racial attitudes and evaluations of Barack Obama? In this article, we report the results of an experiment conducted in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign which examines the effect of political rhetoric on the extent to which evaluations of Barack Obama are racialized. Drawing from research on attitude strength and pretreatment effects in experimental studies, we argue that the use of racial appeals in the pretreatment environment and the strength of citizens’ preexisting attitudes toward the incumbent president may produce a downward bias in average estimates of racial priming effects toward President Obama. After accounting for individual differences in the propensity to form strong attitudes with need to evaluate, we observe substantial effects of campaign rhetoric in priming racial attitudes toward President Obama, especially among individuals who are low in the need to evaluate and who tend to have more malleable political attitudes. We conclude by discussing implications for research on racial priming and the politics of racial intolerance in evaluations of Barack Obama.     

The patriarchy index: a comparative study of power relations across historical Europe

This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new ‘master variable’ for cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This indexed composite measure, which the authors call the Index of Patriarchy, incorporates a range of variables related to familial behaviour, including nuptiality and age at marriage, living arrangements, post-marital residence, power relations within domestic groups, the position of the aged, and the sex of the offspring. The index combines all these items, with each being given equal weight in the calculation of the final score, which represents the varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality (‘patriarchal bias’) in different societal and familial settings. In order to explore the comparative advantages of the index, the authors use information from census and census-like microdata for 91 regions of historical Europe covering more than 700,000 individuals living in 143,000 domestic groups, from the Atlantic to the Urals. The index allows the authors to identify regions with different degrees of patriarchy within a single country, across the regions of a single country, or across and within many broader zones of historical Europe. The unprecedented patterning of the many elements of power relations and agency contained in the index generates new ways of accounting for both the geographies and the histories of family organization across the European landmass.     

Mosaic: recovering surviving census records and reconstructing the familial history of Europe

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data on historical family systems, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. Until lately, however, scholars interested in historical global family variation had to rely on simplified and often ahistorical world-scale classifications of family systems by world geographic regions. This article communicates Mosaic to the scholarly community – one of the largest infrastructural projects in the history of historical demography and family sociology. The article provides a brief history of the project, a discussion of the main issues involved in creating the database (including sampling and representativeness), and Mosaic's data structure and coverage. In the remainder of the article, the authors provide an overview of methodological and research opportunities that the project can offer to scholars, showing how the most pertinent problems of historical family demography can be tackled in more systematic ways than previously.     

区域道路交通事故紧急救援服务体系的构建

近年我国道路交通安全的总体趋势虽然在转好,但仍然呈现出交通事故总量大、死亡人数多的特点。为切实改善这种状况,应借鉴国外经验,在我国构建区域道路交通事故紧急救援服务体系,提高交通事故信息传递、现场急救和急救转运等方面的综合反应和处理能力。     

区域创新网络结构、功能与实证研究

区域创新网络的结构是创新主体和创新环境。区域创新网络可以为网络成员提供一种相互作用和互动的平台,不同创新主体资源通过创新网络,实现相互合作,优势互补,资源共享,产生协同效应。改革开放以来,山东省的网络技术创新能力有了显著提高,但是同发达省相比,仍然存在一定差距。提高山东创新网络绩效,需要加大激励力度,鼓励企业提高自主创新能力;努力提高高校和研究院所的自主创新能力;加强区域内创新主体之间合作创新,提高区域信息流强度。     

具有中国特色的妇女运动实践探索——"双学双比"活动评估报告

":双学双比"作为一个具有中国特色的农村妇女发展活动,已经走过近20年的风雨历程,成为持续时间最长、参与范围最广、涉及部门和人数最多的农村妇女发展项目,积累了丰富经验,产生了深远影响。本报告力图对"双学双比"活动进行评估,科学总结这一活动的特点与成效,客观分析现存的问题和挑战,在此基础上,对"双学双比"活动的可持续发展提出有针对性的对策建议。