Low fertility in premodern China: Positive,preventive or proactive behaviour?

There has taken place recently the re-emergence among specialists of Chinese population history of a debate that started in the 1980's. This debate deals with the reasons for relatively low Chinese fertility in the 19th and early 20th century, and focuses on the question of whether proactive behaviour or a low standard of living was responsible for the low fertility. In this article we summarize the debate and tackle two issues. First, we summarize the biological evidence for the relationship between food and fertility. It turns out that some studies support the existence of this relationship, while other authors contest it. Even if fertility and malnourishment are related, one has to prove that the Chinese population was poor enough to influence fertility negatively. Both contemporary writers and anthropometric studies oppose the recent revisionist view that Chinese fertility was not determined by positive checks. On both issues the debate is still unsettled. The article looks at the reasons for this and advocates a less polemical and more constructive approach.     

Free and unfree labor in Qing China

Though internal migration in China during the Qing era (1644–1911) was mostly unrestricted, the government tightly controlled the movement of peasants who worked state lands in frontier regions and certain other locations. Such peasants accounted for 5–10% of China's population. In the state farms of northeast China, households could move legally only from one place to another within the system. Departure from the system was illegal. In this article, one of the first quantitative studies of migration in late imperial China, we apply discrete-time event-history methods to longitudinal, nominative household register data from six northeast Chinese state farm systems to compare how characteristics of the farm system, village, and household influenced the chances of legal moves and illegal departures. We show that among these state peasants, who were supposedly “unfree,” migration was not uncommon. We also show that the determinants of legal and illegal migration differed substantially. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for our understanding of migration processes in late imperial China.     

Research note: The founders and survivors project

This paper describes the multidisciplinary project Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context. Individual life courses, families and generations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being reconstituted from a wide range of data including convict records; birth, death and marriage registrations; and World War I service records. The project will result in a longitudinal study of Australian settlement, the long-run effects of forced labour and emigration on health and survival, family formation, intergenerational morbidity and mortality, and social and geographic mobility.     

Families,frontiers and the new imperial history

One of the more recent developments in historiography has been the emergence of 'new imperial history'. The articles within this special edition of the History of the Family offer examples of how some historians have dealt with the histories of both empires and families.     

Can Formal Rules of Order be Used as an Accurate Proxy for Behaviour Internal to a Legislature? Evidence from Costa Rica

Scholars rely heavily on formal rules to classify legislatures, but parchment institutions may only tell part of the story about how the chamber works. Behind-the-scenes behaviour may counter-balance or temper the power distribution created by formal rules. To begin examining if formal rules are an accurate predictor of actual behaviour, we analyse standing committees in Costa Rica's Legislative Assembly. We find that despite the formal institutions that favour a majoritarian bonus, the opposition party is a full participant in the legislative process in committee sessions. Opposition deputies participate equally or more so than majority party deputies, and deputies of all parties work together to investigate bills and kill legislation evaluated to be flawed, which indicates that formal rules are only one component to understanding legislative behaviour.     

Homicide Trends in Finland and Estonia in 1880–1940: Consequences of the Demographic,Social and Political Effects of Industrialization

While in western Europe and Scandinavia homicide rates reached their all time low during the period of industrialization, in Finland and Estonia they increased considerably. The rapid growth of criminal violence during the late 1800s and first half of the 1900s in these two countries seems to have been the result of interaction of several factors, partly non-simultaneous and unrelated. They do not seem to have been identical either, although the underlying equation was the same: the quick social and economic change following industrialization, and the modernisation of agriculture, the pressures it put especially on the youth in the form of uncertain prospects for the future and a new competition-oriented set of values, connected with the authoritarian political system of Russian Empire, which prevented necessary political reforms and left behind a legacy of social thinking idealizing violence as a political and social instrument. A legacy, which affected large parts of Finnish and Estonian population still for years after the czarist system itself already passed into history. The criminal violence arisen from the equation, however, had quite a different face on the northern coast of the Gulf of Finland from that on the southern one. In Finland the violence was centered in the new forest industrial communities, in Estonia again among the landless population of the countryside.     

Criminal organizations and the policymaking process

ABSTRACT

What role do criminal organisations play in policymaking? Evidence presented in this paper from Latin America and the Caribbean points to the complex ways that various types of criminal groups influence the policy process. Based on the structure of the criminal organisation and the relationship between these groups and state officials this article illustrates the different types of dynamics criminal groups contribute to the policy process. In some cases, these dynamics increase the costs of policies while in others they alter the content of policies and strengthen the position of criminal groups in the neighbourhoods where they operate. The article identifies three dimensions along which criminal groups intervene in the policy process: friction; division; and mediation. The article shows these dynamics by looking at how criminal groups intervene in the policy process in various gang-controlled neighbourhoods in Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, and Kingston.     

Natural History: the Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno

Abstract

Theodor Adorno's concept of ‘natural history’ [Naturgeschichte] was central for a number of Adorno's theoretical projects, but remains elusive. In this essay, analyse different dimensions of the concept of natural history, distinguishing amongst (a) a reflection on the normative and methodological bases of philosophical anthropology and critical social science; (b) a conception of critical memory oriented toward the preservation of the memory of historical suffering; and (c) the notion of ‘mindfulness of nature in the subject’ provocatively asserted in Max Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. These strands are united by the notion of transience and goal of developing a critical theory sensitive to the transient in history. The essay concludes by suggesting some implications of an expanded concept of natural history for issues in the discourse theory of Jürgen Habermas.     

Trust in elections,vote buying,and turnout in Latin America

Although national elections in Latin America are now described as reasonably free and fair by international observations teams, electoral processes are still affected by a series of malpractices (unequal access to the media and public resources, registration problems, vote buying). These irregularities negatively affect citizens' trust in elections. In this paper, we analyze the consequences of low trust in elections and exposure to vote buying practices on electoral participation in Latin America. Using data from the 2010 wave of LAPOP surveys, we find that perceiving that the election is unfair reduces the willingness to participate in national elections, but receiving material incentives during the campaign has the opposite effect of increasing electoral participation. We also show that the effect of trust in elections on turnout is larger in countries where voting is not mandatory.     

Political party and party system institutionalization in Southeast Asia: lessons for democratic consolidation in Indonesia,the Philippines and Thailand

Abstract

This article analyses the Kim Dae-jung government's industrial realignment (‘Big Deals’) policy in post-crisis Korea, which offers a valuable insight into the state's role in managing the transition from a developmental state to a free-market economy and into the changing nature of government–business relations. Although Kim was committed to creating a free-market economy in Korea, as the ‘Big Deals’ got under way critics accused him of violating market principles and employing tactics of intervention and coercion used by previous authoritarian regimes. The ‘Big Deals’ experience suggests a further stage in the evolution of the Korean developmental state; the dismantling of state powers and the implementation of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s had led to the emergence of a ‘transformative state’ in which the state acted as ‘senior partner’ rather than ‘commander-in-chief’. The transitional state charged with the task of rebuilding the economy after 1997 regained some of its lost powers and used some familiar methods of achieving its ends. However, it also demonstrated by the nature and scope of its interventions that it was gradually evolving and adapting to meet the changing economic environment. Although Kim's actions prompted allegations from the chaebol and their conservative allies of a return to autocratic economic management by the government, it was clear that the developmental state had not been resurrected. Rather, these criticisms serve to highlight the continuing antagonism in the state–business relationship; neither side had developed new strategies for dealing with each other and their relations were still characterized by mutual mistrust and staunch chaebol resistance to key reforms demanded by the government. Although suspicions of a permanent return to extensive state intervention were unfounded, they nevertheless diminished the prospects for the creation of a cooperative relationship between the state and big business that would be a crucial factor in revitalizing the Korean economy.