Chapter 17: The Community as an Advocate for Youth:

State treatment foster care programs established by the National Youth Advocate Program are described in terms of youth served, homes established, treatment program, implementation problems, and evaluation procedures.     

Institutionalization of the authoritarian leadership in China: a power succession system with Chinese characteristics?

To transfer power successfully at the top and prevent a leadership split during this process has always been extremely challenging for authoritarian regimes. Yet, power succession in China has demonstrated a high degree of stability in the past two decades. How did the authoritarian regime in China perform its leadership transition in an orderly and smooth manner? This paper argues that 30 years of institutionalization has resulted in the development of a power succession system with Chinese characteristics. By offering a large amount of primary and secondary data on Chinese elite politics, this paper analyses the institutional development of succession politics and its impacts on regime stability and legitimacy in China. The case of the Chinese succession system provides a dramatic example in understanding ‘authoritarian resilience’.     

The Development of a Parent Support Group as a Means of Initiating Family Involvement in a Residential Program

SUMMARY

Working with the families of children in residential care is critical to the success of the placement. For a variety of reasons, parents of adolescents in one residential setting were not receiving adequate services during placement. A parent support and education group was designed and implemented to provide opportunities for parents to access support, learn new parenting skills and, ultimately, optimize their relationships with their children. The responses of both parents and staff to this program were favorable. The group is now a regular component of the organization's range of services, and served as a springboard to enhance family involvement in other program areas.     

从破坏性冲突到建设性冲突——老旧小区加装电梯的突围之道

老旧小区如何成功加装电梯日益凸显为城市社区治理中的老大难问题,代表不同利益的高低层住户之间的冲突在所难免。W市D小区一波三折的电梯加装过程显示:公共冲突既有正功能也有负功能;冲突的化解要采取整合的方式而非控制或妥协的方式;积极的制度环境对电梯加装工作起到了指导和推动作用;社区能人在冲突的化解中充当整合者的角色。在处理冲突时,要促使其从破坏性向建设性转变,努力整合各方利益,促进多方对话,同时充分发挥好制度环境和社区能人的作用。     

Strengthening the inner circle: the marriage networks of elite families in Joseon Korea

ABSTRACT

Socioeconomic homogamy is a prominent process for reproducing the social structure in preindustrial societies including East Asian countries. Although Joseon Korea was a centralized bureaucratic state under a king, the stratification system was unique by its ambiguity such that the previlege of an upper class was not officially confirmed. Since the social status was rather conferred by the reputation of the family, the quality of marriage relation was important for a man to be ranked as a central official. In this paper, we investigate patterns of social homogamy among elite families in the early Joseon Korea through empirical evidence of the relationship between official rank and spousal family background. We created a novel dataset by compiling the marriage network and official rank information of 14,508 individuals from the jokbos (族譜, genealogy) of 15 elite families and conduct an ordinal logit regression analysis to investigate whether spousal family background increases the probability of an individual being promoted in the bureaucracy. We find that the socio-political power of affinal kin has a greater effect on promotions than the descent and meritocratic effects. Particularly, the empirical evidence shows that marrying into a queen consort’s family increased the likelihood of an individual being ranked in a high position, which was beneficial for retaining the political power of him and the family. The study shows that marriage as a means of managing the socio-political inner circle of elite families, shaping the elites’ socio-political inner circle, built on the marriage network around a queen consort’s family to benefit the royal authority and the elite group.     

Do voters learn? Evidence that voters respond accurately to changes in political parties’ policy positions

A premise of the mass–elite linkage at the heart of representative democracy is that voters notice changes in political parties’ policy positions and update their party perceptions accordingly. However, recent studies question the ability of voters accurately to perceive changes in parties’ positions. The study advances this literature with a two-wave panel survey design that measured voters’ perception of party positions before and after a major policy shift by parties in the government coalition in Denmark 2011–2013. Two key findings extend previous work. First, voters do indeed pay attention to parties when they visibly change policy position. Second, voters update their perceptions of the party positions much more accurately than would have been expected if they merely relied on a ‘coalition heuristic’ as a rule-of-thumb. These findings imply that under some conditions voters are better able to make meaningful political choices than previous work suggests.     

Media Motivation and Elite Rhetoric in Comparative Perspective

The exchange of diverse points of view in elite deliberation is considered a cornerstone of democracy. This study presents evidence that variations in political motivation for media use predict the tendency of politicians to present deliberative rhetoric that considers multiple points of view regarding issues and sees those views as related to one another. We surveyed 111 incumbent Members of Parliament in Belgium, Canada, and Israel and analyzed a large sample of their parliamentary speeches. The findings demonstrate that motivation to attain media coverage and act upon information from the news media leads politicians to strategically display simple and unidimensional rhetoric due to newsworthiness considerations, but only in countries where the media constitute important resources for reelection. The results contribute to extant literature by demonstrating a media effect on elite deliberation and by emphasizing the moderating role of political systems on the nature of elite rhetoric.     

Chapter IV: Child Welfare Education:

No abstract available for this article.     

Finding Identity in Family Work

SUMMARY

The family has always enjoyed an elevated status in Ireland, yet it was not until the mid-1990s that family-based intervention work really found expression in a new division of child and youth care: community child care-workers. This paper introduces readers to an area of child and youth care work in Ireland devoted to an ecological understanding of the child “at risk” and working with the child and the child's family outside of a residential or institutional setting. The paper includes a brief interview with a community child care-worker, observations from a master's student in social care who has also worked in community child care, and concludes by reviewing 12 key areas community child care-workers must address if their status is to be secured in the Irish child and     

中国共产党执政的组织基础:精英转换与精英塑造

执政骨干队伍建设是中国共产党长期执政的组织基础和人才支撑,因此,加强对执政精英的基础性研究,便成为中国共产党需要完成的重大时代课题.在对相关文献进行梳理的基础上,运用贝尔的"中轴原理",揭示新中国成立以来中国共产党革命精英、技术精英和政治精英转换和塑造的政治—经济动因;分析中国共产党在长期的精英转换和塑造中形成的培养接...