城乡统筹的社会保障:思路与对策

城乡分治的社会保障制度缺乏公平性,建立城乡统筹的社会保障制度不仅势在必行,而且具有现实可行性。从建立城乡统筹的最低生活保障制度、公共卫生和大病统筹制度着手,逐步建立城乡统筹的社会保障新体系,不论对于落实"三个代表"要求,全面建设小康社会,还是对于社会保障制度建设本身,都具有重大意义。     

Contact Disputes: Narrative Constructions of `Good' Parents

This paper explores contact disputes in England and Wales. We discuss the legal background as well as separating parents' experiences of contact disputes. Contact has been high on the agenda since the U.K. Government report, Making Contact Work, (2002) examined various means for facilitating contact between non-resident parents and their children. More recently, the issue has featured prominently in the headlines, largely as a result of the campaigning efforts of fathers' rights groups who complain of injustice and demand changes in the law. The idea that contact is necessary for children's well-being seems to have acquired the status of uncontestable truth. This paper examines the ways in which these ideas about children's interests have become embodied in adominant welfare discourse that is embedded in law and informs policy thinking. Family law has long abhorred parental conflict, particularly that which involves the children. It is frequently assumed that conflict can be reduced if parents could be persuaded to accept the premises of the welfare discourse. In this paper, we consider how parents themselves, in talking about their experiences of contact disputes, makes sense of family law. We found that parents regularly invoke the welfare discourse in their talk, but they interpret it in unexpected ways. Often these interpretations fuel conflict rather than reducing it.     

从机构照顾到家庭寄养看我国儿童福利服务政策的转变

作为我国传统儿童福利服务的主要方式,机构照顾经历了三个不同的发展阶段.近年来,随着社会福利社会化改革的不断深入,家庭寄养作为新型的孤残儿童照顾方式,越来越突显它的重要意义,开始成为我国儿童福利服务政策改革的重点.从机构照顾到家庭寄养体现了我国儿童福利服务政策在价值、目标、政府的角色、管理模式、运行模式等方面已经发生根本性转变.     

Refugee Camp Economies

This paper describes the economy of a refugee camp. Key distortionsto the economy of Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in Uganda arenoted and the findings are used to construct a generic modelof a refugee camp economy. Camp economies are influenced byhost country policies, such as restrictions on refugees’movement and work, as well as by the physical and economic isolationof the site. Moreover, market outcomes interact with the natureof humanitarian assistance and the special demographic compositionof the refugees to determine the prices and quantities thatcharacterize the market. An awareness of the dynamics of therefugee camp economy has important implications for practitionersand scholars alike.     

A Roadmap for CANS Validation

In nearly every jurisdiction, juvenile or family courts will be using the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) tool to assess whether children can safely be treated in family-like settings to meet federal Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) requirements. Yet, a number of peer-reviewed publications have raised serious concerns regarding the lack of CANS validation research. Rather than reject CANS, this article provides a roadmap for validating the tool with data that jurisdictions have already collected. Courts should require these three simple analyses before relying on the assessment.     

Party effects on total and disaggregated welfare spending: A mixed-effects approach

Welfare is the largest expenditure category in all advanced democracies. Consequently, much literature has studied partisan effects on total and policy-specific welfare expenditure. Yet, these results cannot be trusted: the methodological standard is to apply time-series cross-section regressions to annual observation data. But governments hardly change annually. Thus, the number of observations is artificially inflated, leading to incorrect estimates. While this problem has recently been acknowledged, it has not been convincingly resolved. This article proposes mixed-effects models (also known as ‘multilevel models’ or ‘hierarchical models’) as a solution, which allows decomposing variance into different levels and permits complex cross-classification data structures. It is argued that mixed-effects models combine the strengths of existing methodological approaches while alleviating their weaknesses. Empirically, partisan effects on total and on disaggregated expenditure in 23 OECD countries in the period 1960–2012 are studied using several measures of party preferences and revealing several substantially relevant findings.     

The importance of discretion for welfare services to minorities: Examining workload and anti-immigration attitudes

Migration influx in Western countries resulting in increasingly diverse societies results in more complex situations for bureaucrats in their client interactions in welfare organizations. The role of discretion for services to clients has received much attention in the public administration research and therefore this study explores the relation among perceived workload, anti-immigration attitudes, perceived discretion, and perceived difficulty in working with migrants. The paper examines the function of perceived discretion as moderator or mediator variable in this constellation. The relations are examined by using structural equation modelling based on a survey among Swedish welfare bureaucrats (N = 1,319). The results show that heavier perceived workload increased the likelihood of experiencing work with migrants as difficult and that greater perceived discretion decreased the likelihood of experiencing work with migrants as difficult. The results suggest that perceived discretion functions as a mediator for the relation between perceived workload and difficulty in work with migrants: potentially functioning as a ‘buffer’ for organizational pressure. We also found that bureaucrats who hold negative attitudes towards migrants were more likely to express their work with migrants as more difficult. This paper contributes to the public administration literature by increasing our knowledge on how discretion has significance in relation to when bureaucrat's behaviour is determined by specific organizational and personal factors.     

城市反贫困:政策比较与中国关怀

随着农村贫困人口的空间转换,城市未来将成为贫困问题凸显的集中地,为完成城市减贫目标,必须回到城市反贫困的政策之中。当前中国在城市反贫困政策上存在定位偏差、目标偏差和执行偏差的情况,救助政策侧重于消极保护,救助对象范围较小,政策之间难以衔接。为解决这些问题,须结合国外发达国家和发展中国家反贫困实践的经验,从定位转型、目标扩展和政策衔接三个方面入手,建设以积极支持为主要内容、以城市居民和新贫困群体为主要对象、"网式"服务的反贫困政策体系。     

The need for protection and punishment in victims of violent and nonviolent crime in the Netherlands: The effect of relational distance

A crime victim’s relationship to the offender is widely recognized as an important variable in the study of victims and the criminal justice system. However, studies concerning comparisons of the needs of victims at various relational distances to the offender are lacking. The authors studied how the victim’s need for protection and punishment correlated to the victim’s relational distance to the offender. The authors distinguished more than the usual two victim-offender relationships (known vs. stranger offender), so that the needs of victims at intermediate relational distance (offender is known to the victim, but not an intimate) to the offender might become visible. A total of 370 victims were interviewed about their reasons for reporting the crime. Respondents were divided into three groups: small (intimates), intermediate (nonintimates), and large (strangers) relational distance. While controlling for gender of the victim and type of crime, the needs of victims were found to vary with the relational distance to the offender.     

Providing Foster Care for Adolescents: Barriers and Opportunities

This study used quantitative and qualitative data from a larger research project regarding foster parent experiences to examine the characteristics that predict a parent’s willingness to foster an adolescent. Data collected from closed- and open-ended items related to reasons for not fostering a teen were also analyzed. Findings suggest parents who are older and were a foster child themselves, increased the likelihood they would foster a teen. When discussing reasons for not fostering an adolescent, parents identified fears of problem behaviors and concerns about negative impact on other children; findings that were corroborated in responses to the open-ended comments.