Explaining Final Term Changes in US Congressional Foreign Travel

Recent scholarship demonstrates US legislators acquire human capital (that is, contacts, knowledge, and skills) in Congress that maximises post-elective earnings because they anticipate re-entering the labour market after leaving office. This literature has not, however, addressed how legislators’ expectations of entering specific professions affect their in-office activities. This article examines this question within the context of final term, employment-particular changes in House members’ foreign travel. Representatives entering the private sector are predicted to travel more in the last period to augment their human capital in foreign affairs and signal their expertise to prospective employers, while retiring legislators are expected to travel less because they lack incentives to maintain productivity levels. Analysis supports the former but not the latter prediction.     

Comment on James H. Carr and Michelle Mulcahy's “Twenty years of housing policy: what's new,what's changed,what's ahead?”

Housing policy in the post Great Recession (GR) era faces tremendous uncertainties, but clearly there will be more sensitivity around risk, quality, and transparency in capital markets. The post-GR domestic policy environment and economy are likely to impose several overarching constraints, including less access to world capital markets for financing housing, more restrictive assessments of risk, and increasing restraints on federal domestic spending particularly for non-entitlement programs. Carr and Mulcahy provide a substantial agenda of liberal-progressive policies that focus on the predatory and risky practices of loan originators and promote expansion of home ownership for low-income households. If we are indeed on the brink of an era of austerity, the housing policy debate will need to focus on priorities for contraction rather than expansion in housing programs, and on tenure-neutral policies rather than promoting home ownership.     

Derrida on Identity and Difference: A Radical Democratic Reading of The Other Heading

Abstract

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power pre suppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that social actors have multiple interpretative horizons avail able to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism.     

The utility of bonding social capital

Abstract

In most studies of social capital, bridging social capital is emphasized as ‘good’ for democracy and economic performance. It is rarer to find studies showing that bonding social capital can bring positive effects. Mostly, bonding social capital is either overlooked or depicted as the ‘villain’ that leads to ethnic conflict, intolerant behaviour and poor economic and democratic development. In this article, it is argued that this picture needs to be revised. If we assume that bonding trust is a negative force for development and democracy, we ignore a substantial portion of the political history of the West. Also, new empirical evidence from India suggests that bonding social capital is related to good governance. High levels of bonding trust cannot only facilitate political cooperation. They may also work as a shield against public sector employees who attempt to exploit citizens in a corrupt or clientelistic manner. The conclusion drawn in the article is that the view of social capital as a prime mover with inherent normatively attractive qualities should give way to a perspective where social capital is more properly regarded as an intermediate variable where the way it is combined with, or interacts with, other factors determines outcomes.     

Social capital,voluntary associations and collective action: Which aspects of social capital have the greatest ‘civic’ payoff?

Abstract

Despite a great variety of theoretical approaches, empirical analyses of social capital are surprisingly similar. Virtually all of them treat membership in voluntary associations as the chief indicator of community involvement while neglecting another form of community involvement: participation in elite-challenging actions. Likewise, authors readily attribute manifold civic benefits to associational life, while hesitating to attribute such benefits to elite-challenging activity. We question these views on two grounds. Firstly, we argue that elite-challenging action reflects social capital, even though this is a specific form of it: an emancipative form typical of self-assertive publics. Secondly, we use data from the Value Surveys to demonstrate that elite-challenging action is linked with greater civic benefits, at both the individual and societal level, than is membership in voluntary associations. This finding confirms the concept of human development, which suggests that emancipative forms of social capital are more civic in their consequences than others. Following this concept, we show that mass self-expression values nurture emancipative social capital, in motivating elite-challenging action. Finally, we locate self-expression values and elite-challenging actions in a theory of emancipative social capital.     

中国特色现代大学制度的运行机制分析

我国现代大学制度建设的理性设计趋于成熟,如何保障现代大学制度的执行力显得尤为重要,而执行的关键又在于科学地建构运行机制。据此,本研究运用系统论思想,从制度的运行主体、结构和程序及其各要素立体互动关系的角度,探讨在运行主体方面学校、政府、社会之间的联动机制,在运行结构方面内部治理结构与外部治理结构的耦合机制,在运行程序方面大学章程与高校董事会制度的规约机制,以期形成具有中国特色的现代大学制度运行机制。     

Mixed Welfare Systems and Hybrid Organizations: Changes in the Governance and Provision of Social Services

Abstract

The provision and governance of personal social services is nowadays often thought as a matter of finding the right balance between market principles and state regulation. However often, personal social services depend as well from a third resource and mechanism of governance: It is the impact of the social capital of civil society, which makes itself felt not only by resources such as grants, donations, and volunteering, but as well by networking and social partnerships. A number of crucial changes in welfare and service provision have led to a situation, where service systems and service units, rather than being part of a clear-cut sector, have increasingly to be seen as hybrids, combining varying balances of resources and mixes of governance principles usually associated with the market, the state, and the civil society.     

Socioeconomic Development and Voluntary Associations in Swedish Municipalities

Abstract

This paper explores the link between voluntary associations and socioeconomic development in Swedish municipalities. According to previous research in the field of social capital, the causal flow goes from having many associations to a high level of socioeconomic development. It has been argued, however, that the causal flow from the level of socioeconomic development to the level of social capital is so weak that it can be ignored. This paper tests a simple simultaneous equation model in order to test whether the causal flows from socioeconomic development to social capital and the inverse are simultaneous. The study is carried out at an aggregated level (the municipalities) that corresponds to the lowest administrative level in Sweden. The results indicate that the socioeconomic development cannot be ignored and that there is a simultaneous relationship. Moreover, the empirical findings indicate that the relationship is negative between the variables expressing socioeconomic development and associational density.     

Recreational Participation Among Ethnic Minorities and Immigrants in Canada and the Netherlands

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the community engagement of minorities as measured by group recreational activity in Canada and the Netherlands—two countries with high immigration intake and high levels of ethnocultural diversity. Using logistic regression, we ask questions concerning the determinants of recreational participation, focussing on the degree to which differences are a product of minority status or of more general socioeconomic status. We also compare rates of participation in the two countries to see if there is an underlying difference, which can be explained by socioeconomic and demographic status. We find that sociodemographic characteristics are generally much stronger predictors of participation than characteristics associated with minority status, regardless of country.     

American Criminal Justice Exposed

In The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and Its Consequences, Matthew Kramer argues that none of the standard rationales used to justify capital punishment successfully vindicates it and that a new justification, the purgative rationale, justifies capital punishment for defilingly evil offenders. In this article, it is argued, first, that a version of retributivism that adheres to the lex talionis as Kramer understands it does seem to call exclusively for the death penalty. Second, it is submitted that the purgative rationale is over-inclusive inasmuch as Kramer considers it applicable to certain offenders with abusive or deprived backgrounds, some offenders indoctrinated to adhere to pernicious ideologies that have impelled their crimes, and wrongdoers who have sincerely repented. Third, doubts are expressed about whether the purgative rationale justifies the execution of any offenders. Even if it is true that the continued existence of an extravagantly evil offender represents an affront to humanity, as Kramer suggests, a moral obligation to execute him does not follow. Since repentance is intrinsically valuable and since repentance would extinguish the affront to humanity, the community in which an unrepentant evil offender abides is duty-bound to foster repentance on the part of the offender by imposing banishment or life imprisonment, sanctions that afford the offender the most extensive opportunity for repentance. The community is therefore obligated to impose one of these sanctions instead of capital punishment.