Eating Attitudes and Weight-Loss Attempts in Female Adolescents and Their Mothers

This study examined the relationship between mothers' eating attitudes and weight-loss attempts and their adolescent daughters' body dissatisfaction and weight-loss attempts. Two modes of transmission of mother's values to the daughter (modeling and encouragement) and two forms of weight-loss behavior (moderate and extreme) were examined. Female 10th and llth graders and their mothers completed eating attitudes and behaviors questionnaires. Daughter's moderate weight-loss attempts (e.g., dietary restraint and exercising) and its associated body dissatisfaction were significantly associated with mother's encouraging her daughter to lose weight. In contrast, daughter's more extreme weight-loss behaviors (e.g., fasting, crash dieting, and skipping meals) were predicted by mother's reports of her own body dissatisfaction and mother's use of extreme weight-loss behaviors herself. These effects were not simply an artefact of daughter's body weight. Implications for theory and prevention were noted.     

Common pool effects and local public debt in amalgamated municipalities

This paper investigates whether the large scale municipal amalgamations in the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in the early 1970s led to considerable common pool exploitation. Through amalgamation the resources of several municipalities are pooled together disclosing the former independent municipalities a larger source of funds. Additionally, the pooling also decreases the cost of local public goods, as those have to be borne by the whole of the amalgamated municipality. By exploiting the huge variance in the amalgamation process in terms of number of participating municipalities, but also in municipality size or amalgamation strategy, we identify considerable common pool effects. Amalgamated municipalities show considerably stronger acceleration in debt accumulation compared to non-amalgamating municipalities. This common pool exploitation is stronger if more municipalities participate and when municipalities amalgamate by annexation.

     

Amtliche Statistik,Sichtbarkeit und die Herstellung von Verfügbarkeit

This essay analyses the programmatic dimension (?Normalerzählung“ or ?normal account“) of official statistics as a social institution and identifies the two concepts of visibility (?Sichtbarkeit“) and availability (?Verfügbarkeit“) as basic principles of modern official statistics. Up to the 18th Century, the proto-statistical attempts at the quantification of the social can still be described as producing ?visibility without availability“. But with the birth of official statistics as an institution in 19th Century the two basic principles are closely coupled. This coupling in statistic visibility regimes of different ranges and depths appears to be unbroken up to the 1970s and 1980s. Towards the end of the 20th Century, however, these principles are increasingly put to the question. This article argues that this can be interpreted as an indication of a reflexive modernization of the official statistics. These developments will finally be illustrated by empirical examples from the public discourse of unemployment statistics.     

Research with minors in Germany

The European GCP Directive has been implemented into German law in sect. 40 ff. AMG (German pharmaceutical law). Unlike the Directive, German pharmaceutical law basically differentiates between three constellations of clinical trials on minors: clinical trials on healthy minors, clinical trials on ill minors with an individual benefit for the individual participant, and clinical trials on ill minors without direct benefit for the individual participant, but with a so-called "group benefit". Particularly the latter possibility of conducting clinical trials on minors even if no individual benefit can be expected is not a matter of course in Germany since due to historical experiences a sceptical attitude towards clinical research on humans prevailed for a long time. German legislature has availed itself of the option granted by Article 3 of the GCP Directive to establish a higher level of protection of clinical trial subjects than the European level.     

Introduction: Regional powers in contest and engagement: making sense of international relations in a globalised world

Over the last couple of years, ‘African ownership’ has become a buzzword in many fields. Economic development initiatives like the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) are based on it, partnership agreements like the Joint AU–EU Africa Strategy are built around it and its central concept of Africanisation guides virtually all external relations of the continent. African leaders (rightly) insist on it, international organisations (rightly) preach it and many non-African actors are (unsurprisingly) hiding behind it. The concept of African ownership is so omnipresent today that it is more than surprising that the simple question of who actually owns it has not yet been asked. It is the declared purpose of this paper to disentangle rhetoric from reality and identify the owner as well as the limits of African ownership in the sphere of peace and security.     

The Geography of Warscape

This article elaborates a heuristic approach to understanding the geography of warscape from a theoretically informed perspective. It argues that agency in protracted civil war emerges at the ambiguous interface of different, competing systems of power and authority. In order to account for the multiple trajectories of threat and opportunity that warscapes offer to different social actors and at different times and places, the article proposes the concept of ‘governable order’, which is derived from a critical review of the literature on ‘social navigation’ and ‘governable space(s)’. The usefulness of combining these three concepts is illustrated by two empirical vignettes. They demonstrate the dynamics of governable spaces in distinct phases of the Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka civil wars. The two cases highlight the temporal and territorial fluidity of governable spaces, which both constrain and enable warscape inhabitants' agency.     

The Geography of Participation

Revisiting the critique of participatory development and one of its core political technologies, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), this paper suggests that participation in the form of PRA creates ‘provided spaces’ that dislocate ‘development’ from politics and from political institutions of the postcolonial state. PRA thereby becomes what Chantal Mouffe calls a post-political aspiration through its celebration of deliberative democracy (although this is largely implicit rather than explicit in the PRA literature). What makes this post-political aspiration dangerous is that its provided spaces create a time–space container of a state of exception (the ‘workshop’) wherein a new sovereign is created. In combination with other developmental techniques, PRA has become a place where a new order is being constituted—the state of exception becomes permanent and nurtures the ‘will to improve’ that undergirds ‘development’.     

Industry-sponsored medical education--in the quest for professional integrity and legal certainty

Industry-sponsored medical education is a much disputed issue. So far, there has been no regulatory framework which provides clear and definite rules as to whether and under what circumstances the sponsorship of medical education is acceptable. State regulation does not exist, or confines itself to a very general principle. Professional regulation, even though applied frequently, is rather vague and indefinite, raising the general question as to whether self-regulation is the right approach at all. Certainly, self-regulation by industry cannot and should not replace other regulatory approaches. Ultimately, advertising law in general and the European Directive 2001/83/EC specifically, might be a good starting point in providing legal certainty and ensuring the independence of medical education. Swiss advertising law illustrates how the principles of the European Directive could be implemented clearly and unambiguously.     

Organizing Democracy: How International Organizations Assist New Democracies

Scholars in the environmental security tradition have sought to explicate the links between environmental scarcity (or degradation) and the onset of different forms of political violence and how these are mediated by institutional mechanisms. The Malthusian trap here is not a direct deterministic relationship, but rather a possibility, where environmental scarcity when it coincides with socio-economic processes of rent-seeking and exclusion triggers political conditions ripe for violent struggles. This a priori attention to scarcity as causal mechanism blurs our understanding why violence occurs in some and does not in other places. Our research strategy is therefore different: we study a case of non-violent relations between resource users under conditions of environmental scarcity (due to drought) and political instability and look into the crucial role of local institutions in governing competing resource claims. Our case from the violence-prone Somali Region, Ethiopia analyses how agro-pastoralist communities develop sharing arrangements on pasture resources with intruding pastoralist communities in drought years, even though this places additional pressure on their grazing resource. A household survey investigates the determinants for different households in the agro-pastoralist community, asset-poor and wealthy ones, to enter into different types of sharing arrangements. Our findings suggest that resource sharing offers asset-poor households opportunities to stabilise and enhance their asset-base in drought years, providing incentives for cooperative rather than conflicting relations with intruding pastoralists.     

Endogenous Versus Exogenous Rules in Water Management: An Experimental Cross-country Comparison

This paper draws on institutional and experimental economics to investigate the role of exogenous and endogenous rules in irrigation systems. The hypotheses we examine argue that despite the differences between socio-economic and political settings, (1) endogenous rule-crafting can help water users to overcome appropriation and provision dilemmas in water-scarce environments like in the East Mediterranean countries and that (2) in market-like water governance systems, institutions other than the market itself, are less influential for overcoming appropriation and provision dilemmas than in hybrid governance systems. These hypotheses are being tested comparing the results of field experiments conducted in Jordan, the Republic of Cyprus and North Cyprus with 70 farmers. Field experiments simulate asymmetric access to resources and are based on variations of the irrigation game by Cardenas et al. to model and test asymmetric distribution of investment, harvest and revenue that favours upstream users. Empirical evidence shows that externally imposed allocation rules are able to bring in more equal distribution of revenue among upstream–downstream users but is likely to reduce the volume of investment and revenue, without resolving issues of free-riding. The authors argue that given the opportunity, water users (small farmers in our experiments) are able to craft their own rules improving the overall performance of the group in terms of investment and revenue, with a parallel improvement of equity in distribution. The implications and policy relevance of such findings are briefly discussed as they contradict typical practices of top-down policy delivery in the selected cases.