The Politics of Local Policy-Making in Urban Bangladesh: The Case of Rajshahi City Corporation

Some of the contemporary writings provide a different outlook in adopting institutional analysis by claiming that society-rooted politics is foremost in shaping the third world's political institutions. This paper, drawing on an empirical study, puts special emphasis on understanding the nature of society rooted politics in designing the local government system in Bangladesh and how it has shaped local policy-making. By focusing on the policy-making of a municipal corporation, this paper identifies the actors and factors and their roles in the urban local governance process in Bangladesh.     

What price fairness when security is at stake? Police legitimacy in South Africa

The legitimacy of legal authorities – particularly the police – is central to the state's ability to function in a normatively justifiable and effective manner. Studies, mostly conducted in the US and UK, regularly find that procedural justice is the most important antecedent of police legitimacy, with judgments about other aspects of police behavior – notably, about effectiveness – appearing less relevant. But this idea has received only sporadic testing in less cohesive societies where social order is more tenuous, resources to sustain it scarcer, and the position of the police is less secure. This paper considers whether the link between process fairness and legitimacy holds in the challenging context of present day South Africa. In a high crime and socially divided society, do people still emphasize procedural fairness or are they more interested in instrumental effectiveness? How is the legitimacy of the police influenced by the wider problems faced by the South African state? We find procedural fairness judgments play a key role, but also that South Africans place greater emphasis on police effectiveness (and concerns about crime). Police legitimacy is, furthermore, associated with citizens' judgments about the wider success and trustworthiness of the state.     

Gender,Culture and the Law: Approaches to ‘Honour Crimes’ in the UK

This article examines the debate on whether to analyse ‘honour crimes’ as gender-based violence, or as cultural tradition, and the effects of either stance on protection from and prevention of these crimes. In particular, the article argues that the categorisation of honour-related violence as primarily cultural ignores its position within the wider spectrum of gender violence, and may result in a number of unfortunate side-effects, including lesser protection of the rights of women within minority communities, and the stigmatisation of those communities. At the same time it is problematic to completely dismiss any cultural aspects of violence against women, and a nuanced approach is required which carefully balances the benefits and detriments of taking cultural factors into account. The article examines the issues within the context of the legal response to cases involving honour-related violence, arguing that although the judiciary has in a number of cases inclined towards viewing ‘honour’ as primarily cultural rather than patriarchal, in some cases they have begun to take a more gender-based or ‘mature multiculturalism’ approach.

State Agencies’ Use of Administrative Data for Improved Practice: Needs,Challenges, and Opportunities

Growing interest in the use of administrative data to answer questions around program implementation and effectiveness has led to greater discussion of how government agencies can develop the necessary internal data infrastructure, analytic capacity, and office culture. However, there is a need for more systematic research into how states find different pathways and strategies to build administrative data capacity. Drawing on interviews with almost 100 human service agency staff and their data partners, the authors examine the realities of administrative data use. They summarize the experiences of data users in order to address two main challenges: limited analytic capacity and challenges to linking or sharing data resources. The article concludes by examining a range of approaches that government agencies take to improve data quality and capacity to analyze that data.     

Cultural Stressors and the Hopelessness Model of Depressive Symptoms in Latino Adolescents

Depressive symptoms in Latino youth have been related to both culturally-universal and culturally-based stressors. However, few studies have examined the unique contributions of culturally-based stressors above and beyond other types of stressors. Moreover, no past studies with Latinos have examined the role of culturally-based stressors within a hopelessness model of depressive symptoms, a cognitive model with the strongest empirical support in adolescence. The current study examined these issues in a sample of 171 Latino adolescents (7th-10th grades; mean age?=?14; 46?% male). The Latino adolescents were primarily Mexican-American (78?%) and born in the United States (60?%). Students completed measures during a school period on their experiences of parent-child conflict, economic stress, discrimination from peers, and acculturative stress as well as depressive symptoms and attributional style. The results indicated that culturally-based stressors (e.g., acculturative stress and discrimination) predicted greater depressive symptoms even when controlling for culturally-universal stressors (e.g., parent-child conflict, economic stress). Moreover, a negative attributional style moderated the relationship between culturally-universal stressors and depressive symptoms, but this was not the case for culturally-based stressors. Culturally-based stressors play an important role in depressive symptoms among Latino youth. These stressors predicted greater symptomatology even when controlling for other types of stressors and a negative attributional style. These findings suggest that there may be other cognitive risk factors associated with culturally-based stressors.