Suchergebnisse

How are regional organizations responding to the emergence of non-traditional security (NTS) challenges? Are they engaging in more cooperative efforts to meet new threats? Or, on the contrary, do they react in different manners according to their distinctive values, principles and internal structures? This article attempts to investigate how the threats posed by NTS are compelling different regional organizations to reconsider their security thinking and to find new innovative ways of cooperation. This is done by comparing two diverse regional organizations, the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), whose models of security cooperation have significantly varied reflecting the preference for different security approaches. The EU's security system has been more formalized and institutionalized; conversely, the "ASEAN way" has traditionally been rooted in the principles of informality and consensus. It is argued, however, that the emergence of NTS threats is acting as a catalyst behind a normative and operational shift of the modus operandi of both organizations. In so doing, this empirical analysis will try to shed light on the effects of exogenous factors on the emergence of patterns of convergence within the security sphere of distinctive regional processes.

During the interwar period, California's labor-intensive agriculture transitioned from reliance on diverse immigrants to preference for Mexicans. Political movements to restrict immigration, the Great Depression, and labor unrest compelled farm employers to search for labor that could be used flexibly and deported easily. To achieve this objective, the growers needed a central organization that could foster unity and articulate their collective interest. The formation of the California Farm Bureau Federation and the American Farm Bureau Federation in 1919 and 1920 provided such a political platform. When lawmakers sought to apply the quota provision of the Immigration Act of 1924 to Mexico, the growers' strong presence at congressional hearings demonstrated their rising influence in policy making. Moreover, the clear difference between Filipinos and Mexicans with respect to deportability during the Depression affirmed the flexibility of Mexican labor. Finally, at the height of labor unrest in the 1930s, the American Farm Bureau leadership called for agricultural class consciousness to strengthen unity and maintain dominance over the striking workers. The development of grower organizations in this era set the stage for California agriculture's almost exclusive dependence on flexible Mexican labor in the ensuing decades.

In democratic theory, community-representing organizations play a critical role in mediating between citizens and elites. While proponents argue that neighborhood governance can improve efficacy and responsiveness of urban governance, critics warn that socioeconomic bias privileges the parochial interests of higher-income residents. There is limited knowledge, however, concerning the specific types of activities community-representing organizations undertake. This study illuminates the community mediation process through an analysis of the agenda orientation of community-representing organizations. An analysis of actual meeting agendas from Los Angeles neighborhood councils demonstrates that these community-representing organizations engage with varied issues including community improvement and other types of service needs or preferences in addition to land use. The findings suggest a more complex relationship between income and agenda orientation than is generally acknowledged. In particular, lower-income communities focus heavily on internal maintenance and capacity development activities that may displace engagement with more substantive issues. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that these organizations are likely to channel middle-class NIMBYism, the analysis reveals a U-shaped relationship between income and land-use emphasis, evidence that engagement in land use is also emphasized in lower-income communities that historically have been the target of locally undesirable land uses.

The Manifesto Project Dataset provides the scientific community with parties' policy positions derived from a content analysis of parties' electoral manifestos. It covers over 1.000 parties from 1945 until today in over 50 countries on five continents.
The content analysis aims to discover party and presidential stances by quantifying their statements and messages to their electorate. A unified classification scheme with an accompanying set of rules was developed to make such statements comparable. Analysing manifestos allows for measurement of party and presidents' policy positions across countries and elections within a common framework. Manifestos are understood to be parties' only and presidential candidates' main authoritative policy statements and, therefore, as indicators of the parties' policy preferences at a given point in time.
The Manifesto Project Data Collection was originally created by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) in the late 1970s and the 1980s. The work was continued under the name Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in the 1990s and 2000s. Since 2009 the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) project updates and extends the dataset. It is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is still located at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

AbstractHigh‐skilled migration has increasingly been the subject of migration research over the past decade, but the focus has tended to be on health and IT professionals. In this paper, we address the mobility of schoolteachers in a region that has so far received little attention, the Pacific Islands. It is timely to examine trends in teacher mobility in the Pacific, given the shortages that are occurring elsewhere. In particular, the tailoring of immigration policies to attract highly skilled workers in areas of shortage could impact on the Pacific. The focus of the paper is on emigration and we argue that of three countries studied, only Fiji is negatively affected by teacher mobility. The Cook Islands and Vanuatu are currently experiencing low levels of international teacher emigration. Levels of internal mobility are also investigated in an attempt to see if remote areas and outer islands are experiencing teacher shortages. The preference for working near one's land or on one's home island is a strong drawcard in bringing people back home to teach. A problem arises, however, when not enough people are trained from a region/island and the incentives to encourage others to go and work there are less than effective.

ABSTRACTThis paper proposes an additive measure on the basis of compromise programming to evaluate fund performance from multiple criteria, of which the most usual are profitability and risk. This proposal is motivated by the fact that compromise programming is a sound decision support model to obtain scores of alternatives by minimizing weighted distances to an ideal point, the weights reflecting the investor's preferences for the criteria. To define the distance objective function, the linear‐quadratic composite metric is used, which combines advantages of linear and non‐linear objective functions. A critical advantage of compromise programming for fund performance evaluation is that the model can be extended to more than two financial criteria while other measures currently used (either ratio‐based or leverage‐based measures) only consider two criteria, say, profitability and risk. In the application, three investor's profiles are defined, which involve different weighting systems and lead to different fund rankings. These rankings are compared with domination relationships, the latter formulating if a fund is dominated or non‐dominated by convex combinations of other funds. Numerical tables are provided with data, computational process and results, which are analysed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A recent stream of influential research suggests that the inclusion of behavioral genetic models can further inform our understanding of political preferences and behaviors. But it has often remained unclear what these models mean, or how they might matter for the broader discourse in the political science literature. The initial wave of behavioral genetic research focused on foundational discovery, and has begun to outline the basic properties of genetic influence on political traits, while a second wave of research has begun to link genetic findings to broader aspects of political behaviors. In the introduction to this special issue, we explicate how genes operate, the most common forms of behavioral genetic analyses, and their recent applications toward political behaviors. In so doing, we discuss what these findings mean for political science, and describe how best to interpret them. We note potential limitations of behavioral genetic approaches and remain cautious against the overextension of such models. The five articles that follow strive to move beyond discovery and focus more on the integration of behavioral genetic models with mainstream theories of political behavior to analyze problems of interest to political scientists.

The aim of this study is to examine the factors that impact on older employees in their plans to continue at work or to retire, and to find out to what extent retirement plans are actually realised. The frame of reference for the study is Beehr's model (1986) of the retirement process. It consists of three stages: retirement preferences (thoughts about retirement), retirement intentions, and retirement outcomes. In this study, two stages of Beehr's model have been examined: retirement intentions and realised retirement. Retirement figures from the register data showed that people have retired somewhat later than they planned. Slightly more than half of the older employees retired when they intended, a third retired later, and a small proportion retired earlier than they intended. Intentions to continue working longer were explained by many personal and work-related factors, most of which are consistent with earlier studies on retirement plans, whereas realised retirement was largely explained by work-related factors. The centrality of work, a short working career and financial incentives to continue working were the best predictors of late retirement. With reference to Beehr, we conclude that different factors are emphasised as explanatory variables at different stages of the retirement process.

This study is about the multifaceted nature of language use in immigrant families. Following earlier explorations of language in the segmented assimilation framework and using adolescent and parental data from the 1995 wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, this article examines how adolescents' use of English with their parents relates to their proficiency in English and ethnic languages, and their personal language preferences, as well as their parents' language proficiency and use. The findings suggested that adolescent language choice in child–parent interactions reflected the family's ways to negotiate the distinct linguistic repertoires of immigrant parents and their children. The adolescent use of English was not necessarily associated with social and emotional estrangement between generations. Even when adolescents generally preferred English, they were less likely to use English in child–parent interactions if their parents, particularly their mothers, were less proficient in English. On the other hand, adolescents were more likely to speak English to their parents if their mothers were proficient in English, regardless of what language parents used with the children. Parents who spoke to their children in English likely responded to their children's doubts about their ethnic language proficiency and were linguistically and emotionally ready to make that transition.

While a number of scholars have focused on the importance of partisan agenda control in the US House, few have examined its uneven consequences within the majority party. In this paper, we explore 'counterfactual' utility distributions within the majority party, by comparing policy outcomes under a party-less median voter model to policy outcomes under party-based positive and negative agenda control models. We show that the distribution of policy losses and benefits resulting from agenda control are quite similar for both the positive and negative varieties. In both cases, moderate majority-party members are made worse off by the exercise of partisan agenda control, while those to the extreme side of the majority-party median benefit disproportionately. We also consider the benefit of agenda control for the party as a whole, by looking at the way changes in majority-party homogeneity affect the summed utility across members. Interestingly, we find that when the distance between the floor and majority-party medians decreases, the overall value of positive and negative agenda control diminishes. However, we also find support for the 'conditional party government' notion that, as majority-party members' preferences become more similar, they have an increased incentive to grant agenda-setting power to their leaders.

The Manifesto Project Dataset provides the scientific community with parties' policy positions derived from a content analysis of parties' electoral manifestos. It covers over 1.000 parties from 1945 until today in over 50 countries on five continents.
The content analysis aims to discover party and presidential stances by quantifying their statements and messages to their electorate. A unified classification scheme with an accompanying set of rules was developed to make such statements comparable. Analysing manifestos allows for measurement of party and presidents' policy positions across countries and elections within a common framework. Manifestos are understood to be parties' only and presidential candidates' main authoritative policy statements and, therefore, as indicators of the parties' policy preferences at a given point in time.
The Manifesto Project Data Collection was originally created by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) in the late 1970s and the 1980s. The work was continued under the name Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in the 1990s and 2000s. Since 2009 the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) project updates and extends the dataset. It is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is still located at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

SummaryWhile positive research on the determinants of happiness (or 'subjective well‐being') abounds, comparatively little thought has been given to its practical policy implications. Two approaches to derive policy advice seem to emerge in the literature: The first, most prominent one, is organized in terms of the idea to maximize a hedonic social welfare function. The second focuses on the design of constitutional rules to facilitate the individuals' self‐determined 'pursuit' of happiness. We suggest to substantiate what it means to 'pursue' (rather than merely 'enjoy') happiness in order to provide the constitutional approach to happiness politics with deeper psychological foundations and a more refined policy focus. Specifically, the pursuit of happiness is seen as being constituted not only by the satisfaction of innate needs for self‐determination (generating procedural utility), but also by (i) the enjoyable anticipation of hedonically valuable outcomes, and (ii) the use of these outcomes within the context of an overarching process of preference learning. If extended in this direction, a notion of the pursuit of happiness has interesting conceptual and policy implications. The latter are exemplified by suggestions on how to re‐focus public decision‐making mechanisms.

AbstractRecent research on the sources of individual attitudes toward trade policy comes to very different conclusions about the role of economic self-interest. The skeptical view suggests that long-standing symbolic predispositions and sociotropic perceptions shape trade policy opinions more than one's own material well-being. We believe this conclusion is premature for two reasons. First, the practice of using one attitude to predict another raises questions about direction of causation that cannot be answered with the data at hand. This problem is most obvious when questions about the expected impact of trade are used to predict opinions about trade policy. Second, the understanding of self-interest employed in most studies of trade policy attitudes is unrealistically narrow. In reality, the close relationship between individual economic interests and the interests of the groups in which individuals are embedded creates indirect pathways through which one's position in the economy can shape individual trade policy preferences. We use the data employed by Mansfield and Mutz to support our argument that a more complete account of trade attitude formation is needed and that in such an account economic interests may yet play an important role.1

Background  Promoting self‐determination is recognized to be an essential element of disability service provision; however, the extent to which older people with intellectual disability working in supported employment are enabled to make intentional decisions about retirement is not well understood.Methods  This research explored the views of older people with disability and service providers to understand the elements that impact on people's decision to retire. Seventy‐six people participated in semi‐structured interviews, including 33 older people with intellectual disability working in supported employment, 10 people who had retired and 30 service providers.Results  Service providers strongly supported the right of people to retire; however, people with disability almost never reported the ability to make self‐determined choices about retirement. Barriers to self‐determination included an association between retirement, poor health and meaningless activities, which was perpetuated through structural service gaps.Conclusion  Although disability services and service providers emphasize the importance of promoting self‐determination for people with disability, those working in supported employment are not currently enabled to make self‐directed choices about retirement. To address this requires more flexible services, better information about retirement, exposure to real experiences and assistance to express preferences and participate in problem solving throughout the lifespan.

AbstractWhile the Internet is often discussed as empowering or endangering patients due to broadening access to medical and health‐related information, little is known about the way patients actually get informed about medical conditions and how the technology shapes their practices. This article draws on 40 user observations and 40 qualitative interviews to explore how users employ the web to obtain knowledge about a chronic disease in the Austrian context. Following concepts from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) it explores how users' individual medical preferences and search engines' mechanisms of pre‐filtering information co‐shape online health information practices. The analysis demonstrates that search engines are not passive intermediaries, but rather actively shape how users browse through, select and evaluate health information in the context of their own bodies of knowledge. Accordingly, new skills are required on the part of users, but also on the part of medical professionals and policy makers. Both policy makers and doctors should engage with users' highly individual search practices and establish more dialogue‐oriented and technology‐focused health policy measures, rather than trying to educate users with standardized quality criteria for websites not responding to users' online routines and needs.