Suchergebnisse

Research conducted in the United States and Canada shows that female candidates for political office are covered differently in the news than their male counterparts: Female candidates receive less coverage, their electoral prospects are more negatively assessed, and the focus of reporting is often on "soft" issues compared with coverage of male candidates. We examine reporting during the 2005 Bundestag election campaign to assess the degree to which findings can be extended from North American and European contexts. Germany's first female chancellor candidate, Angela Merkel, and her male opponent, incumbent Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, were the main focus of campaign news. Drawing on an analysis of the four main evening national television newscasts and the most widely read newspaper in the six weeks prior to Election Day, we show that while the two candidates were rather equal in terms of visibility in the news, and did not differ substantially in terms of the issues on which they were reported, gender did play a considerable role in framing certain stories.

The debate which arose between the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) and the opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP) in early September 2005, concerning the history of Malaysia's independence movement, necessitates a re-appraisal of the organizations and personalities involved. This article re-assesses the period and actors involved in bringing to fruition Malaysian independence. By utilizing mainly authoritative secondary sources, the reconstructed history belies the argument of the ruling elites that they inherit the mantle of `real independence fighters' from their political ancestors. Although the sources are readily available in Malaysian libraries, the truth contained in them has eluded the general public. Thus, to lay people, political history in Malaysia has been what ruling politicians tell them and what they find in school textbooks that, in any case, have been approved by the powers that be. This article reveals that pre-independence Malaysian history is replete with contradictions and paradoxes which may transform perceptions of who were and were not independence heroes.

In the last 10 years the world's leading economic powers have driven important changes in international policy on illicit drug trafficking. They have set up and financed semi-formal or informal transnational groups to proactively implement policy on the ground. This is a reaction to the bureaucratic, formal mechanisms of the United Nations and its agencies, where policy is diluted by the need for consensus among 53 member states, plus various regional groupings of other countries. The new groups take a more integrated approach to the problem by going beyond trafficking into countering money laundering and controlling the sale of precursor chemicals, which criminal gangs use to synthesize drugs earlier in the supply chain to reduce the bulk of trafficked materials. The established link between organized transnational crime, drugs, and the financing of terrorism has added impetus to these efforts, but there is still a need for better cooperation on projects and to harmonize the collection of seizure statistics between key international bodies.

We use a household projection model to construct future scenarios for the United States designed to reflect a wide but plausible range of outcomes, including a new set of scenarios for union formation and dissolution rates based on past trends, experience in other countries, and current theory. The period covered is from 2000 to 2100. We find that the percentage of people living in households headed by the elderly may climb from 11 percent in 2000 to 20–31 percent in 2050 and 20–39 percent in 2100, while the average size of households could plausibly be as low as 2.0 or as high as 3.1 by the second half of the century. We assess the sensitivity of household size and structure to various demographic events, and show that outcomes are most sensitive to changes in fertility rates and rates of union formation and dissolution. They are less sensitive to the timing of marriage and childbearing and to changes in life expectancy.

Paris: Last year an American socialist on a long stay in France ambled almost daily past the Socialist Party (PS) headquarters of Paris's fourth arrondissement. He thought to stop in. "What are local Socialist politics like?" he wondered. After all, he came from the United States, where, unlike France, avowed socialists rarely come close to winning elections. But there was a problem. The PS office was always closed. Finally, he saw a notice indicating when it was open—one day a week for a half hour. This was a time of massive demonstrations against labor legislation proposed by the conservative government of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. The PS is the major opposition party, thousands of new members joined it during the protests, yet it never seemed to situate itself in this broad opposition movement. A year later, Nicolas Sarkozy, of the conservative Union for a Popular Majority (UMP), defeated Socialist Ségolène Royal in presidential elections by 53 percent to 47 percent.

This article outlines the negative impact of California's anti-affirmative action initiative, Proposition 209, on the hiring of women faculty members throughout the University of California (UC) system. Martha West viewed with alarm the widening discrepancy between the increasing percentage of women Ph.D.s in the United States and the declining percentage of women faculty hires in the UC system after Prop 209 passed in 1996. The UC data indicated that serious discrimination against women was occurring in the faculty hiring process. Perceiving the urgency of the situation, she and other faculty advocates approached a state legislator for assistance in putting pressure on the UC administration. The legislator initiated a state audit of UC's faculty hiring process and held three hearings in 2001, 2002, and 2003, inviting testimony from faculty and administrators at all nine campuses and the UC's central administration. The proceedings of the hearings, the obstacles faced by faculty women, and recommendations for change are highlighted in this article.

Political trust is an important determinant of individual political behavior and government effectiveness and an indication of the health of civil society. Declining trust among Americans is well documented. Surveys of Latino immigrants indicate that they are also cynical about government,but it is not clear whether this distrust takes the same form or is distinctive due to a racialized outlook and experience. This essay analyzes a set of 56 interviews with California immigrants of Latino (mostly Mexican) descent. The results indicate that some Latino immigrants distrust the governmentbecause they believe the government is racist, suggesting they have acculturated into an ethnic minority subculture. But others are more like Anglo Americans in their cynicism, citing concerns such as lying politicians; this suggests they have socially incorporated into the American mainstream. Still other responses are less predictable, the result of a nuanced acculturation process. These findings reflect the multiple identities adopted by immigrants and the multiple borders they face as they adaptto life in the United States.

This study focuses on the content of eleven high school economics textbooks currently being used throughout the United States. We reviewed them with regard to their attention to the Voluntary National Standards in Economics developed under the auspices of the National Council on Economic Education. In the process of our analysis we made ten observations about these texts, including the statement that these books fall into one of two categories: large, encyclopedic volumes which we label as 'Comprehensive' or shorter books aimed at a specific audience which we label as 'Specialty' textbooks. While many of the texts have specific shortcomings, we see that the majority of them include more material than the national standards require. Overall there is less variation in the quality of high school textbooks today than was seen in earlier generations of texts; and we argue that the majority of the current crop of comprehensive high school economics texts provides a solid introduction to the economics discipline.

I test how the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, promulgated by the United States Sentencing Commission, affected district court decision making from 1999 to 2003. Policymakers effectively used legal regulation to constrain judicial discretion by specifying (a) the sentencing ranges applicable to certain factual patterns, (b) the departures from these ranges allowed for prosecutors, or (c) the departures allowed for judges. My results establish significant differences in how judges make decisions depending on whether or not they were constrained by guideline ranges. When the guidelines curtailed judges' discretion, judges followed these guidelines but overwhelmingly sentenced defendants to the minimum sentence possible under the guidelines. Conversely, when guidelines allowed judges to depart from the sentencing ranges and instead to exercise broad discretion, they used this authority, and case sentences, although widely varying, were right censored at a point at or below the guideline minimum. Finally, the lowest sentences arose from prosecutors' motions rather than judges' own initiatives.

Drinking alcohol, a normative behavior during adolescence in the United States, has significant consequences for health and well-being in adolescence and beyond. Highly social in nature, it is also a domain in which to assess the implications of the assimilation of immigrant youth into American peer culture. Using a Mexican American sample drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 1,034), this study found generational differences in adolescent drinking behaviors, with more recent immigrants less likely to drink or binge drink. It also found generational differences in the social ecology of friendship groups, with first- and second-generation youth in friendship groups with higher concentrations of coethnic and other immigrant youth who engaged in less party behaviors. These differences did not explain generational differences in adolescent drinking behaviors but did condition the drinking behaviors of second-generation Mexican Americans. More specifically, second-generation youth with more White friends and friends who engaged in more party behaviors were more likely to binge drink than all others.

ABSTRACT**:  This study identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the the new regulatory framework for railways in Spain. We offer a description of the present situation of the railway industry in Spain, following the coming into force of the new Railway Industry Law in January 2005. We also analyse the international experience in light of the principles underlying the liberalization of the railway industry in Europe and, in particular, the cases of the United Kingdom and France. These two models are suitable for our purposes based on these main items: the degree of effective competition, the similarity to the Spanish case, the rail market growth and the geographical location. Our conclusions are that Spain has overcome some mistakes made by the countries mentioned above, like leaving infrastructure investment or security aspects in the hands of the private sector, however others have been committed, such as the excessive influence of the government on the basic actors of the industry or defining a complex system without well defined responsibilities.

AbstractProperty is an important part of modern economies with significant social and environmental consequences. As a result, practitioners and scholars have begun focusing on the social responsibility and sustainability of property investors. This paper expands that work by examining Responsible Property Investing among investment organizations in the United States. Responsible Property Investing is defined as efforts that go beyond compliance with minimum legal requirements to better manage the environmental, social, and governance issues associated with property investing. A survey of senior American executives finds that most organizations are going beyond compliance, implementing management strategies and investing in properties that are consistent with Responsible Property Investment principles. Most executives also place their organization beyond compliance in a Responsible Property Investing stage model. Business concerns are the leading drivers and impediments. Among the various types of organizations studied, pension funds, foundations and endowments lag behind others in implementing Responsible Property Investing. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The conduct of war is among the most important acts of the state. In the last century alone, failure in this undertaking has toppled governments and imposed hostile occupation under a conqueror's rule for hundreds of millions from Paris to Warsaw and Tokyo to Jakarta. Military failure in World War I destroyed the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires and created a host of new states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in their stead. Allied military victory in World War II made global superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, and split Germany into two countries; the success of Soviet arms ended Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian independence, and resulted in a generation of subjugation under Soviet satellite rule for the peoples of Eastern Europe. Pyrrhic victory in two world wars exhausted Britain and brought an end to its global economic hegemony. Failure in internal war has toppled governments from Afghanistan to Vietnam; variations in the conduct of such wars can mean the difference between decades of misery in grinding stalemates as in Lebanon or in a rapid, decisive conclusion as in Rwanda's.

This article analyses exchanges of support between the elderly and adult generations and by gender, based on data from the United Nations household survey in Mexico City (SABE, 2000), and the National Study of Ageing and Health (ENASEM, 2001). Results indicate that in Mexico both generations — elderly parents and adult children — provide support, such as money, services, care or gifts for grandchildren, according to gender roles and the generation's resources. Men provide monetary support and reproduce their role as family providers, but this role depends on having an income from work and, in later years, a pension, a more common situation among men than among women. Women develop their female domestic role as caregivers. They do not have a formal income, but receive informal economic support and offer services and care to their relatives, reproducing their invisible and unpaid work during their life course. Both types of support are widely exchanged between elderly parents and adult children and children-in-law.

ABSTRACTThis essay reflects upon post‐World War II and post‐Cold War admissions of low‐skilled temporary foreign workers to North America and Europe. The author's hope is that lessons from history can help Polish (and other new European Union immigration states) develop well‐informed labour migration policy. The lessons from North America and Europe suggest that admissions of low‐skilled temporary foreign workers lead to short‐term economic benefits and long‐term economic, political, and social costs. This, in turn, makes coherent and humane statecraft difficult to achieve.Considering the complexity of temporary foreign worker admissions, Polish policymakers would be better off avoiding them like the United States, France, and Switzerland have largely done in the post‐Cold War period after learning the lessons from the post‐war era. The alleged labour shortages and illegal migration pressure could be addressed through settlement‐oriented policies which are more likely to prevent unexpected outcomes since they allow greater economic, social, and political integration of admitted immigrants.