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We analyze policies that support and affect the provision and costs of child care in the United States. These policies are motivated by at least three objectives: (1) improving the cognitive and social development of young children, (2) facilitating maternal employment, and (3) alleviating poverty. We summarize this policy landscape and the evidence on the effects they have on the development of children and parents. We provide a summary of the use and costs of nonparental child care services; and we summarize existing policies and programs that subsidize child care costs, provide child care to certain groups, and regulate various aspects of the services provided in the United States. We then review the evidence on the effects that child care policies have on these objectives. We go on to discuss the existing evidence of their effects on various outcomes. Finally, we outline three reform proposals that will both facilitate work by low-income mothers and improve the quality of child care that their children receive.

Individuals participating in the HUD Housing Choice Voucher program, formerly Section 8, can rent units in the private market and are not tied to public housing projects in a specific neighborhood. We would expect vouchers to help poor families leave the ghetto and move to more diverse communities with higher socioeconomic opportunity, but many voucher holders remain concentrated in poor, segregated communities. We use longitudinal qualitative data from one hundred low-income African American families in Mobile, Alabama, to explore this phenomenon, finding that tenants' limited housing search resources, involuntary mobility, landlord practices, and several aspects of the voucher program itself limit families' ability to escape disadvantaged areas. We also find that the voucher program's regulations and funding structures do not incentivize housing authorities to promote neighborhood mobility and residential choice. This combination of forces often keeps voucher recipients in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poor and minority residents.

Cities are the location of the great majority of economic activity in the United States and produce a disproportionate share of output. It is thus critical for the economy's long-term growth that cities operate efficiently. In this article, the authors review the basic determinants of output growth, with a focus on productivity growth in cities. The authors then explore the effects of a particular distortion in politically fragmented metropolitan areas. After documenting the interdependence of the suburbs and central city of a metropolitan area, the authors develop a model that embodies many of the empirically verified aspects, including agglomeration economies and public goods. After calibrating the model to outcomes for Philadelphia, the authors use it to simulate various policy changes. The authors conclude that, under the model, some kinds of fiscal redistributions can provide benefits in both cities and suburbs.

In recent years, China has sought to supplement its traditional use of hard power with soft power, and thus the Chinese government has paid more and more attention to public diplomacy. Chinese governments have previously demonstrated a limited understanding of public diplomacy, seeing it either as external propaganda or a form of internal public affairs, but this has not prevented China from becoming a skilled public diplomacy player. Key aspects of traditional Chinese culture and politics have presented major obstacles for Chinese public diplomacy. In comparison to the United States, China needs an enduring and effective public diplomacy strategy and needs to improve its skills to make full use of the modern media. The peaceful rise/peaceful development policy in Chinese grand strategy has sought to integrate Chinese hard power and soft power to create a soft rise for China. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2008 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

This article examines the linkages between fear of crime, residential integration, and racial prejudice among whites. Survey studies confirm that residential proximity to black people is related to whites' fear of crime. In addition, whites who are prejudiced (in this case, who disapprove of school and neighborhood integration) are more fearful. The fear-provoking effects of proximity and prejudice are independent and, in fact, whites currently living closer to blacks register lower levels of prejudice than do those who live farther away. This is probably due to their ability to use housing markets to distance themselves from minority neighborhoods. Despite the political salience of white fear, blacks are more fearful of crime, due in large measure to the concentration around them of factors that make everyone more fearful. These include neighborhood-level differences in victimization, social disorder, and physical decay. In a highly segregated society, these factors are highly associated with race, so it is difficult to specify which aspects of this bundle—including racial proximity—are affecting white fear as well.

Attempts to measure quality of life (QOL) in rural America have gone through three stages, focusing first on economic well-being, later on a broad array of so-called ob jective indicators, and finally on subjective evaluations. All remain important to gaining a comprehensive understanding of the QOL in rural America. An analysis of objective con ditions points to several areas of deprivation among rural people, especially economic well-being and the receipt of institutional services, but suggests they are better off than urban Americans with respect to their material and social environment. Rural people's subjective assessments are strik ingly consistent with the objective conditions of their environ ment. However, they evaluate their overall QOL more positively than do urban Americans, possibly because they give greater weight to the relatively intangible aspects of their environment. A cautious look at the future suggests the current population turnaround and prospects of resource scarcity are critical factors likely to affect the QOL enjoyed by rural Americans.

Considerable confusion exists over the concept of political development, which is of recent origin in political sci ence. The confusion is compounded because particular trends in the social sciences inhibited explicit concern about political, as distinct from economic, development. Ten definitions of "political development" are analyzed in this article, and a final summary view of the essential dimensions of the concept is pre sented in which three broadly shared characteristics of politi cal development are outlined: concern with equality, with the capacity of the political system, and with the differentiation or specialization of governmental organizations. These three characteristics are generally related to certain aspects of politi cal development: equality to the political culture, the problems of capacity to authoritative governmental structures, and the question of differentiation to nonauthoritative structures. This suggests a final analysis that the problems of political develop ment revolve around the relationship between the political cul ture, the authoritative structure, and the general political process.

The number of African students in the United States is increasing rapidly as the need for trained manpower compels newly independent African nations to send their young people to other countries for higher education. There is also need for correlation between the studies taken overseas and the requirements for economic development in a given coun try. African students coming here are apt to be somewhat older and more politically conscious than their American coun terparts. More of them choose the social sciences, with eco nomics leading, than any other major field of study. The physical and natural sciences, the humanities, and engineering follow in order. Racial discrimination in the United States is a serious problem affecting the African student personally and often influencing his evaluation of American life. Careful and sympathetic counseling, together with an orientation pe riod in the summer before college entrance, will tend to reduce the negative aspects of adjustment and increase the likelihood of useful assimilation and a generally beneficial experience for African students.

Group work with predelinquent youths outside of building-centered programs is an aspect of delinquency pre vention to which settlement houses, neighborhood centers, and youth-servicing agencies are increasingly giving attention. Such group work follows the same general pattern as work with delinquent gangs, but there are significant differences in the nature and intensity of the workers' relationships with parents and other adults which have to be observed. The Hyde Park Youth Project, described in this paper, selected groups of teen-age youths who were believed to have a high potential for delinquent behavior and provided them with in tensive staff service for periods from six to eighteen months. A comparison of the frequency of individual antisocial behavior at the outset of the staff service and termination indicated that the youths who were participating in little or no antisocial behavior when staff service was first provided continued to avoid delinquency. The staff was least successful with youths who, at time of first contact, already had a history of anti social behavior.

Unravelling the mechanisms of daily diplomacy in the mid-20th century, this book follows one Dutch diplomatic couple, the van Kleffens, on their postings from the 1930s to the 1950s to offer a new perspective on how non-officials and personal politics shaped the postwar world. Combining private and public source materials, Erlandsson foregrounds the political culture of diplomacy and highlights events and people which have been left off the official record. The book integrates the detailed study of behind-the-scenes diplomatic practice into the larger narrative of traditional diplomatic history, connecting social practices with political outcomes. Exploring how women s tea drinking was used to achieve post-war foreign policy and how Rosa, a Guatemalan cook, contributed to the international standing of the Netherlands, it offers a more inclusive history by recognising the diplomatic work done by actors who were not diplomats. In doing so it demonstrates the ways in which diplomacy was class-bound, gendered and racialized, and proves that historicizing gender and cultural norms is crucial to understanding political and international history

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) has long been recognized as a major political and social thinker as well as historian, but his writings also contain a wealth of little-known insights into economic life and its connection to the rest of society. In Tocqueville's Political Economy, Richard Swedberg shows that Tocqueville had a highly original and suggestive approach to economics--one that still has much to teach us today. Through careful readings of Tocqueville's two major books and many of his other writings, Swedberg lays bare Tocqueville's ingenious way of thinking about major economic phenomena. At the center of Democracy in America, Tocqueville produced a magnificent analysis of the emerging entrepreneurial economy that he found during his 1831-32 visit to the United States. More than two decades later, in The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville made the complementary argument that it was France's blocked economy and society that led to the Revolution of 1789. In between the publication of these great works, Tocqueville also produced many lesser-known writings on such topics as property, consumption, and moral factors in economic life. When examined together, Swedberg argues, these books and other writings constitute an interesting alternative model of economic thinking, as well as a major contribution to political economy that deserves a place in contemporary discussions about the social effects of economics.

We review a large formal literature on economic models of voting and electoral politics. We discuss two broad classes of model: those focusing on preference aggregation and those that look at elections as mechanisms of information aggregation. We also explore the role of elections in situations of asymmetric information, where politicians take hidden actions or are otherwise better informed about policy than voters are, and examine the role of elections in selection and as incentive mechanism. In the section on models of preference aggregation, we focus on the themes of exogenous candidacy, policy commitment, and the role of valence attributes. For information aggregation, we analyze how different aspects of the institutional environment affect aggregation, focusing on the structure of elections -- whether simultaneous or sequential -- and the number of choices, as well as the motivations of voters. Finally, in considering models of asymmetric information, we describe how these models shed new light on incumbency effects, campaign spending, and the policy choice of politicians. Adapted from the source document.

International audience ; Groups matter in our ordinary folk psychology because a part of our social interactions is done with collective entities. In our everyday life, we indeed sometimes ascribe mental states to social groups as a whole or to individuals as members of groups in order to understand and predict their behavior. The aim of this paper is to explore this aspect of social interactions by focusing on the concept of 'collective belief' in a non-summative sense and, more precisely, on collective belief of a specific kind of group: the political party. How can the concept of 'collective belief' help to understand the interactions which involve these kinds of collective entities? After providing an epistemic description of political parties, this paper focuses on the collective belief in a non-summative sense. As Gilbert says, a group believes that p, if its members are jointly committed to believe that p as a body. It is argued, with the help of an example from the political history of France, that this view can enable us to understand the interaction between political parties. More precisely, it can help clarify the way in which a political party uses the rational constraints on the party as a whole and/or the social and epistemic constraints on the behavior of the group's members in order to destabilize or weaken other political parties.

International audience ; Groups matter in our ordinary folk psychology because a part of our social interactions is done with collective entities. In our everyday life, we indeed sometimes ascribe mental states to social groups as a whole or to individuals as members of groups in order to understand and predict their behavior. The aim of this paper is to explore this aspect of social interactions by focusing on the concept of 'collective belief' in a non-summative sense and, more precisely, on collective belief of a specific kind of group: the political party. How can the concept of 'collective belief' help to understand the interactions which involve these kinds of collective entities? After providing an epistemic description of political parties, this paper focuses on the collective belief in a non-summative sense. As Gilbert says, a group believes that p, if its members are jointly committed to believe that p as a body. It is argued, with the help of an example from the political history of France, that this view can enable us to understand the interaction between political parties. More precisely, it can help clarify the way in which a political party uses the rational constraints on the party as a whole and/or the social and epistemic constraints on the behavior of the group's members in order to destabilize or weaken other political parties.