Based on survey data from the Swedish Election Studies Program, the green breakthrough in Sweden is assessed. In the parliamentary election of 1988, for the first time in 70 years, a new party, the Greens, succeeded in getting representation in the Swedish Riksdag. The future situation of the Greens is very precarious, however. The analysis shows that the party's voters tend to belong to highly volatile groups in the Swedish electorate (young, big city, white collar). Furthermore, the Greens have to confront many different issue publics on environmental issues since a coherent green dimension structuring ordinary people's opinions on environmental issues has not yet developed in Sweden. The alternative green dimension is still to a very large extent an elite phenomenon in Swedish politics.
An exploration of structural changes within the US capitalist system, ie, the switch from industrial capital to speculative capital in terms of the wealth-holding patterns of rich Americans during the past decade. The extent to which wealth has moved away from industry toward finance & real estate is examined. Forbes 400 data (28 Oct 1985) indicate that speculators have become dominant in the US ruling class. It is suggested that the speculative basis of capitalism in the US has created a greater risk of instability. The recent "big winners" in the real estate & financial sectors could be brought down by the existing recession, along with the major industrial sectors with which they are associated. J. W. Stanton
Scholarly studies on arms transfers, a critical aspect of present-day international politics, abound. These studies are almost all done from the perspectives of big and super powers. There is virtually no systematic and comparative study of the impact of arms transfers on developing states. Through the use of cross-national aggregate data analysis as well as case-by-case studies, we have examined the impact of arms transfers on civil-military relations in developing states. This analysis suggests that arms transfer facilitates the occurrence of coup d'état and lengthens the period of military rule. The study also indicates that large-scale deaths from political violence might be the result rather than the cause of military rule. We explain these relationships in sociopolitical terms.
Analysis of two national data sets reveals that African-Americans in general know less about how the mass media operate, see fewer outside influences on the media, see themselves as having less influence on the media and are less cynical about the media than are whites. African-Americans who have the most contact with the dominant white society do evaluate the media as being more biased, compared with those with less contact with white people. Blacks and whites alike judged the news media to be influenced by advertisers, big business, unions and to be influenced by the two major political parties. If many news media are part of large corporations, this fact has not gone unnoticed by audiences, fairly or not.
Gender Equality in French Academia is difficult to analyse –and manage- for one main reason: Academia and academics belong to the Public Sector and the law which rules equality in employment (1983, updated in 2001) concerns only the private sector. In France commonrules are not applying to the Public sector: it has its proper working rules and its proper courts (it does not come within industrial tribunals but within internal civil services ones), its proper career management (appointments and promotions are ruled by specific competitiveexaminations, the so called "concours"). Likewise, traditionally, the collection of data and statistics are not systematic in the publicsector. For example, each big private enterprise has to present each year to its work's council a social assessment with data on employees, training, salaries etc.and since the 1983's law it must include gendered ones. But the public sector was not concerned with this legal obligation. It was only at the end of the 90's that governmental circulars and decrees ordered for such statistics. So it is only very recently that official and systematic analysis and statistics on Academia are gathered and published.
Gender Equality in French Academia is difficult to analyse –and manage- for one main reason: Academia and academics belong to the Public Sector and the law which rules equality in employment (1983, updated in 2001) concerns only the private sector. In France commonrules are not applying to the Public sector: it has its proper working rules and its proper courts (it does not come within industrial tribunals but within internal civil services ones), its proper career management (appointments and promotions are ruled by specific competitiveexaminations, the so called "concours"). Likewise, traditionally, the collection of data and statistics are not systematic in the publicsector. For example, each big private enterprise has to present each year to its work's council a social assessment with data on employees, training, salaries etc.and since the 1983's law it must include gendered ones. But the public sector was not concerned with this legal obligation. It was only at the end of the 90's that governmental circulars and decrees ordered for such statistics. So it is only very recently that official and systematic analysis and statistics on Academia are gathered and published.
Gender Equality in French Academia is difficult to analyse –and manage- for one main reason: Academia and academics belong to the Public Sector and the law which rules equality in employment (1983, updated in 2001) concerns only the private sector. In France commonrules are not applying to the Public sector: it has its proper working rules and its proper courts (it does not come within industrial tribunals but within internal civil services ones), its proper career management (appointments and promotions are ruled by specific competitiveexaminations, the so called "concours"). Likewise, traditionally, the collection of data and statistics are not systematic in the publicsector. For example, each big private enterprise has to present each year to its work's council a social assessment with data on employees, training, salaries etc.and since the 1983's law it must include gendered ones. But the public sector was not concerned with this legal obligation. It was only at the end of the 90's that governmental circulars and decrees ordered for such statistics. So it is only very recently that official and systematic analysis and statistics on Academia are gathered and published.
Using data from 1,080 study participants, this study simulates a hiring scenario in which personality measures are used to screen candidates for a hypothetical expatriate (expat) position. On the basis of recent research indicating that selected "big five" personality variables are related to expat assignment success, an expatriate composite score was computed‐based on NEO personality inventory and Hogan personality inventory scale scores. Across these two personality instruments, four samples, and eight selection ratios, a greater proportion of women versus men are consistently "selected". Statistical tests confirm that the use of personality criteria results in gender being significantly associated with selection outcomes. These results are consistent with arguments that women are dispositionally advantaged with respect to international assignments. These findings contrast sharply with extant evidence indicating that women hold relatively few expat positions.
The nonlinear dynamical process of self-organized criticality provides a new 'theory of history' that explains a number of unresolved anomalies: Why are the really big events in human history usually unpredictable? Why is it impossible to anticipate sudden political, economic, and social changes? Why do distributions of historical data almost always contain a few extreme events that seem to have had a different cause from all the rest? Why do so many of our 'lessons of history' fail to predict important future events? As people, organizations, and nations become increasingly sensitive to each other's behavior, trivial occurrences sometimes propagate into sudden changes. Such events are unpredictable because in the self-organized criticality environment that characterizes human history, the magnitude of a cause often is unrelated to the magnitude of its effect.
AbstractWhile heritability studies show that most of the variance in adult personality can be attributed to genetic or so-called nonshared environmental influence, this does not mean that shared events lack importance for the development of later personality differences. We studied the relationship between Big Five personality differences in monozygotic (MZ) twins at age 29, and life stressors at age 6 to 15, using prospective data from 26 MZ pairs studied from birth onwards. A positive significant correlation was found between stressors in childhood and early adolescence, and intrapair personality differences in Agreeableness, Openness, Conscientiousness, and five-factor profiles. We note that the effects of shared events are labeled "nonshared" environment when the effect is to make siblings more different. Case examples illustrate the relationship between stress and personality differences, and provide hypotheses for further studies in larger samples.
In a previous study [Ali, Siyal and Sultan (1995)], we observed a big gap between behaviour and desires. Only 35 percent women had the number of children that they had desired. Whereas, a very large number of women had more children than their stated ideal number of children. The same data set also showed that a majority of women (54 percent) either wanted to stop having children or wanted to wait at least two years before having another child [Ali and Rukanuddin (1992)]. In practice, all of these women were not protected; instead only 12 percent were practising contraception [Shah and Ali (1992)]. An argument was put forward that, had these women been empowered to decide about the number of children to be born, the scenario would have been different and small family size norms would have prevailed.
In June 1996, the EU directive on parental leave came into force. A major consideration in the introduction of this directive was its advantages for the reconciliation of work and family life. However, there is little systematic knowledge about the practical significance of parental leave arrangements in the European Union for equal opportunities policy. Given this situation, the main focus of this article is on empirical issues such as the number of (male and female) leavetakers and the length of the leave. In order to present comparative data, a user rate is calculated for eight European countries. It appears that the majority of leavetakers are women; even in Nordic countries there are big differences between the user rates of men and women. As a result, the importance of the actual parental leave arrangements for equal opportunities seems rather dubious.
Abstract. The study of hydrological variations in the watersheds of seismic areas can be useful in order to acquire a new knowledge of the mechanisms by which earthquakes can produce hydrological anomalies. Italy has the availability of many long historical series both of hydrological parameters and of seismological data, and is an ideal laboratory to verify the validity of theoretical models proposed by various authors. In this work we analyse the hydrological anomalies associated with some of the big earthquakes that occurred in the last century in the southern Apennines: 1930, 1980 and 1984. For these earthquakes we analysed hydrometric and pluviometric data looking for significant anomalies in springs, water wells and mountain streams. The influence of rainfalls on the normal flows of rivers, springs and wells has been ascertained. Also, the earthquake of 1805, for which a lot of hydrological perturbations have been reported, is considered in order to point out effects imputable to this earthquake that can be similar to the effects of the other big earthquakes. The considered seismic events exhibit different modes of energy release, different focal mechanisms and different propagation of effects on the invested areas. Furthermore, even if their epicentres were not localised in contiguous seismogenetic areas, it seems that the hydrological effects imputable to them took place in the same areas. Such phenomena have been compared with macroseismic fields and transformed in parameters, in order to derive empirical relationships between the dimensions of the event and the characteristics of the hydrological variations. The results of this work point to a close dependence among hydrological anomalies, regional structures and fault mechanisms, and indicate that many clear anomalies have been forerunners of earthquakes. In 1993, the Naples Bureau of the Hydrographic National Service started the continuous monitoring of hydrologic parameters by a network of automatic stations and transmission in real time; presently 7 acquifers are under control in which also pH, T , salinity, electrical conductivity, dissolved oxygen are measured. We envisage to increase the number of monitoring sites and controlled parameters.
The decentralization of government is one of the most significant trends in politics worldwide. Variation in the timing of reform across countries only vaguely relates to the genesis of an international consensus pushed by big lenders and development banks or the reemergence of democracy in decentralizing countries. Moreover, these reforms were enacted from the top, which appears to contradict one of political science's central tenets: that politicians seek to maximize (or at least maintain) control over political and fiscal resources. This article develops a theory linking the adoption of decentralization to the electoral concerns of political parties: Decentralization represents a desirable strategy for parties whose support at subnational levels appears more secure than their prospects in national elections. The author tests this argument using data from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela.
Sociologists and psychologists observe that African American mothers socialize their children to enduring Black "cultural motifs" and "styles of behavior" rather than "informed Black values." Yet, little empirical data exists on what African American mothers socialize—or perceive they socialize—children to value. Using a qualitative, quasi-analytic inductive technique, in-depth interviews with 30 low- income African American mothers, who participated in African American Brer Rabbit storytelling, were examined. The findings suggest that the women's teachings about Brer Rabbit's trickery include "informed Black values." The women teach that tricks per se are undesirable; however, Brer Rabbit's tricks are good because they dramatize highly valued, group-affirming traits, such as "thinking ahead," "thinking well," "using your head instead of your fist," and "protecting the physically small and defenseless against the physically big and powerful." A discussion of the women's Africentric group-affirming teachings is presented.
