Marital splits and income changes: Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

We provide new evidence about what happens to people's incomes when their or their parents' marital union dissolves using longitudinal data from waves 1--4 of the British Household Panel Survey. Marital splits are accompanied by substantial declines in real income for separating wives and children on average, whereas separating husbands' real income on average changes much less. Results are shown to be robust to the choice of income de®nition and degree of economies of scale built into the household equivalence scale, and are validated with information about respondents' assessments of how their personal ®nancial circumstances changed. In addition we analyse the extent to which the welfare state mitigates the size of the income loss for women and children relative to men, and document the accompanying changes in social assistance bene®t receipt and paid work, and maintenance income receipt and payment.     

When Women Run Against Men

The electorate's reactions to women congressional candidatesare examined using both election returns and survey data. Whenparty and incumbency are controlled candidate sex alone is foundto have little or no effect on election outcomes. A curiousinteraction is found between candidate sex and party, however.This is attributed to nomination patterns     

A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis of Politics

The purpose of this article will be to outline a symbolic interactionist approach to the study of politics in the United States. In the course of this presentation, the basic assumptions and concepts of the interactionist perspective will be presented, culminating in a model of society as a negotiated order. This model in conjunction with definitions of power and politics will provide the basis for analyzing the processes of power. The article will focus on and emphasize two mechanisms of power, information flow control and symbolic mobilization of support, which have previously been unrecognized and unan-alyzed. In the conclusion, the strengths and weaknesses of the approach will be discussed.     

Transnational social capital: the socio‐spatialities of civil society

Civil society remains a contested concept, but one that is widely embedded in global development processes. Transnationalism within civil society scholarship is often described dichotomously, either through hierarchical dependency relations or as a more amorphous networked global civil society. These two contrasting spatial imaginaries produce very particular ideas about how transnational relations contribute to civil society. Drawing on empirical material from research with civil society organizations in Barbados and Grenada, in this article I contend that civil society groups use forms of transnational social capital in their work. This does not, however, resonate with the horizontal relations associated with grassroots globalization or vertical chains of dependence. These social relations are imbued with power and agency and are entangled in situated historical, geographical and personal contexts. I conclude that the diverse transnational social relations that are part of civil society activity offer hope and possibilities for continued civil society action in these unexpected spatial arrangements.     

Robust Estimation for Zero‐Inflated Poisson Regression

Abstract. The zero‐inflated Poisson regression model is a special case of finite mixture models that is useful for count data containing many zeros. Typically, maximum likelihood (ML) estimation is used for fitting such models. However, it is well known that the ML estimator is highly sensitive to the presence of outliers and can become unstable when mixture components are poorly separated. In this paper, we propose an alternative robust estimation approach, robust expectation‐solution (RES) estimation. We compare the RES approach with an existing robust approach, minimum Hellinger distance (MHD) estimation. Simulation results indicate that both methods improve on ML when outliers are present and/or when the mixture components are poorly separated. However, the RES approach is more efficient in all the scenarios we considered. In addition, the RES method is shown to yield consistent and asymptotically normal estimators and, in contrast to MHD, can be applied quite generally.     

WOMEN AND TARIFFS: TESTING THE GENDER GAP HYPOTHESIS IN A DOWNS-MAYER POLITICAL-ECONOMY MODEL

This paper tests a variant of the standard endogenous tariff model under direct democracy (the Downs-Mayer model) with a gender gap. Specifically, we argue that, if there is a division of economic activity between men and women, and political preferences are affected by one's relationship to the economy, there will be a gender gap in political activity. We test this hypothesis with respect to the effect of political enfranchisement of women on the level of the U.S. tariff. The empirical results strongly support the hypothesis (JEL F4, D7, N4)     

Professional Ethics in Social Work-- What Future?

Correspondence to: Sarah Banks, Community and Youth Work Studies Unit, Durham University, 45, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HN, UK. E-mail: s.j.banks{at}durham.ac.uk Summary This paper examines the ethical implications of recent changesin social work, particularly in relation to the conception ofsocial workers as professionals guided by a code of ethics.These changes include the fragmentation of the occupation, theincreasing proceduralization of the work and the growing focuson consumer rights and user participation. Some people haveargued that codes of ethics are becoming increasingly irrelevantin this climate, in that they assume a unified occupationalgroup and are based upon professionals' definition of valueswithout consultation with service users. On the other hand,it has also been maintained that it is ever more important toretain and strengthen codes of ethics in order to maintain professionalidentity and to defend the work of the profession from outsideattack. This paper explores the relevance of a code of professionalethics for social work, focusing particularly on the BritishAssociation of Social Workers' code, in the context of the changingorganization and practice of the work. It considers two alternativeapproaches: the ‘new consumerism’ which focuseson the worker's technical skills (rather than professional ethics)and consumer rights (as opposed to professional obligations);and a ’new radicalism‘ which stresses the worker'sown personal or political commitment and individual moral responsibility(as opposed to an externally imposed code of professional ethics).It is concluded that the changes in social work do threatenthe notion of a single set of professional ethics articulatedin a code, and that, in some types of work, this model is lessappropriate. However, there is still mileage in retaining anddeveloping a code of ethics, not as an imposed set of rulesdeveloped by the professional association, but as part of adynamic and evolving ethical tradition in social work and asa stimulus for debate and reflection on changing and contradictoryvalues.