Religious Values and Environmental Concern: Harmony and Detachment*

Objective. The thought that environmental concern is rooted in religious beliefs and values has been raised by many writers. Different claims have been made about whether the nature of this relationship is positive or negative, and empirical evidence is mixed. In line with research on attitudes and values, this study examines the hypothesis that unless religious values are mentally accessible, they will not affect judgments of environmental issues. Method. Two environmental issues, genetically modified crops and more traditional environmental issues, for example, air pollution from traffic, are chosen to represent accessibility and nonaccessibility, respectively. A two‐wave data set from a national survey is analyzed. Results. The findings support the suggestion that religious values will affect the judgment of environmental threats of the first, but not the second, issue. Conclusion. These findings suggest that situational cues partly determine which values embodied in religion will influence environmental attitudes.     

Hierarchisches Selbstinteresse und Fremdenfeindlichkeit bei Jugendlichen

The article focuses on the construct ‘Hierarchic Self-Interest’ (HSI) which is put into the context of conceptual considerations about the process of individualization (Heitmeyer et al., 1992). The construct is an expression of the logic of the market, the individual effort to perform ‘better than others’,and therefore it can be labelled as internalized elbow mentality. It is shown that HSI is a stable predictor of xenophobic attitudes and mediates the impact of sociological factors like socio-economic status, parental style, and gender in the statistical models. Intergenerational transmission of xenophobia, i.e., the transfer of attitudes from parents to offspring has a genuine influence independent of HSI. For the reported analyses, questionnaire data of a panel survey (1999–2001) from 443 familiy quadruples (target child, opposite-sex sibling, mother, father) were used. The target children came from 68 Berlin schools and were in 8^th or 9^th grade during the first wave of data gathering.     

Alumni Relationship Management als Erfolgsfaktor im Wettbewerb der Hochschulen

Alumni Relationship Management is an important attribute in the increasingly competitive environment of German universities. Alumni are ambassadors of their alma mater and are part of its reputation. The retention of alumni is of further importance because it enhances the transfer between the academic’s and practitioner’s worlds and can contribute to a sound financial basis of universities. This empirical survey of alumni organisations of universities shows two general types of alumni organisations which can be differentiated by their parameters and activities. The success of alumni relationship management is reflected by professionalism of its organisation and the quality, which is determined by its acceptance of its members.     

The heroine and the capitalist: the profession's debate about privatisation of Swedish social work

Since the 1990s, as a consequence of economic crisis and ideological and political redirections, welfare provision in Sweden has undergone processes of decentralisation, market orientation and privatisation. Publicly financed services provided by subcontracted private enterprises have increased substantially in every welfare sector, including social work. Furthermore, numbers of self-employed social workers also appear to be increasing. The aim of the article is to describe and analyse the debate on privatisation in professional social work journals. More than 700 articles gleaned from 1100 issues of four professional journals spanning the period 1985–2003 have been analysed using a combination of quantitative content and qualitative discourse analysis. The results show that the debate has shifted from ideology to pragmatics in the two major social work unions, although, despite de-polarisation tendencies, ambivalence towards private social work is evident.     

Reputation und Kooperation

The institutionalized system of rating sellers in internet-auctions is a powerful tool to promote cooperation. This system encourages rational actors to “invest in reputation” and, consequently, to behave cooperatively. We analyze the strategic behaviour of sellers and buyers and, particularly, we investigate with empirical data whether there is a “premium on reputation”. Ulrich Brinkmann and Matthias Meifert critically comment on our article. In this rejoinder we discuss their objections and particularly the measurement of reputation. Also, we explore the question of the relevance of an institutionalized system of reputation. Is an exogeneous sanctioning mechanism a necessary prerequisite to generate a stable amount of cooperation as Brinkmann and Meifert argue or does the institution of a reputation system suffice? To answer this question further experimental or simulation studies are required.     

Methodological Nationalism,the Social Sciences,and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology1

The article examines methodological nationalism, a conceptual tendency that was central to the development of the social sciences and undermined more than a century of migration studies. Methodological nationalism is the naturalization of the global regime of nation‐states by the social sciences. Transnational studies, we argue, including the study of transnational migration, is linked to periods of intense globalization such as the turn of the twenty‐first century. Yet transnational studies have their own contradictions that may reintroduce methodological nationalism in other guises. In studying migration, the challenge is to avoid both extreme fluidism and the bounds of nationalist thought.     

THE POLITICAL COLOR OF FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY

We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model that yields testable implications about the fiscal policy run by governments of different political color. Successive generations of voters choose taxation, expenditure, and government debt through repeated elections. Voters are heterogeneous by age and by the intensity of their preferences for public good provision. The political equilibrium switches stochastically between left‐ (pro‐public goods) and right‐leaning (pro‐private consumption) governments. A shift to the left (right) is associated with a fall (increase) in government debt, an increase (fall) in taxation, and an increase (fall) in government expenditures. However, left‐leaning governments engage in more debt accumulation during recessions. These predictions are shown to be consistent with the time‐series evidence for the United States in the postwar period, and also with the evidence for a panel of OECD countries. (JEL: D72, E62, H41, H62, H63)     

The influence function of penalized regression estimators

To perform regression analysis in high dimensions, lasso or ridge estimation are a common choice. However, it has been shown that these methods are not robust to outliers. Therefore, alternatives as penalized M-estimation or the sparse least trimmed squares (LTS) estimator have been proposed. The robustness of these regression methods can be measured with the influence function. It quantifies the effect of infinitesimal perturbations in the data. Furthermore, it can be used to compute the asymptotic variance and the mean-squared error (MSE). In this paper we compute the influence function, the asymptotic variance and the MSE for penalized M-estimators and the sparse LTS estimator. The asymptotic biasedness of the estimators make the calculations non-standard. We show that only M-estimators with a loss function with a bounded derivative are robust against regression outliers. In particular, the lasso has an unbounded influence function.