Working with legal pluralism: widowhood,property inheritance,and poverty alleviation in urban Senegal

This article explores the role of women's inheritance and ownership of property in urban Senegal. It shows how being able to inherit and own property promotes the economic and emotional security of widows and their children in urban areas, and discusses the challenges posed by legal pluralism in working on poverty alleviation and social protection in the city.     

Explaining ethnic polarization over attitudes towards minority rights in Eastern Europe: A multilevel analysis

This paper examines divisions between majority and minority ethnic groups over attitudes towards minority rights in 13 East European societies. Using national sample surveys and multilevel models, we test the effectiveness of competing explanations of ethnic polarization in attitudes towards minority rights, as well as regional and cross-national differences in levels of polarization. We find that, at the individual level, indicators of ‘social distance’ (inter-marriage and social interaction) account most effectively for the extent of ethnic polarization. However, regional and cross-national variations in polarization between majority and minority groups are explained most effectively by cultural (linguistic and religious) differences. These findings accord with research in the West, indicating the importance of cultural differences as a source of ethnic polarization, while offering little support for theories focusing on economic and structural factors or the size of minority groups. They also suggest the likely sources of difficulties for democratic consolidation in ethnically divided post-communist societies.     

(Not) Taking Account of Precarious Employment: Workfare Policies and Lone Mothers in Ontario and the UK

Workfare is, at least in part, a policy response to changing labour markets and the expansion taking place in jobs that are low‐paid, irregular and insecure. For lone mothers, increasingly the focus of workfare policies, precarious employment creates special challenges. However, the nature of the jobs that are available to women on social assistance has received relatively little attention in the workfare literature, which focuses more on individual characteristics, supports to employment, and programme impacts. Drawing upon both primary and secondary sources and using Ontario, the province with the most developed workfare programme in Canada, this article examines the ways in which policies support and enforce precarious employment. The article also considers the implications of precarious employment for UK policy, which has not (yet) adopted workfare for lone mothers, although incremental steps in that direction are taking place as employment is increasingly viewed as the appropriate objective of income support programmes for lone mothers.     

Risk reduction or risk compensation? The case of mandatory safety-belt use laws

The technological approach to risk regulation seeks to lessen the incidence of mortality and morbidity by modifying environmental conditions. Insofar as risk-taking behavior is purposive, social scientists have predicted that technological progress may be negated by various forms of risk compensation. The validity of this hypothesis is tested in the transportation sector with data from the U.S. on the effects of new mandatory safety-belt-use laws. A fixed-effects model of traffic fatality counts is estimated using pooled data from 50 states during the 1975–1987 period. Results suggest that such laws have reduced mortality among car occupants to a degree that is compatible with the predictions of technologists. However, there is weak evidence of increased mortality among some nonoccupants, a pattern predicted by risk-compensation theorists. The lifesaving effects of belt-use laws are largest in states that permit primary police enforcement and appear to be somewhat larger for front-seat occupants age 21 and under. Although offsetting behavior appears to be small relative to lifesaving effects, it may take several more years for any compensatory behavior to achieve a new equilibrium.This research was supported in part by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control to the New England Injury Prevention Research Center.     

WORK INCENTIVES AND SOLE MOTHERS: COMPARING AUSTRALIAN POLICY

This article adopts a comparative perspective on policies to increase labour force participation of single mothers. Australia's orientation is briefly explored within the context of other major English-speaking countries (the United States, Britain and Canada), and the common emphasis in the policies on providing employment services and reducing poverty traps for Australia and Canada's largest province (Ontario) is then examined. While the potential of these approaches to increase labour force participation is found to be limited, the comparison suggests that Canada would do well to follow some of the recent anti-poverty measures Australia has adopted. Australia, however, appears to offer a less favourable employment climate for women. The article concludes that both jurisdictions will need to pursue a broader set of policies to respond to the root causes of poverty among women heading families on their own.     

Reproductive and Developmental Risks from Ethylene Oxide: A Probabilistic Characterization of Possible Regulatory Thresholds

Ethylene oxide is a gas produced in large quantities in the United States that is used primarily as a chemical intermediate in the production of ethylene glycol, propylene glycol, non-ionic surfactants, ethanolamines, glycol ethers, and other chemicals. It has been well established that ethylene oxide can induce cancer, genetic, reproductive and developmental, and acute health effects in animals. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is currently developing both a cancer potency factor and a reference concentration (RfC) for ethylene oxide. This study used the rich database on the reproductive and developmental effects of ethylene oxide to develop a probabilistic characterization of possible regulatory thresholds for ethylene oxide. This analysis was based on the standard regulatory approach for noncancer risk assessment, but involved several innovative elements, such as: (1) the use of advanced statistical methods to account for correlations in developmental outcomes among littermates and allow for simultaneous control of covariates (such as litter size); (2) the application of a probabilistic approach for characterizing the uncertainty in extrapolating the animal results to humans; and (3) the use of a quantitative approach to account for the variation in heterogeneity among the human population. This article presents several classes of results, including: (1) probabilistic characterizations of ED10s for two quantal reproductive outcomes-resorption and fetal death, (2) probabilistic characterizations of one developmental outcome-the dose expected to yield a 5% reduction in fetal (or pup) weight, (3) estimates of the RfCs that would result from using these values in the standard regulatory approach for noncancer risk assessment, and (4) a probabilistic characterization of the level of ethylene oxide exposure that would be expected to yield a 1/1,000 increase in the risk of reproductive or developmental outcomes in exposed human populations.     

Seat belt laws: why we should keep them

In the June 2007 issue of Significance , John Adams argued for the repeal of seat belt laws. They have never been demonstrated to save lives, he said; and they increase the number of pedestrians and cyclists killed on the roads. Richard Allsop, Oliver Carsten, Andrew Evans and Robert Gifford argue that Parliament should keep the seat belt laws on the statute book and that we should all keep wearing belts whenever we travel in a car, van or coach—and they contest John's statistics.