The Continuing Dominance of Traditional Gender Roles in Southern Elections*

Objective. Studies of the election of women to public office have been increasingly encouraging about their prospects of female candidates. The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which gender roles continue to influence the election of women to local office and the pool of candidates for higher office. Methods. Utilizing data on the gender of officials, the nature of the office, and constituency demographics from county elections in eight Southern states, we construct logit models of the election of women. Results. Women hold few local offices involved in fighting crime or of an executive nature. On the other hand, women routinely win election to process‐oriented offices with less discretion. Our analysis of constituency demographics reinforces our conclusions. Women win election in areas where the public office is relatively undesirable compared to other opportunities and the ratio of high‐quality male to high‐quality female candidates is relatively low. Conclusions. Although the frequent election of women to county office provides an expanded pool of female candidates for higher offices, it seems unlikely that women will find it as easy to move up the electoral ladder into the more competitive arena of high‐profile statewide and federal leadership offices.     

Recent Research on the Psychological Effects of Unemployment

Economic turbulence in the early 1980s stimulated not only popular and governmental concern about the effects of unemployment, but also extensive research on the topic. This journal issue presents 10 representative reports of such recent research from the United States and Europe. Of the two principal methodologies used in this field, aggregate time-series analysis and individual-level surveys, this issue is limited to the individual-level literature. Two papers provide a social psychological and human developmental orientation to the topic. Then, six papers address the psychological costs of unemployment, four based on population surveys and two dealing with plant closings. Finally, two papers describe policy responses being considered or implemented in North America and Europe.     

Will you trust your new boss? The role of affective reactions to leadership succession

Affective reactions to the departure of work group leaders are proposed as an important determinant of members' trust-related judgments regarding new leaders. A field test of veterinary hospital employees evaluating new leaders revealed that the affective reaction to the departure of the prior group leader predicted trust when there was no history between the individuals. When there was history between the two individuals, the group member's evaluation of the new leader's ability on their prior job was a significant predictor of trust over and above their affective reaction to the succession. The relationships between affective reactions to succession and trust formation were replicated in a longitudinal simulation of trust formation in student groups. The implications of these findings for the study of trust in organizations and leadership succession processes in work groups are discussed.     

The medium-term currency outlook

The article examines the experience of the major international currencies over the period since 1953 and assesses their prospects in the early 1980s. It summarizes the historical background, drawing a distinction between the Bretton Woods arrangement, when the world operated under a notional fixed exchange rate system, and the post 1971 experience which has involved a good deal of ‘dirty floating’ in the absence of any formal system. The paper focuses on the factors which influence exchange rate movements, and examines the practical uses of the analytical tools available, assessing the value, and possible misuse, of exchange rate forecasts in the decision-making process of the Long Range Planner. The author draws certain conclusions about economic policy and the international monetary system and offers some thoughts about the implications of the European Monetary System.     

Economic socialization in the kibbutz and the town in Israel

This study compared the economic understanding and attitudes of children living in the city with those living in a kibbutz, collective villages where an extreme socialist lifestyle is practised and preached. The differences in the answer patterns of the urban and kibbutz children were not very large, but the pattern was clear, and in keeping with the dominant ideology in both places: socialist in the kibbutz, middle-class capitalist in the city.     

Inference problems in life testing under multivariate normality

Modified maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters of a multivariate normal distribution are developed when the smallest or largest observations on one of the components are censored. These estimators are used to construct tests for means and correlation coefficients. The robustness of these tests to deviations from normality is investigated.