For Some and Not Others: Developmental Perspectives on the Challenges of Change and Continuity

Books reviewed:
Mark Bennett, (Ed.) Developmental Psychology: Achievements and Prospects     

Racism, Sexism, and Candidate Evaluations in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

In an attempt to understand the extent to which racism and sexism influenced affect toward Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, we analyze data from a national survey conducted in October 2008. Situating our investigation in previous examinations of modern racism and modern sexism, we test competing hypotheses about the role of these attitudes in the 2008 presidential election. Our results suggest that racism had a significant impact on candidate evaluations while sexism did not. We find that respondents who hold racist attitudes expressed negative attitudes toward Obama and positive attitudes toward Palin. When interacted with party identification, racism continued to exert a strong effect, indicating findings that are robust across partisan affiliations. Sexism, on the other hand, did not significantly influence evaluations of either Palin or Obama .     

The U.S. Diversity Visa Programme and the Transfer of Skills from Africa

The Diversity Visa (DV) programme is designed to improve the multicultural composition of the U.S. “melting pot” beyond the traditional source countries in Europe. In pursuit of this objective, the basic eligibility requirement for participation in the programme is a high school diploma. Despite its salutary objective and design, the programme’s implications for the African brain drain may not all be benign. The “tired, poor, huddled masses” from Africa are defined in more restrictive terms, and the obstacles they face are more economically and administratively onerous than those encountered by their early European counterparts. The costs of transforming a lottery win to an actual diversity visa and Green Card are so high that only Africans in well‐paying jobs, who are likely to be professionals rather than mere high school graduates, are likely to be able to afford the full costs of programme participation. In this sense, the programme has an in‐built, skills‐selective mechanism. The main objective of this study is to examine the extent to which the DV has facilitated the movement of professional, technical and kindred workers (PTKs) from Africa to the United States, and some of the economic and policy implications of the process.     

LIFE CHANCES AND CHOICES:

A Weberian lifestyles approach is employed to examine differences in quality of life among the homeless. Using a systematic random sample of 161 homeless people in a mid-sized, Southern metropolitan area, the study focuses on the impact of life chances and social choices on aspects of quality of life in this severely challenged population. Regression results show that a number of life chance and social choice variables affect general and domain-specific well-being. While chances and choices both contribute to these aspects of quality of life, there is only modest evidence of a mediating effect. With the exception of depressive symptoms, life chances appear to play a more important role in quality of life differences than life choices. The specific life chance and choice factors influencing aspects of quality of life vary with each separate well-being outcome. The implications of these findings for general sociology and homeless social policy are explored.     

Party to inequality: Right party power and income inequality in affluent Western democracies

Much social science suggests that income inequality is a product of economic and demographic factors and recent work highlights the influence of Leftist politics in affluent Western democracies. But, prior research has neglected rightist politics. We examine the impact of cumulative right party power on three measures of income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 16 affluent Western democracies from 1969 to 2000. We find that cumulative right party power significantly increases inequality with effects comparable to other established causes. Left party power has less influence than the right on the Gini coefficient and the 90/50 ratio but a larger influence on the 90/10 ratio. Union density is insignificant after controlling for right party power. Right party power partly channels through and partly combines with government expenditures to affect inequality. Temporal interactions show that right parties became more influential after 1989 while left parties became less effective. Supplementary analyses suggest that a component of right party power's effects occurs through labor market inequality prior to taxes and transfers. Sensitivity analyses reveal that the results are robust to a wide variety of alternative specifications and operationalizations and do not depend on the inclusion of the U.S. in the sample. Our results inform debates about the sources of inequality and related sociological theories regarding class, politics, the state and the economy.     

Inequality and Deliberative Development: Revisiting Bolivia's Experience with the PRSP

The deliberative‐development approach to policy‐making has gained popularity in both academic and policy circles. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the requirements necessary for deliberation to have beneficial effects on policy, some of which are detailed in this article, in particular the need for equality among deliberators. The article examines Bolivia's 2000 National Dialogue and demonstrates the effects of inequality — not between elites and non‐elites, but between groups within civil society — on the legitimacy of the outcome. Its findings have important implications for the design of deliberative‐development institutions.     

Followership theory: A review and research agenda

While theory and research on leaders and leadership abound, followers and followership theory have been given short shrift. It is accepted wisdom that there is no leadership without followers, yet followers are very often left out of the leadership research equation. Fortunately this problem is being addressed in recent research, with more attention being paid to the role of followership in the leadership process. The purpose of this article is to provide a systematic review of the followership literature, and from this review, introduce a broad theory of followership into leadership research. Based on our review, we identify two theoretical frameworks for the study of followership, one from a role-based approach (“reversing the lens”) and one from a constructionist approach (“the leadership process”). These frameworks are used to outline directions for future research. We conclude with a discussion of conceptual and methodological issues in the study of followership theory.