Democratic Deficit in the ACT: Is the Citizen Initiated Referendum a Solution?

Hopeful of bringing citizens closer to government decision‐making Gary Humphries recently presented the Community Referendum Bill 2002 to the ACT Legislative Assembly. The Citizen Initiated Referendum has many staunch advocates however this paper considers whether CIR is an appropriate solution to perceived democratic deficits in the ACT or anywhere else in Australia. The paper canvasses a number of pitfalls of CIR. These include: their potential to aggravate rather than ameliorate the democratic deficit; the problems associated with under‐deliberation; and potentially detrimental consequences for existing electoral arrangements. Specifically, CIR could engender voter fatigue, reduce the salience of elections and exacerbate levels of ungovernability and accountability, all of which are known to turn people off politics and voting.     

Stress Crossover in Newlywed Marriage: A Longitudinal and Dyadic Perspective

Studies of stress and marital quality often assess stress as an intrapersonal phenomenon, examining how spouses’ stress may influence their own relationship well‐being. Yet spouses’ stress also may influence partners’ relationship evaluations, a phenomenon referred to as stress crossover. This study examined stress crossover, and conditions that may facilitate crossover, in a sample of 169 newlywed couples over 3.5 years. A significant crossover effect emerged for husbands, which was moderated by couples’ observed conflict resolution skills. For wives, a significant stress interaction emerged, such that the influence of husbands’ stress on wives’ marital satisfaction depended on wives’ own stress levels. These findings highlight the importance of a dyadic approach when examining the role of stress in marriage.     

Factors associated with fundraising dependency among nonprofit organisations in Australia

Despite the importance of fundraising to the nonprofit sector there has been surprisingly little research on fundraising as a revenue source in Australia. Research that has been conducted both here and internationally has focused on the cost of fundraising – the proportion of fundraising expenses to total fundraising revenue, and fundraising performance – the absolute or relative amount of money raised by organisations via fundraising. This paper examines why some nonprofit organisations are more dependent on fundraising as a source of revenue than others. The paper applies multivariate techniques to examine the influence that three broad sets of factors: organisational; revenue generation model; and fundraising approach, have on what we term ‘fundraising dependency’ – the percentage of a nonprofit organisation's total revenue that is derived from fundraising activities. It finds that fundraising dependency is associated with a range of organisational characteristics (e.g. size, geographical scope of the organisation and tax status); alternative forms of revenue generation (e.g. reliance on government funding and commercial venturing) and fundraising approach (e.g. whether professional fundraising staff are employed, the use of volunteer fundraisers and the number of fundraising practices used). The results support taking a multidimensional approach to understanding fundraising dependency.     

Improving robustness of next-hop routing

A weakness of next-hop routing is that following a link or router failure there may be no routes between some source-destination pairs, or packets may get stuck in a routing loop as the protocol operates to establish new routes. In this article, we address these weaknesses by describing mechanisms to choose alternate next hops. Our first contribution is to model the scenario as the following tree augmentation problem. Consider a mixed graph where some edges are directed and some undirected. The directed edges form a spanning tree pointing towards the common destination node. Each directed edge represents the unique next hop in the routing protocol. Our goal is to direct the undirected edges so that the resulting graph remains acyclic and the number of nodes with outdegree two or more is maximized. These nodes represent those with alternative next hops in their routing paths. We show that tree augmentation is NP-hard in general and present a simple \(\frac{1}{2}\)-approximation algorithm. We also study 3 special cases. We give exact polynomial-time algorithms for when the input spanning tree consists of exactly 2 directed paths or when the input graph has bounded treewidth. For planar graphs, we present a polynomial-time approximation scheme when the input tree is a breadth-first search tree. To the best of our knowledge, tree augmentation has not been previously studied.     

A mixed-methods examination of sexual coercion and degradation among women in violent relationships who do and do not report forced sex

Although partner sexual abuse is clearly an important dimension of partner violence, it has received less research attention than partner physical and psychological abuse. This article contributes to the literature by examining similarities and differences in coercive and degrading sexual tactics experienced by women who do (n = 31) and women who do not (n = 31) report forced sex using quantitative and qualitative data. The women in the sample had all been recently (within the past 6 months) stalked by a violent intimate partner. Results suggest that both women who do and women who do not report forced sex experience various coercive and degrading tactics within the context of sexual activity. Results also suggest that multiple sexual abuse dimensions should be considered within the context of partner psychological abuse, physical abuse, and stalking and that more research on understanding the outcomes associated with dimensions of sexual abuse within the context of physical and psychological abuse is needed.     

Public Participation and Claimsmaking: Evidence Utilization and Divergent Policy Frames in California's Ergonomics Rulemaking

Notice and comment provisions in agency rulemaking provide animportant mechanism for the public to contribute to policy.Yet there is limited research on how interest groups participatein this process. California's passage of an ergonomics standardin 1997, the only current state statute in the country, providesa useful, high salience policy case for examining public commentary.Between an initially proposed comprehensive standard and theenactment of a much weaker regulation occurred the largest publicresponse in California's state Occupational Safety and HealthAdministration history. Through a detailed content analysisof the notice and comment submissions we identify features ofparticipation and claimsmaking that differ between businessand nonbusiness submissions. Business groups were the largemajority of participants and also presented a disproportionateamount of evidence, using an "abstract-technical" policy frameto assert the illegitimacy of the ergonomics standard. Labor,public health organizations and private citizens representedless than one-third of the participants and relied primarilyon experiential information and a "concretized-moral" characterizationof policy issues in support of the standard. The existence ofthese distinct "interpretive communities" that mobilize differentresources raises questions about whether public commentary canfulfill its purported "democratic accountability" purpose aswell as underline the limitations of appealing to scientificexpertise for solving complex policy problems.     

Wage-Poor Mothers and Moral Economy

"You have to choose ... and what mother's choosing this jobover her child?"

This article explores the subaltern work andfamily care practices of 300 low-wage women. Although US welfarereform enforced the labor market as the sole route for familysupport, many, often single–mother, families remain wageimpoverished. Their work habits orbit around keeping childrensafe and defy market norms. Furthermore, in wage-poor Americaand beyond, this defiance is understood as morally legitimate,representing a hidden challenge to an economic ideology thatsubordinates humanity to the market.     

Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking: A Social Work Perspective on Misidentification,Victims, Buyers,Traffickers, Treatment,and Reform of Current Practice

Domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) has been steadily on the rise in the United States, with estimates between 15,000 and 50,000 victims per year. Actual estimates of DMST victims are difficult to determine based on misidentification, conflicts between state and federal laws about age of consent and charges, perceptions of the victim, as well as lack of knowledge regarding the prevalence and dynamics of sex trafficking of minors. Oftentimes, child victims come from multi-problem homes and have already experienced abuse and neglect, which further complicates treatment and services. This article explores the emerging literature and defines the problem and identifies laws, statues, and definitions of the problem. It also reviews the literature on victim, buyer, and trafficker characteristics. Organized crime's role in this growing epidemic is explained as well as treatment options and recommendations for future social work practice at the micro-, mezzo-, and macro-levels.     

Testing Respite Effect of Work on Stress Among Mothers of Children with Special Needs

Extant research is ambivalent about whether or not working outside the home provides mothers of children with special needs a buffer against the stressful effects of caregiving. The empirical evidence of a respite effect is based primarily on small, non-probability samples. The study reported here used a large nationally representative sample of families from the National Survey of American Families (NSAF) and analysis that addressed the biasing effects of simultaneity between the dependent variable (parent stress) and employment. Results produced are consistent with a caregiver-specific respite effect from work, at least among mother caregivers of older children who were not concerned that working will have negative effects on their child’s well-being and who worked regular shifts in higher level occupations.