What Does It Mean To Be Patriotic? Policing Patriotism in Sports and Social Studies Education

Authors discuss the relationship between social studies education and patriotism. The authors share two lesson plans (one elementary and one secondary) that examine the racialized and politicized experiences of three professional athletes, Gabby Douglas, Colin Kaepernick, and Megan Rapinoe. Drawing on tenets of critical race media literacy and conceptual understandings of critical patriotism, this article presents two model lesson plans designed to assist teachers in guiding students toward an understanding of patriotism that is critical in nature through promoting informed action inside and outside the classroom.     

Information Sources as Explanatory Variables for the Belgian Health‐Related Risk Perception of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

The media play an important role in risk communication, providing information about accidents, both nearby and far away. Each media source has its own presentation style, which could influence how the audience perceives the presented risk. This study investigates the explanatory power of 12 information sources (traditional media, new media, social media, and interpersonal communication) for the perceived risk posed by radiation released from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant on respondents’ own health and that of the population in general. The analysis controlled for attitude toward nuclear energy, gender, education, satisfaction with the media coverage, and duration of attention paid to the coverage. The study uses a large empirical data set from a public opinion survey, which is representative for the Belgian population with respect to six sociodemographic variables. Results show that three information sources are significant regressors of perceived health‐related risk of the nuclear accident: television, interpersonal communication, and the category of miscellaneous online sources. More favorable attitudes toward nuclear power, longer attention to the coverage, and higher satisfaction with the provided information lead to lower risk perception. Taken together, the results suggest that the media can indeed have a modest influence on how the audience perceives a risk.     

Explosion time for some Laplace transforms of the Wishart process

In this article, we focus upon a family of matrix valued stochastic processes and study the problem of determining the smallest time such that their Laplace transforms become infinite. In particular, we concentrate upon the class of Wishart processes, which have proved to be very useful in different applications by their ability in describing non-trivial dependence. Thanks to this remarkable property we are able to explain the behavior of the explosion times for the Laplace transforms of the Wishart process and its time integral in terms of the relative importance of the involved factors and their correlations.     

How to Enhance Social Participation and Well-Being in (Formerly) Homeless Clients: A Structural Equation Modelling Approach

Social Indicators Research - In the present study we examined care-related and demographic predictors of well-being among 225 (formerly) homeless clients of a Dutch organisation providing shelter...     

Educational Pairings,Motherhood, and Women’s Relative Earnings in Europe

As a consequence of the reversal of the gender gap in education, the female partner in a couple now typically has as much as or more education compared with the male partner in most Western countries. This study addresses the implications for the earnings of women relative to their male partners in 16 European countries. Using the 2007 and 2011 rounds of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (N = 58,292), we investigate the extent to which international differences in women’s relative earnings can be explained by educational pairings and their interaction with the motherhood penalty on women’s earnings, by international differences in male unemployment, or by cultural gender norms. We find that the newly emerged pattern of hypogamy is associated with higher relative earnings for women in all countries and that the motherhood penalty on relative earnings is considerably lower in hypogamous couples, but neither of these findings can explain away international country differences. Similarly, male unemployment is associated with higher relative earnings for women but cannot explain away the country differences. Against expectations, we find that the hypogamy bonus on women’s relative earnings, if anything, tends to be stronger rather than weaker in countries that exhibit more conservative gender norms.     

Exit from and re‐entry into social assistance benefit in Belgium among people with migration background and the native‐born

Whereas several studies have examined the timing of exit from social assistance, little is known about the exit destinations after social assistance and whether these entail different risks of re‐entry into social assistance. Using administrative data, we studied 13,552 people with various migration backgrounds who entered social assistance in Belgium in 2004 or 2005. We tracked their social assistance spell(s) and the income source(s) after exit on a quarterly basis over 4 years, using random‐effects hazard models. We found that one‐third of the beneficiaries exited from first‐spells to work, whereas 14% left to active labour market programmes (ALMPs) and 16% to social insurance benefits. About a third re‐entered social assistance, in particular after short work exits. Participation in ALMPs and social insurance benefit receipt was less common among beneficiaries with migration background compared with native‐born and these exits led less frequently to re‐entry than did exits to paid employment.     

Optimal income taxation with Kalai wage bargaining and endogenous participation

This paper characterizes the optimal redistributive tax schedule in a search–matching framework where (voluntary) nonparticipation and (involuntary) unemployment are endogenous and wages are determined by proportional bargaining à la Kalai. The optimal employment tax rate is given by an inverse elasticity rule. This rule depends on the global response of the employment rate, which depends not only on the participation (labor supply) responses, but also on the vacancy posting (labor demand) responses and on the product of these two responses. For plausible values of the parameters, our matching environment induces much lower employment tax rates than the usual competitive model with endogenous participation only. However, optimal employment tax rates are larger (in absolute value) when a given level of the global elasticity of employment is more due to search frictions and less due to participation responses.     

Cracks in a policy paradigm – poverty reduction and social security: the case of Belgium

Poverty reduction rests on the mechanisms of horizontal and vertical solidarity and on prevention and repair of social risks. In this contribution, we argue that in contemporary welfare states the poverty-reducing capacity of existing social security systems has inherent limitations. Focusing on Belgium, we present and discuss empirical indications of a persistent (over a period of at least 30 years) decline in poverty reduction through social transfers, particularly among households who are highly dependent on such transfers. Firstly, we show that prevention and repair have failed to contribute to a reduction in the proportion of work-poor households who are highly dependent upon social security and face a high (rising even) poverty risk. Secondly, we find that given the fragmentation of social risks – in terms of both ex post poverty outcomes and ex ante social stratification – horizontal redistributive mechanisms through risk pooling have become less obvious, especially in respect of unemployment. Thirdly, it appears that the mechanisms of vertical solidarity also face inherent limitations. In a final section we summarise some important research questions for the future and potentially worthwhile policy avenues to resolve the question of how social policy-making might succeed in the future where it has failed in the past.