The Ideologically Colonized Metropole: Dutch Racism and Racist Denial

Many in The Netherlands deny the existence of race and racism even as significant research strongly suggests otherwise. This paper synthesized existing literature to illuminate The Netherlands' unique form of racism, which is rooted in racial neoliberalism, anti‐racialism (i.e. the denial of race), racial Europeanization, and the particular Dutch history of colonial exploitation. This article summarizes existing scholarship addressing racism in wide array of social institutions in The Netherlands before addressing the historical roots of Dutch racism and how Dutch aphasia and racial Europeanization deny the links between contemporary and historical oppression before, finally, offering an explanation for this disconnect.     

Costs and Rewards of Children: The Effects of Becoming a Parent on Adults' Lives

How do new parents differ from their childless counterparts in social and psychological resources, daily strains, and psychological well‐being? Using a nationally representative panel of 1,933 adults who were childless at the first interview, we compare 6 indicators of adults' lives for those who became parents and those remaining childless several years later, controlling for earlier states. Becoming a parent is both detrimental and rewarding. With the exception of social integration, which is greater for all groups of new parents compared with their childless counterparts, the effects of parental status on adults' lives vary markedly by gender and marital status. Unmarried parents report lower self‐efficacy and higher depression than their childless counterparts. Married mothers' lives are marked by more housework and more marital conflict but less depression than their childless counterparts. Parental status has little influence on the lives of married men.     

How Does Public Management Affect Government Performance? Findings from International Research

Despite the growing importance of public management reform aroundthe world, relatively little scholarship evaluates the contributionsof public management to government performance, that is, tothe character and consequences of service provision by publicagencies. One study (Hill and Lynn 2005) evaluated over eighthundred American empirical studies that address issues of publicmanagement effectiveness in a wide variety of fields, subfields,and disciplines. In this article we employ the analytic frameworkof Hill and Lynn—a polycentric "logic of governance"—toevaluate 193 research articles published in English that usenon-American, or what we will term international, empiricalevidence. Our evaluation reveals more similarities in Americanand non-American public management research, and in the determinantsof government performance, than one might expect, given thedistinctiveness of the American politico-administrative system.These similarities may be deceptive, however. Internationalinvestigators exhibit somewhat different modeling strategies,tending, for example, to favor more linear managerialist hypotheses—changesin structure lead to changes outcomes, for example—thanAmerican research, which is more concerned with intragovernmentalcomplexities. The fact that the use of a polycentric logic ofgovernance revealed highly suggestive similarities and differencesin the determinants of performance in public organizations suggeststhe potential value of this kind of analytic strategy in bothsingle investigations and in meta-analyses of public managementreform.     

Rules Infants Look By: Testing the Assumption of Transitivity in Visual Salience

What drives infants’ attention in complex visual scenes? Early models of infant attention suggested that the degree to which different visual features were detectable determines their attentional priority. Here, we tested this by asking whether two targets—defined by different features, but each equally salient when evaluated independently—would drive attention equally when pitted head‐to‐head. In Experiment 1, we presented 6‐month‐old infants with an array of Gabor patches in which a target region varied either in color or spatial frequency from the background. Using a forced‐choice preferential‐looking method, we measured how readily infants fixated the target as its featural difference from the background was parametrically increased. Then, in Experiment 2, we used these psychometric preference functions to choose values for color and spatial frequency targets that were equally salient (preferred), and pitted them against each other within the same display. We reasoned that if salience is transitive, then the stimuli should be iso‐salient and infants should therefore show no systematic preference for either stimulus. On the contrary, we found that infants consistently preferred the color‐defined stimulus. This suggests that computing visual salience in more complex scenes needs to include factors above and beyond local salience values.     

Engaging Indigeneity in Development Policy

This article explores how development programming in rural poverty and the environment can work with indigenous peoples. It draws on research conducted in Asia and Latin America to suggest how indigeneity can be understood as specific kinds of marginalisation intersecting with self‐identification and recognition as indigenous. Current obstacles to effective engagement with indigenous peoples are outlined, and suggestions are offered for pro‐actively addressing their experience. Two critical areas where there are opportunities for donors to support indigenous peoples' priorities include ‘FPIC’ (Free Prior and Informed Consent) and a careful consideration of the implications of niche‐market engagement.     

The Time Squeeze: Parental Statuses and Feelings About Time With Children

Policy makers, parents, and the public are concerned with perceived declines in parents’ time with children. Data from two national surveys (N = 1,159 and N = 821) used in this study show that nearly half of parents report feeling too little time with children. Work hours are strongly related to these feelings, even controlling for time spent with children, and explain why fathers more than mothers feel time strain. For fathers, those whose youngest child is an adolescent feel more strain than similarly situated mothers. Controlling for work hours, single parents are not more likely than married parents to feel that they spend insufficient time with children.     

The Pomp of Power: Black Mayoralties in Urban America*

Objectives. Although urban scholarship has come to better understand the dynamics of black political incorporation in the United States, to date scant empirical attention has been paid to an important element of minority representation in local politics—the rise of black mayors. The present study addresses this gap in the extant literature. Methods. We analyze incidences of black mayoralties by fitting standard pooled and random effects probit models to a panel of 309 cities observed between 1971 and 2000. Results. Although cities' racial profiles are strongly associated with the incidence of black mayoralties, black representation on city council, black educational attainment, and reformed governments increase the odds of black mayoral emergence. On the other hand, southern location continues to depress the rise of black mayoralties, as do partisan elections, particularly in cities where no racial group constitutes a majority. Conclusions. Although our results partially confirm extant research on the diffusion of black mayoralties in American urban politics, they also call into question conventional wisdom. Our study emphasizes the need for more large‐N studies of minority representation in urban politics and provides suggestions for how the independent effects of black mayors on municipal policy outcomes might subsequently be analyzed empirically.     

Trajectories of Perceived Friendship Quality During Adolescence: The Patterns and Contextual Predictors

Findings are presented from an ecologically grounded, longitudinal study of 206 urban, ethnic minority adolescents that used hierarchical linear modeling to examine: (1) individual trajectories of change in adolescents' perceptions of general and closest same‐sex friendship quality from middle to late adolescence; (2) the effects of gender and ethnicity on these trajectories of change; and (3) the relative influence of adolescents' perceptions of individual‐level (i.e., self‐esteem) and contextual‐level (i.e., family relationships and school climate) variables on change over time in perceptions of friendship quality. Findings indicated that adolescents' perceptions of the quality of friendships improved from middle to late adolescence. Boys reported sharper increases over time than girls in their perceptions of the quality of their closest, same‐sex friendships. Furthermore, perceptions of contextual level variables (i.e., family relationships, teacher/student relations, and student/student relations) were significantly associated with change over time in perceptions of general and/or closest same‐sex friendship quality.