Gender and the Politics of Death: Female Representation,Political and Developmental Context,and Population Health in a Cross-National Panel

There is considerable speculation that female political empowerment could improve population health. Yet, evidence to date is limited, and explanations for why political empowerment would matter and the conditions under which this might be enhanced or muted are not well understood. In this article, we draw on theoretical work on the politics of representation to frame an investigation of whether increases in the percentage of females in a country’s parliament influence mortality rates. We further examine whether the relationship is conditioned by extent of democracy and economic and social development. Through multivariate longitudinal regression, we analyze four indicators of mortality in 155 countries spanning 1990 to 2014 with controls for initial country conditions, time-stable structural predispositions to higher mortality, and a number of time-varying potential confounders. Results indicate that a high level of female representation—30 % or greater in our models—has large negative associations with mortality, that these are particularly strong in lesser developed and weak democratic contexts, that high female political representation effectively offsets liabilities associated with low development, and that the relationships are robust to various operationalizations of social development. In the end, our research provides a particularly thorough accounting of the relationship between female political representation and population health, particularly by specifying the conditions under which female representation is most salient. In doing so, the research suggests important links between issues of female empowerment, political context, and developmental trajectories of countries more generally.     

The future of refugee flows and policies

"The number of forced migrants...is estimated today to exceed 40 million [worldwide]. The changed international climate of the 1990s...has shifted the focus from the asylum and resettlement countries to the countries of origin: there is today a greater willingness to intervene in other countries' affairs either to avert the creation of new flows of focused migrants or to assist internally displaced populations, and there is the expectation of large-scale voluntary returns of refugees in asylum. This article discusses these and other policy issues concerning forced migration in this new international environment."     

Assessing right to die attitudes: a conceptually guided measurement model

This article discusses the current status of research regarding the assessment of attitudes toward euthanasia and other right to die constructs with a focus on conceptual and methodological issues hindering advancement in this area. Two models are presented: a conceptual model for differentiating the various right to die constructs, and a measurement model to guide scale development and refinement. The conceptual model defines the right to die constructs as a function of locus of decision and locus of action. Health status and age are hypothesized as important factors that in some instances are defining attributes in right to die constructs and in other instances are factors influencing people's attitudes toward the right to die. The measurement model considers the importance of construct specificity, individual characteristics, and conviction in the assessment of right to die attributes. An extant euthanasia attitude scale is presented and evaluated in terms of the models to demonstrate how they may be useful for advancing attitude research in this important area.     

Evaluating a private foundation's health program

Public policy decisions in health are increasingly difficult and expensive. Although there will never be enough information available, private foundations can help to bridge the most important gaps in knowledge. Larger foundations may also wish to respond to those who doubt the value of foundation activities. This article reviews the experiences over the past eight years of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in employing evaluation and related social research procedures in the planning and implementation of a major philanthropic effort to improve the health and medical care of Americans. Discussed are the still evolving Foundation evaluation framework, the unanticipated problems in undertaking specific evaluations, and the substantive findings of some of the studies.     

Information Technology in Public Services: Towards the Contractual Organization?

The growing trend towards information technology (IT) outsourcing is analysed within the UK public sector. The paper first details the research findings on factors influencing the degree of success experienced in a range of IT outsourcing deals. These factors are then utilized as a framework for analysing and discussing two case histories—of selective and large-scale IT outsourcing—drawn from different parts of the public sector. Both demonstrate how distinctive public-sector contexts influence the direction and degree of outsourcing. At the same time they highlight a range of managerial and organizational issues raised by moves towards contractual, core competence forms of organizing. Selective outsourcing is revealed as effective provided key decisions and actions are taken. The large-scale outsourcing case raises a number of critical issues not just for how it can be conducted in public-sector contexts, but also about the efficacy of such arrangements in terms of cost savings, possible over-dependence on a few suppliers, and ability to respond flexibly to changing political requirements and legislation.     

Internalized Other Interviewing in Relational Therapy: Three Discursive Approaches to Understanding its Use and Outcomes

For over 20 years, family therapist Karl Tomm has been engaging families and couples with a therapeutic intervention he calls Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). The IOI (cf. Emmerson‐Whyte, 2010; Hurley, 2006) entails interviewing clients, from the personal experiences of partners and family members as an internalized other. The IOI is based on the idea that through dialogues over time, one can internalize a sense of one's conversational partner responsiveness in reliably anticipated ways. Anyone who has thought in a conversation with a family member or partner, “Oh there s/he goes again,” or anticipates next words before they leave the other's mouth, has a sense of what we are calling an internalized other. For Tomm, the internalized anticipations partners and family members may have offers entry points into new dialogues with therapeutic potential—particularly, when their actual dialogues get stuck in dispreferred patterns.     

Using a “child's‐eye view” of social success to understand the importance of school readiness at the transition to formal schooling

Recent research into school readiness has highlighted the importance of not only children's cognitive and socio‐emotional skills, but also the degree to which they have family support in the home. The current study examines the association between social success upon school entry and teacher‐ratings of school readiness as assessed by the Brief Early Skills and Support Index (BESSI), controlling for language ability. Importantly, social success was assessed using a “child's‐eye view” with peer‐reported assessments of both social preference and reciprocated friendships. A total of 244 children (131 boys, M_age = 61 months, SD = 4.78 months) in their first year of formal schooling participated. Child school readiness was found to be important for social preference, with the association being more marked for boys versus girls. Family support was the only independent predictor of children's reciprocated friendships. The use of the BESSI, with its broad scope compared to other measures of school readiness, highlights the importance of focusing both on a child's cognitive and socio‐emotional skills at school entry and their family support when exploring the association of school readiness to children's social success at the transition to formal schooling.