bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Employment Conditions in Journalism
Authors: Gollmitzer Mirjam
Published: March 2019

Amid the rise of atypical and casual employment across economic sectors and the decline in profits taking place in media organizations internationally, the conditions under which journalists work are changing and, for many, worsening. The number of employed journalists has declined significantly since the late 20th century, and the real salaries of the remaining journalists have decreased or remained mostly stagnant. Female journalists, freelancers, and online journalists are paid (often significantly) less than male employees working for traditional media. These trends are particularly well documented for the United States, but they are international in scope. Although job satisfaction is traditionally robust among journalists, it is starting to decline, as some studies have indicated, together with the perceived level of autonomy over the labor process.

Although those who continue to hold permanent jobs in news organizations do journalism from a position of having a steady income and social security, a growing number of freelancers work for multiple clients, experience fluctuating incomes, and must shoulder greater risks (such as legal challenges potentially arising from their reporting). Staff journalists encounter increased workloads in newsrooms as they take on the tasks of laid-off colleagues. Freelancers, on the other hand, find it increasingly difficult to earn enough from doing journalism alone and take on secondary jobs or assignments, including in public relations. Their stress is more related to ensuring that they have ongoing work; juggling multiple jobs; and doing self-promotion, administrative work, and budget planning on top of journalism. Despite this, freelancers consistently report enjoying the flexibility and autonomy their employment status affords, pointing to a complex interlinking of freedom and constraint at the core of their work experience.

It is not yet clear whether emerging ways of organizing and financing journalistic labor, such as journalism cooperatives, news start-ups, and crowdfunding, offer sustainable alternatives to the waning employment opportunities in the big news organizations or to the model of the lone freelancer. So-called entrepreneurial journalism does not only tend to emphasize teamwork across professional boundaries; it also assigns a defining importance to digital technologies. The impact of the latter on journalistic labor overall varies; some research foregrounds the increased mobility and autonomy of multiskilled reporters, and other research mentions deskilling, labor rationalization, and the increased monitoring and measuring of journalistic performance.
Solidarity and European Union Politics
Authors: Grimmel Andreas
Published: March 2019

Solidarity is one of most contentious and contested concepts in European Union (EU) politics. At the same time, it was, and remains, a central value of European integration that has been more and more institutionalized over time. The numerous codifications in the EU treaties and the Charter of Fundamental Rights, along with the increasingly frequent references to the value in political declarations and decisions, prove the value’s growing significance.

Yet, there also exists a fundamental divide between rhetorical commitments to solidarity and the practice of the EU and its member states. The most recent crises of the EU have shown the instrumentality and strategic use of the concept in order to promote particular political positions rather than work toward a more common understanding of European solidarity.

This makes the application of solidarity in the EU a question not just of arriving at definitional clarity, but also of developing practices that reflect solidarity in concrete cases. Such practices are inextricably linked with three grounds for action: voluntariness, selflessness, and identification.

Despite, or precisely because of, these difficulties in defining, concertizing, and implementing solidarity as a European value, there is a rising interest in solidarity in various fields of studies, such as political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and history, making it an interdisciplinary and multidimensional subject matter.
The Separation of Powers in African Constitutionalism
Authors: Fombad Charles Manga
Published: March 2019

One reason why dictatorships flourished in Africa until the 1990s was that constitutions concentrated excessive powers in presidents. The democratic revival of the 1990s led to the introduction of new or substantially revised constitutions in a number of countries that for the first time sought to promote constitutionalism, good governance, and respect for the rule of law. A key innovation was the introduction of provisions providing for separation of powers. However, in many cases the reintroduction of multipartyism did not lead to thorough constitutional reform, setting the scene for a subsequent struggle between opposition parties, civil society, and the government, over the rule of law.

This reflects the complex politics of constitutionalism in Africa over the last 60 years. In this context, it is important to note that most of the constitutions introduced at independence had provided for some degree of separation of powers, but the provisions relating to this were often vaguely worded and quickly undermined.

Despite this, the doctrine of separation of powers has a long history, and the abundant literature on it shows that there is no general agreement on what it means or what its contemporary relevance is. Of the three main models of separation of powers, the American one, which comes closest to a “pure” system of separation of powers, and the British, which involves an extensive fusion of powers, have influenced developments in anglophone Africa. The French model, which combines elements of the British and American models but in which the executive predominates over the other two branches, has influenced developments in all civilian jurisdictions in Africa, particularly those in francophone Africa. The common denominator among the models is the desire to prevent tyrannical and arbitrary government by separating powers but doing so in a manner that allows for limited interference through checks and balances on the principle that le pouvoir arrête le pouvoir.

The combined Anglo-American (common law) and French (civil law) models received during the colonial period remain applicable today, but despite its adoption in the 1990s, the effectiveness of the doctrine of separation of powers in limiting governmental abuse has been curtailed by the excessive powers African presidents still enjoy and the control they exercise over dominant parties in legislatures. South Africa in its 1996 Constitution, followed by Kenya in 2010 and Zimbabwe in 2013, entrenched a number of hybrid institutions of accountability that have the potential not only to complement the checks and balances provided by the traditional triad but also to act where it is unable or unwilling to do so. The advent of these institutions has given the doctrine of separation of powers renewed potency and relevance in advancing Africa’s faltering constitutionalism project.
Historical Approaches to African Politics
Authors: Pierce Steven
Published: March 2019

Since the late 1980s, historians have paid increasing attention to party politics and political movements in Africa. Recent work has emphasized the importance of World War II in transforming political constituencies, mobilizing opposition to colonial regimes, and encouraging new political imaginaries. Documenting these processes has also enabled a richer appreciation of the complexity of African publics, and the ongoing power demanded and asserted by women as well as men, non-elites as well as elites. In this way, the role of history has often been to tell important stories from the bottom up. Africanist historians’ interdisciplinary research methodologies, emphasizing local discourses and cultural frames, have also contributed to an increased understanding of the specificities of political participation and state practices in African countries. In turn, these insights represent a useful addition to—and in some cases revision of—existing accounts of “weak” African states and other notions of African dysfunction.
The Banking Union in Europe
Authors: Quaglia Lucia
Published: March 2019

The banking union is considered to be one of the main steps in economic integration in the European Union. Given the rather recent establishment of this policy, academic research on the banking union does not have a long lineage, yet it is an area of bourgeoning academic enquiry. There are three main “waves” of research on the banking union in political science, which have mostly proceeded in a chronological order. The first wave of scholarly work focused on the “road” to banking union, from the breaking out of the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area in 2010 to the agreement on the blueprint for the banking union in 2012, explaining why it was set up. The second wave of literature explained how the banking union was set up and took an “asymmetric” shape, whereby banking supervision was transferred to the European Central Bank (ECB); however, banking resolution partly remained at the national level, whereas other components of the banking union, namely, a common deposit guarantee scheme and a common fiscal backstop, were not set up. The third wave of research discussed the functioning of the banking union, its effects and defects. The banking union has slowly brought about significant changes in the banking systems of the member states of the euro area and in government–business relations in the banking sector, even though these effects have varied considerably across countries.
Measuring Religion in Terms of Belonging, Beliefs, and Behavior
Authors: Smidt Corwin E.
Published: March 2019

Religion is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, and scholars have taken different approaches to measuring religion in seeking to study religion’s influence on political attitudes and behavior. One analytical strategy for assessing the influence of religion politically among members of the mass public has been to adopt what is known as the “3B” approach. Though this approach can be applied across different cultural contexts, it has been widely adopted in the American context because of the multiplicity of denominational affiliations present in American life. Associated with this approach in the American context is the concept of religious traditions, particularly the presence of subtraditions within the Christian faith, and the associated measurement strategy for assigning such affiliations to their specific religious tradition. The approach offers various analytical advantages, but it constitutes an analytical strategy and not a specific theoretical explanation about how different facets of religious life necessarily shape political attitudes and behavior.
Fundamentalism as a Cross-National, Cross-Traditional Concept
Authors: Haynes Jeffrey
Published: March 2019

“Religious fundamentalism” is a term that, for several decades now, has been a staple of writing about the general involvement of religion in politics. “Religious fundamentalism” is nearly always associated with “traditional,” “conservative,” or “right-wing” understandings of the world. It is articulated and pursued by those who appear to believe that the world would be a better place if all people lived by the word of (their) God, as articulated and set forth in their particular faith’s holy scriptures. In addition, for many, “religious fundamentalism” implies a rejection of modernity and a wish to return to the past, to a—perhaps mythical—time when people lived by God’s jurisdiction.

Despite what some believe, it is clear that religious fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, although with historical antecedents. As a concept, “religious fundamentalism” has been widely employed since the late 1970s, especially by the mass media and many scholars. It has been used to describe and explain quite a few, sometimes rather diverse, religious movements around the globe with political aspirations to change society. The designation “fundamentalist” was first applied by some American Protestants to themselves in the 1920s. In the early 21st century, as a generic term, it is now widely applied additionally to a multitude of groups outside the corpus of American Protestantism.

Generally speaking, the character and impact of fundamentalist doctrines is located within a nexus of moral and social issues revolving, in many contemporary countries and religions, around state–society interactions. “Modernization” has affected many people’s lives in profound and sometimes disconcerting ways. For some religious fundamentalists, this was manifested in an initial defensiveness, which eventually developed for many into a political offensive that sought to alter the prevailing social and political realities of state–society relations. That rulers were performing inadequately and/or corruptly, led many—but not all—religious fundamentalists to relate contemporary developments to a critical reading of their faith’s holy texts. The significance of this from a political perspective was that it could serve to supply an already restive group with a ready-made manifesto for social change. Many religious leaders saw the opportunity and began explicitly to use a selective reading of religious texts both to challenge secular rulers and to propose a program for often radical societal or sociopolitical reforms. Under these circumstances, it was often relatively easy for fundamentalist leaders to gain the support of those who felt that in some way the development of society was not proceeding according to God’s will or their community’s interests. In sum, various manifestations of what are generically referred to as religious fundamentalisms have appealed to different groups for different reasons at different times.
Postcolonial Approaches to the Study of African Politics
Authors: Adeniyi Ogunyankin Grace
Published: March 2019

Postcolonial theory has been embraced and critiqued by various scholars since the 1980s. Central to the field of postcolonial studies is the examination of colonial episteme and discourse, European racism, and imperial dominance. Broadly, postcolonialism analyzes the effects, and enduring legacies, of colonialism and disavows Eurocentric master-narratives. Postcolonial ideas have been significant to several academic disciplines, largely those in the humanities and social sciences, such as cultural and literary studies, anthropology, political science, history, development studies, geography, urban studies, and gender and sexuality studies. The key scholars that are connected to postcolonial theory, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, have been critiqued for grounding their work in the Western theories of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Given the predominant association of these three scholars to postcolonial theory, Africanists have argued that postcolonial theory is dismissive of African theorizing. Moreover, some scholars have noted that Africanists have hesitated to use postcolonial theory because it is too discursive and has limited applicability to material reality. As such, the relevancy of postcolonial theory to Africa has been a repetitive question for decades. Despite this line of questioning, some scholars have posited that there are African thinkers and activists who are intellectual antecedents to the postcolonial thought that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, other Africanist scholars have engaged with the colonial discursive construction of African subjectivities and societies as inferior. These engagements have been particularly salient in women and gender studies, urban studies and studies of identity and global belonging.
Conceptualizing Militias in Africa
Authors: Tapscott Rebecca
Published: March 2019

Although militias have received increasing scholarly attention, the concept itself remains contested by those who study it. Why? And how does this impact contemporary scholarship on political violence? To answer these questions, we can focus on the field of militia studies in post–Cold War sub-Saharan Africa, an area where militia studies have flourished in the past several decades. Virtually all scholars of militias in post–Cold War Africa describe militias as fluid and changing such that they defy easy definition. As a result, scholars offer complex descriptors that incorporate both descriptive and analytic elements, thereby offering nuanced explanations for the role of militias in violent conflict. Yet the ongoing tension between accurate description and analytic definition has also produced a body of literature that is diffuse and internally inconsistent, in which scholars employ conflicting definitions of militias, different data sources, and often incompatible methods of analysis. As a result, militia studies yield few externally valid comparative insights and have limited analytic power. The cumulative effect is a schizophrenic field in which one scholar’s militia is another’s rebel group, local police force, or common criminal. The resulting incoherence fragments scholarship on political violence and can have real-world policy implications. This is particularly true in high-stakes environments of armed conflict, where being labeled a “militia” can lead to financial support and backing in some circumstances or make one a target to be eliminated in others. To understand how militia studies has been sustained as a fragmented field, this article offers a new typology of definitional approaches. The typology shows that scholars use two main tools: offering a substantive claim as to what militias are or a negative claim based on what militias are not and piggy-backing on other concepts to either claim that militias are derivative of or distinct from them. These approaches illustrate how scholars combine descriptive and analytic approaches to produce definitions that sustain the field as fragmented and internally contradictory. Yet despite the contradictions that characterize the field, scholarship reveals a common commitment to using militias to understand the organization of (legitimate) violence. This article sketches a possible approach to organize the field of militia studies around the institutionalization of violence, such that militias would be understood as a product of the arrangement of violence. Such an approach would both allow studies of militias to place their ambiguity and fluidity at the center of analyses while offering a pathway forward for comparative studies.
Power Sharing as a Strategy to Resolve Political Crises in Africa
Authors: Bratton Michael , Penar Peter
Published: March 2019

Power sharing is often offered as a strategy to resolve political crises. In contrast to power capture and power division, power sharing entails exercising power in cooperation with rival groups. The outcome of power sharing largely rests on the purpose and context of the agreement. Power sharing has proven effective at attenuating political violence and providing stability when enacted to guide a transition from white-minority to black-majority rule in former settler states (e.g., South Africa) or to bring persistent civil wars to an end (e.g., Sierra Leone and Burundi). However, in the context of an election dispute, power sharing fails to solve the underlying concerns that contribute to election-related conflict. Although power sharing may attenuate or end violence, the outcome is poor reconciling election winners and losers and deepening democratic practices (e.g., Kenya and Zimbabwe). Recognizing the failure of power sharing after election disputes, external mediators—particularly in West Africa (e.g., Côte d’Ivoire and The Gambia)—have tended to emphasize maintaining normal constitutional processes rather than power-sharing settlements.
Resource Mobilization Among Religious Activists
Authors: Chapp Christopher
Published: March 2019

The concept of resource mobilization helps explain how and why religious beliefs and attachments can become a political force. Religious actors achieve their political aims only when they are able to mobilize resources on behalf of a particular cause. While material resources are perhaps the most intuitive prerequisite for social movement success, what sets religious activism apart is not access to capital, but rather activists’ ability to leverage organizational, moral, cultural, and human resources. Religious groups ranging from local churches to broad-based parachurch organizations take advantage of organizational resources to support their goals. Religious activists also leverage moral resources by reframing a cause in appropriate moral terms to spur potential supporters into action or gain direct institutional access. Cultural resources, particularly civic skills that are developed in apolitical contexts, are regularly adapted and appropriated to achieve political objectives. And, human resources such as local congregational leadership are an important factor in political movements ranging from the American civil rights movement to the prolife movement.
Religious Communication and Persuasion
Authors: Knoll Benjamin R. , Bolin Cammie Jo
Published: March 2019

Religious communication affects political behavior through two primary channels: political messages coming from a religious source and religious messages coming from a political source. In terms of the first channel, political scientists have found that clergy do tend to get involved in politics, and church-goers often hear political messages over the pulpit, although not as frequently as might be expected. Sometimes these political messages are successful in swaying opinions, but not always; context matters a great deal. In terms of the second channel, politicians use religious rhetoric (“God talk”) in an attempt to increase their support and win votes. When this happens, some groups are more likely to respond than others, including political conservatives, more frequent church attenders, and racial/ethnic minorities. The scope and effectiveness of religious communication remains a field ripe for further research, especially in contexts outside of the United States.
Measurement Burst Designs in Lifespan Developmental Research
Authors: Cho Gawon , Pasquini Giancarlo , Scott Stacey B.
Published: March 2019

The study of human development across the lifespan is inherently about patterns across time. Although many developmental questions have been tested with cross-sectional comparisons of younger and older persons, understanding of development as it occurs requires a longitudinal design, repeatedly observing the same individual across time. Development, however, unfolds across multiple time scales (i.e., moments, days, years) and encompasses both enduring changes and transient fluctuations within an individual. Measurement burst designs can detect such variations across different timescales, and disentangle patterns of variations associated with distinct dimensions of time periods. Measurement burst designs are a special type of longitudinal design in which multiple “bursts” of intensive (e.g., hourly, daily) measurements are embedded in a larger longitudinal (e.g., monthly, yearly) study. The hybrid nature of these designs allow researchers to address questions not only of cross-sectional comparisons of individual differences (e.g., do older adults typically report lower levels of negative mood than younger adults?) and longitudinal examinations of intraindividual change (e.g., as individuals get older, do they report lower levels of negative mood?) but also of intraindividual variability (e.g., is negative mood worse on days when individuals have experienced an argument compared to days when an argument did not occur?). Researchers can leverage measurement burst designs to examine how patterns of intraindividual variability unfolding over short timescales may exhibit intraindividual change across long timescales in order to understand lifespan development. The use of measurement burst designs provides an opportunity to collect more valid and reliable measurements of development across multiple time scales throughout adulthood.
Analysis of Dyadic Data in Lifespan Developmental Research
Authors: Hülür Gizem , Weber Elisa
Published: March 2019

Lifespan development is embedded in multiple social systems and social relationships. Lifespan developmental and relationship researchers study individual codevelopment in various dyadic social relationships, such as dyads of parents and children or romantic partners. Dyadic data refers to types of data for which observations from both members of a dyad are available. The analysis of dyadic data requires the use of appropriate data-analytic methods that account for such interdependencies. The standard actor-partner interdependence model, the dyadic growth curve model, and the dyadic dual change score model can be used to analyze data from dyads. These models allow examination of questions related to dyadic associations such as whether individual differences in an outcome can be predicted by one’s own (actor effects) and the other dyad member’s (partner effects) level in another variable, correlated change between dyad members, and cross-lagged dyadic associations, that is, whether one dyad member’s change can be predicted by the previous levels of the other dyad member. The choice of a specific model should be guided by theoretical and conceptual considerations as well as by features of the data, such as the type of dyad, the number and spacing of observations, or distributional properties of variables.
Aging and Cognitive Skill Learning
Authors: Kuhns Jack , Touron Dayna R.
Published: March 2019

The study of aging and cognitive skill learning is concerned with age-related changes and differences in how we gather, store, and use information and abilities. As life expectancy continues to rise, resulting in greater numbers and proportions of older individuals in the population, understanding the development and retention of skills across the lifespan is increasingly important. Older adults’ task performance in cognitive skill learning is often equal to that of young adults, albeit not as efficient, where older adults often require more time to complete training. Investigations of age differences in fundamental cognitive processes of attention, memory, or executive functioning generally reveal declines in older adults. These are related to a slowing of cognitive processing. Slowing in cognitive processing results in longer time necessary to complete tasks which can interfere with the fidelity of older adults’ cognitive processes in time-limited scenarios. Despite this, older adults maintain comparable rates of learning with young adults, albeit with some reduced efficiency in more complex tasks. The effectiveness of older adults’ learning is also impacted by a lesser tendency to recognize and adopt efficient learning strategies, as well as less flexibility in strategy use relative to younger adults. In learning tasks that involve a transition from using a complex initial strategy to relying on memory retrieval, older adults show a volitional avoidance of memory that is related to lower memory confidence and an impoverished mental model of the task. Declines in learning are not entirely problematic from a functional perspective, however, as older adults can often rely upon their extensive knowledge to compensate for certain deficiencies, particularly in everyday tasks. Indeed, domains where older adults have maintained expertise are somewhat insulated from other age-related declines.
Healthy and Pathological Neurocognitive Aging: Spectral and Functional Connectivity Analyses Using Magnetoencephalography
Authors: Susi Gianluca , de Frutos-Lucas Jaisalmer , Niso Guiomar , Ye-Chen Su Miao , Toro Luis Antón , Chino Vilca Brenda Nadia , Maestú Fernando
Published: March 2019

Oscillatory activity present in brain signals reflects the underlying time-varying electrical discharges within and between ensembles of neurons. Among the variety of non-invasive techniques available for measuring of the brain’s oscillatory activity, magnetoencephalography (MEG) presents a remarkable combination of spatial and temporal resolution, and can be used in resting-state or task-based studies, depending on the goals of the experiment.

Two important kinds of analysis can be carried out with the MEG signal: spectral a. and functional connectivity (FC) a. While the former provides information on the distribution of the frequency content within distinct brain areas, FC tells us about the dependence or interaction between the signals stemming from two (or among many) different brain areas.

The large frequency range combined with the good resolution offered by MEG makes MEG-based spectral and FC analyses able to highlight distinct patterns of neurophysiological alterations during the aging process in both healthy and pathological conditions. Since disruption in spectral content and functional interactions between brain areas could be accounted for by early neuropathological changes, MEG could represent a useful tool to unveil neurobiological mechanisms related to the cognitive decline observed during aging, particularly suitable for the detection of functional alterations, and then for the discovery of potential biomarkers in case of pathology.

The aging process is characterized by alterations in the spectral content across the brain. At the network level, FC studies reveal that older adults experience a series of changes that make them more vulnerable to cognitive interferences.

While special attention has been dedicated to the study of pathological conditions (in particular, mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease), the lack of studies addressing the features of FC in healthy aging is noteworthy. This area of research calls for future attention because it is able to set the baseline from which to draw comparisons with different pathological conditions.
Anarchy and Qualitative Methods
Authors: DeLeon Abraham P.
Published: March 2019

What is anarchist theory and practice? What does it mean when anarchists engage with qualitative research? Anarchism has a long-standing history within radical political action that has been enacted at particular historical times and spaces. The Spanish Civil War, Paris 1968, and the so-called Battle of Seattle in 1999 saw the potential of anarchism as both a mode of critique and way(s) in which to think about direct political action. However, little has been done within the critical qualitative research project to engage with the ideas and critiques that anarchism offers researchers to think about and inform their own work.

Resisting hierarchies and their arrangements, challenging domination and relationships of power, rethinking praxis and direct action in qualitative research, and envisioning a utopian social and political imagination have been just a few of the political and epistemological projects that anarchists have undertaken that have direct implications for qualitative researchers. In thinking about future potentials, it has become imperative that critical qualitative researchers engage with anarchist theory and its critiques to better inform its own assumptions when thinking about the roles that qualitative research plays in resisting and altering oppressive social, political, and economic conditions.
Managing Behavior or Promoting Engagement?
Authors: Thomas Jeff
Published: March 2019

Classroom behavior management has consistently been recognized as a central issue of importance in staff well-being, student success, and school culture. For decades, theories and models on how best to “manage” the behavior of students for a productive classroom have showed an increasing trend away from teacher-controlled reactive approaches to misbehavior toward more student-centered strategies to prevent misbehavior. Focusing on managing student behavior, either reactively or proactively, is coming at the problem from the wrong direction. The student behaviors that most affect teaching and learning in our classrooms are low-level disruptive, or “disengaged,” behaviors. These disengaged behaviors are best understood as indications of a student’s weakened affective or cognitive engagement with school. Schools wishing to have less disengaged behaviors need to refocus their lens on these behaviors, from how to “manage” them to how to strengthen targeted areas of engagement. This has direct implications for reforming classroom practices as well as school polices on behavior management.
High-Stakes Assessment in Undergraduate and Postgraduate Studies
Authors: Sternberg Robert J.
Published: March 2019

High-stakes assessment is playing an increasingly important role in higher education at the undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels. Such assessments are sometimes used for group purposes—to assess how well a university is doing in educating its students—and other times for purposes of evaluating individuals.

High-stakes assessment at the undergraduate level generally involves assessments of learning and reasoning at the end of the college experience. Sometimes, pretests are also given to compare cognitive skills before and after the college experience. There are several different approaches to measuring learning and performance outcomes: (a) standardized instruments and inventories; (b) indirect methods that focus on students’ perceptions of learning and engagement; (c) authentic performance-based methods, such as portfolios; and (d) locally designed tests and inventories. Each of these methods of assessment has different advantages as well as disadvantages. For example, standardized tests are normed, and thus it is possible to compare the performance of students at, say, one university to those at another. But standardized tests also measure outcomes that some scholars feel are less meaningful than the outcomes measured by other kinds of assessments. Indirect measures, such as of student engagement, look at students’ level of engagement with college but tell less about cognitive gains than some other kinds of measures. Performance-based measures such as portfolios have the advantage of measuring outcomes presumably relevant to each individual student; they are harder to score than some other kinds of measures, however, and they do not lend themselves readily to comparisons across colleges and universities. Homemade tests produced by individual institutions can be tailored to the goals of those institutions but generally lack the standardization and generality of some other kinds of measures.

Assessments of graduate and postgraduate students are of a different ilk. Generally, graduate, postgraduate, and hiring institutions are looking for presumed research and teaching competence. Publication records as well as letters of recommendation serve as primary bases for evaluating students going onto the job market. It is possible to entertain more sophisticated measures than just counting publications, such as various measures based on citations in the scholarly literature.
Land and Water in Tsarist and Early Soviet Central Asia
Authors: Penati Beatrice
Published: March 2019

Precipitation and elevation shape land and water usage in Central Asia, distinguishing the southern irrigated oases from the steppes, deserts, and prairies, where instead nomadic pastoralism (sometimes rain-fed agriculture) is economically rational. The former was included in Russian Turkestan, the latter in the Steppe provinces. The colonial state recognized land usage rights of the nomads; while not formally admitting land property among the settled population, it allowed them to enjoy it within Islamic law. Nomads paid a capitation; at first tilled land continued to be taxed as a share of the real harvest. Land-assessment works from the 1890s, though, imposed a tax based on the estimated harvest value, initially on irrigated land and then, with some differences, on rain-fed land. Irrigation was paid for eminently through corvées. The increase in the share of land under cotton did not derive from state coercion but from factor endowments and absolute and relative prices. Subsidies, in the form of import duties and, above all, a growing tax break contributed to this. Despite political claims, new irrigation had a limited impact under the tsars. While the “cotton boom” altered the landscape and local economy of the oases, in the Steppe and Semirechie (now south-eastern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) the natives lost land to settler peasants from European Russia. The latter received land that statisticians and surveyors had deemed excess for the nomads and former nomads. Conflicts around land, water, and forests coalesced in the 1916 uprising, which in turn initiated a cycle of violent retaliation between Russians and natives that would last until the early 1920s. With the establishment of Soviet power, a first land reform “decolonized” former resettlement areas; in 1925 and 1927 another land reform aimed at reducing landlessness in southern Central Asia, while restoring pre-war output levels and cotton procurement mechanisms.
Hadramis in Africa
Authors: Bang Anne K.
Published: March 2019

The Hadramawt is a region of in the south-eastern part of present-day Yemen. Since antiquity, it has been vital in the network of ports that made up the Indian Ocean trade system. The main ports, Mukalla and Shihr have been the exit and entry points for the main cities in the interior Wadi Hadramawt, Shibam, Sayun and Tarim, as well as smaller towns and villages.

Migration from Hadramawt to Africa dates back to at least the first century ce. The Islamic period is better documented than the pre-Islamic period, and it shows that there were four main destinations: (a) the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa; (b) the East African coast, including the Comoro Islands, Mozambique, and Northern Madagascar; (c) Southern Africa; and (d) the African interior (Tanzania, Congo, Kenya, and Uganda).

The migrants were, from the early period until well into the 20th century, almost exclusively male, and they tended to marry strategically into local clans to obtain access to trade networks. Over time, many lost their connection to the Hadramawt, but they might reactivate that identity at times when “Arabness” was a political advantage, such as during the period of Bu Saidi rule in East Africa. The colonial period led to restrictions on movement to and from the Hadramawt, but also to new business opportunities for Hadramis in Africa. Decolonization was at times traumatic for the Hadramis in Africa too, but the new nation-states also offered opportunities for those who remained in Africa as citizens.

Hadrami migration to Africa over the centuries also impacted the Hadramawt itself. The return visit was a tradition that emerged especially in the 19th century, when sons born in diaspora were sent to Hadramawt to learn about their ancestral homeland. These young men, known as muwalladun, spoke Swahili, Somali, or any other of their “mother-tongue” languages—but very little Arabic, which could make their stays in Hadramawt difficult. In the 20th century, descendants of Hadrami migrants to Africa tended to return to Hadramawt to seek employment or Islamic education.
Bukhara under the Mongols
Authors: Hope Michael
Published: March 2019

In Muharram ah 617/March 1220 ce Chinggis Khan led his armies to Bukhara as part of a larger campaign against the Khwārazmshāh Empire (616–621/1220–1225). The city quickly surrendered and was rapidly integrated into the growing Mongol Empire. In the subsequent decades, Bukhara enjoyed a speedy recovery under the stewardship of a series of Mongol officials, who patronized religious institutions, repaired the damage caused by the invasion, and mitigated some of the excesses of the Mongol armies stationed in Transoxania. Yet this revival was stunted in the second half of the 13th century when the Mongol Empire was divided by war. During this period different factions contested control of Transoxania, and Bukhara became the target of periodic raids and attacks. A full rehabilitation of the city had to wait until after 716/1317–1318, when alliances between the Mongol military elites and the popular religious leaders of Bukhara facilitated a new period of stability that would last until the fall of the last effective khan, Qazān Sultan, in 746/1346.

Bukhara’s status as an intellectual, economic, and political capital of Transoxania was diminished during the period of Mongol rule. Samarqand was designated as the administrative capital of Transoxania for much of this period, and the presence of Mongol forces in Nakhshab saw Bukhara subordinated to the itinerate court of the Chaghadaid-Mongol princes. Nevertheless, the city continued to be seen as an important center of religious scholarship, and its prestige was boosted by the fact that it served as the base for two of the leading Sufi movements of its time, the Kubrawiyya and the Naqshbandiyya.
Valuation of Health Risks
Authors: Andersson Henrik , Hole Arne Risa , Svensson Mikael
Published: March 2019

Many public policies and individual actions have consequences for population health. To understand whether a (costly) policy undertaken to improve population health is a wise use of resources, analysts can use economic evaluation methods to assess the costs and benefits. To do this, it is necessary to evaluate the costs and benefits using the same metric, and for convenience, a monetary measure is commonly used. It is well established that money measures of a reduction in health risks can be theoretically derived using the willingness-to-pay concept. However, because a market price for health risks is not available, analysts have to rely on analytical techniques to estimate the willingness to pay using revealed- or stated-preference methods. Revealed-preference methods infer willingness to pay based on individuals’ actual behavior in markets related to health risks, and they include such approaches as hedonic pricing techniques. Stated-preference methods use a hypothetical market scenario in which respondents make trade-offs between wealth and health risks. Using, for example, a random utility framework, it is possible to directly estimate individuals’ willingness to pay by analyzing the trade-offs they make in the hypothetical scenario. Stated-preference methods are commonly applied using contingent valuation or discrete choice experiment techniques. Despite criticism and the shortcomings of both the revealed- and stated-preference methods, substantial progress has been made since the 1990s in using both approaches to estimate the willingness to pay for health-risk reductions.
Medical Malpractice Litigation
Authors: Hyman David A. , Silver Charles
Published: March 2019

Medical malpractice is the best studied aspect of the civil justice system. But the subject is complicated, and there are heated disputes about basic facts. For example, are premium spikes driven by factors that are internal (i.e., number of claims, payout per claim, and damage costs) or external to the system? How large (or small) is the impact of a damages cap? Do caps have a bigger impact on the number of cases that are brought or the payment in the cases that remain? Do blockbuster verdicts cause defendants to settle cases for more than they are worth? Do caps attract physicians? Do caps reduce healthcare spending—and by how much? How much does it cost to resolve the high percentage of cases in which no damages are recovered? What is the comparative impact of a cap on noneconomic damages versus a cap on total damages?

Other disputes involve normative questions. Is there too much med mal litigation or not enough? Are damage caps fair? Is the real problem bad doctors or predatory lawyers—or some combination of both?

This article summarizes the empirical research on the performance of the med mal system, and highlights some areas for future research.
National Parks in Colombia
Authors: Leal Claudia
Published: March 2019

The history of Colombian national parks started in 1948 with the establishment of a reserve for scientific research, which stood alone until the 1960s, when various state agencies created a few parks with quite different goals in mind, including preserving imposing landscapes and conserving water. This rather casual development changed after the growing international concern for the environment led to the creation of an environmental agency in 1968 and the enactment of an environmental code in 1974, which served as institutional platform for the planned expansion of a system of national parks based largely on ecological criteria.

Chronically underfunded and understaffed, the Office of National Parks has confronted its weakness by establishing parks which confer legal protection on areas whose natural attributes were deemed valuable. Such a strategy has led to confrontations with local populations living in and around parks, whose rights to resource use have been hampered. The office’s incapacity to properly enforce rules and its attempts to work with rural communities, especially indigenous groups, have to some extent mitigated such tensions. It has further sought to enlist the support of the middle classes and been forced to deal with illegal armed groups on the left and the right, as well as the national army, vying for territorial control. Although parks have not fulfilled their ideal, they have fostered the notion that the nation has a natural patrimony and have contributed decisively to its conservation.
Nineteenth-Century Foreign Travelers to Central America
Authors: Taracena Arriola Arturo
Published: March 2019

Foreign travelers, mainly from Europe and the United States, did not come to Central America until the founding of the Federal Republic of Central America in 1823 after independence from Spain. They had been previously unknown in the Central American isthmus despite the impression that Alexandre von Humboldt’s achievement made on Latin Americans at the beginning of the 19th century. From 1823 to 1870, the foreign travelers in three characteristic cycles: the first, from 1823 to 1838, during the federal administration, attracted consular agents, merchants, and foreign adventurers, especially former soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars; the second, from 1839 to 1850, brought publicists, canal and timber entrepreneurs, and promoters of diverse kinds of colonization; and the third, which ran from 1851 to 1870, saw the arrival of naturalists, archeologists, entrepreneurs, and diplomats. All of them contributed to the integration of the short-lived Federal Republic of Central America and the division into five nations into the world market and concert of western nations. In fact, the victory of the liberal reforms beginning in 1871 would mean a new cycle of travelers, not discussed here, characterized by the positivist goal of progress, secularity of the state, freedom of religion, the banner of Central American reunification, and the gamble on mono-exportation centered on coffee and banana cultivation.
The Federal Republic of Central America, 1824–1840
Authors: Taracena Arriola Luis Pedro
Published: March 2019

The Federal Republic of Central America existed for a brief but critical period in Central American history. Tension in the region between its colonial legacy and liberal aspiration and conflict between Guatemalan prevalence and state independence led to the eventual dissolution of the Federal Republic. The result was a confederate rather than a federal approach to government in which each state was sovereign in its own territory. The period convulsed with interspersed colonial and republican regimes, which reflected the politics of the heterogeneous society of the time. The imaginary unity failed and the new republics emerged, doomed to their own sovereignty.