Journals
2009 EN
Sebastián Mazzuca · James A. Robinson
In this paper we present historical evidence and a theoretical analysis of the origins of political stability and instability in Colombia for the period 1850-1950, and their relationship to political, particularly electoral, institutions. We show that the driving force behind institutional change over this period, specifically the move to proportional representation (PR), was the desire of the Conservative and Liberal parties to come up with a way of credibly dividing power to avoid civil war and conflict, a force intensified by the brutal conflict of the War of a Thousand days between 1899 and 1902. The problem with majoritarian electoral institutions was that they did not allocate power in a way which matched the support of the parties in the population, thus encouraging conflict. The strategic advantage of PR was that it avoided such under-representation. The parties however could not initially move to PR because it was not `fraud proof' so instead, in 1905, adopted the "incomplete vote" which simply allocated 2/3 of the legislative seats to the winning party and 1/3 to the loser. This formula brought peace. The switch to PR arose when the Liberals became confident that they could solve problems of fraud. But it only happened because they were able to exploit a division within the Conservatives. The switch also possibly reflected a concern with the rising support for socialism and the desire to divide power more broadly. Our findings shed new light on the origins of electoral systems and the nature of political conflict and its resolution.
Journals
2009 EN
Chulhee Lee
This paper investigates patterns of socioeconomic difference in the wartime morbidity and mortality of black Union Army soldiers. Among the factors that contributed to a lower probability of contracting and dying from diseases were (1) lighter skin color, (2) a non-field occupation, (3) residence on a large plantation, and (4) residence in a rural area prior to enlistment. Patterns of disease-specific mortality and timing of death suggest that the differences in the development of immunity against diseases and in nutritional status prior to enlistment were responsible for the observed socioeconomic differences in wartime health. For example, the advantages of light-skinned soldiers over dark-skinned and of enlisted men formerly engaged in non-field occupations over field hands resulted from differences in nutritional status. The lower wartime mortality of ex-slaves from large plantations can be explained by their better-developed immunity as well as superior nutritional status. The results of this paper suggest that there were substantial disparities in the health of the slave population on the eve of the Civil War.
Cambridge University Press
Journals
2009 EN
Peter A. Jackson
This essay considers the role of market economies in global queering, the transnational proliferation of new male homosexual and male-to-female transgender identities and cultures. Early accounts of global queering highlighted the culturally homogenizing effects of transnational capitalism, representing new queer sexualities beyond the West as cultural imports from the United States. But international similarities among queer cultures also emerge from parallel processes of sex-cultural change produced by national-level forms of capitalism. Case studies from Thai queer history trace market-induced cultural parallels to earlier decades of the twentieth century, before the post–Cold War intensification of globalizing processes. These studies confirm the importance of the market in global queering. They also reveal that international commonalities reflect emergent parallels among multiple queer modernities and result as much from local responses to similar economic conditions as from foreign cultural influences. The alternative narrative of queer histories beyond the West presented here decouples the spread of capitalism from cultural Westernization. It highlights moments where queer subjects have enhanced their autonomy vis-à-vis local heteronormative traditions by creative engagements that take advantage of opportunities provided by the growth of the market economy.
Journals
2009 EN
Joseph A. McCartin
Without question, the vision and values of North American workers were influenced over time by their varied religious commitments; their movements and organizations were often profoundly affected by their relationships to religious institutions and traditions. While freethinking and atheist views have always characterized a portion of workers and labor activists, such views have never been as broadly shared as religious beliefs and affiliations. Indeed, labor history is replete with examples of religious influence: nineteenth-century shoemakers named their union after the martyred St. Crispin, patron of cobblers, while the Knights of Labor referred to itself as a Holy order; early-twentieth-century immigrants in the needle trades were steeped in the traditions of the Jewish Labor Bund—Sidney Hillman was scarcely the only garment union leader to have acquired skills of analysis and argumentation in rabbinical studies; Depression-era Catholic labor activists cited Quadragesimo Anno and other papal encyclicals to defend organizing campaigns; black tobacco strikers sang a gospel hymn called “We Shall Overcome” on their picket lines after World War II, transforming it into the world’s most powerful protest song; and Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers marched under banners bearing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Yet, despite abundant evidence suggesting the importance of religious influence to the lives, work, and struggles of North American workers, labor and working-class historians have barely begun to probe and illuminate this rich history. This special issue of Labor takes one small but significant step toward redressing this scholarly neglect. In his influential book Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955), the sociologist of religion Will Herberg (a onetime radical and labor educator with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union) famously described the pervasive influence of “the three great American ‘faiths.’ ” But whereas Herberg saw these religions as buttresses of an American consensus, the three historical articles we have gathered for this volume take a different view. Although each article addresses one aspect of Herberg’s religious triad, these studies do not share his conclusion that American
Journals
2009 EN
Toshikazu Kaise · Kenji Kinoshita
The old Japanese army developed several chemical warfare agents on Ohkuno Island in Seto inland sea, Hiroshima Japan, during the period between 1919 and 1944. These chemical agents including yperite (mustard; irritating agent), lewisite (irritating agent), diphenylchloroarsine (DA; vomiting agent), diphenylcyanoarsine (DC; vomiting agent) and other poisonous gases were manufactured to be used in China. After World War II, the old Japanese army abandoned or dumped these agents into seas inside or outside of Japan and interior of China. Rather than being used for terrorism, these chemical warfare agents containing arsenicals may cause injury to some workers at the digging site of abandoned chemical weapons. Moreover, the leakage of chemical agents or an explosion of the bomb may result in environmental pollution, as a result, it is highly possible to cause serious health damage to the residents. There are still many abandoned or dumped warfare agents in Japan and China, therefore chemical agents containing arsenic are needed to be treated with alkaline for decomposition or to decompose with oxidizing agent. Presently, a large quantity of chemical agents and the contaminated soil are processed by combustion, and industrial waste is treated with sulfur compounds as the insoluble sulfur arsenic complex. This report describes the methods for the disposal of these organic arsenic agents that have been implemented until present and examines the future prospects.
Pharmaceutical Society of Japan
Journals
2009 EN
Honey Goel · Nishant Vora · Ashok K. Tiwary
+1 more
The objective of this investigation was to prepare orodispersible tablets (ODTs) of ondansetron HCl using a direct compression method. A combination of glycine and chitosan was used as a disintegrating system and these tablets were compared for mechanical strength and disintegration time with those containing superdisintegrants. The Plackett-Burman screening design was used to screen the independent variables [concentration of glycine (X(1)), concentration of chitosan (X(2)), concentration of ondansetron HCl (X(3)) and tablet crushing strength (X(4))] which were found to actively influence the dependent variables [disintegration time in the oral cavity (DT), wetting time (WT), and water absorption ratio (WAR)]. Further, a central composite design was used to formulate additional ODTs of ondansetron HCl for estimating response in the extended spherical domain. The regression analysis (performed using Statistica-7.0) of quadratic fit revealed that DT or WT and WAR were 99% and 98% correlated with active factors (X(1), X(2) or X(3)), respectively. The data showed that disintegration time of optimized ondansetron HCl ODTs was not significantly different (p<0.05) from ODTs prepared using Croscarmellose sodium or Crospovidone.
Pharmaceutical Society of Japan
Journals
2009 EN
Carlos Dobkin · Nancy Nicosia
In mid-1995, a government effort to reduce the supply of methamphetamine precursors successfully disrupted the methamphetamine market and interrupted a trajectory of increasing usage. The price of methamphetamine tripled and purity declined from 90 percent to 20 percent. Simultaneously, amphetaminerelated hospital and treatment admissions dropped 50 percent and 35 percent, respectively. Methamphetamine use among arrestees declined 55 percent. Although felony methamphetamine arrests fell 50 percent, there is no evidence of substantial reductions in property or violent crime. The impact was largely temporary. The price returned to its original level within four months; purity, hospital admissions, treatment admissions, and arrests approached preintervention levels within eighteen months. (JEL I12, K42).
American Economic Association
Journals
2009 EN
Nico Voigtländer · HansJoachim Voth
This paper argues that Malthusian regimes are capable of sustained changes in per capita incomes. Shifting mortality and fertility schedules can lead to different steady-state income levels, with long periods of growth during the transition. Europe checked the downward pressure on wages through late marriage, which reduced fertility, and a mortality regime that combined high death rates with high incomes. We argue that both emerged as a result of the Black Death.
American Economic Association
Journals
2009 EN
Timothy Besley · Torsten Persson
Perhaps the crowning achievement of mature democracies is the peaceful acceptance of the ballot box as the primary instrument for deciding who should hold power in society. We do not have to go far back in the history of most democratic states, however, to find a distinct role for political violence. Moreover, many inhabitants of the globe still remain at risk of falling prey to widespread violence in the struggle for political office. Forms of political violence differ a great deal. We focus on two important manifestations: repression and civil war distinguished by whether violence is one-sided or two-sided. We present a unified approach to studying these forms of political violence with common roots in poverty, natural resource rents, and weak political institutions. First, we lay out rudimentary model to analyze whether violence will occur and, if so, manifest itself as repression or civil war. Three regimes — peace, repression and civil war — emerge as alternative equilibrium outcomes in the interaction between an incumbent government and an opposition group. Moreover, the theory suggests a natural ordering of these regimes. We then construct empirical measures of repression and civil war, which we map into ordered variables as suggested by the theory. We investigate how the regime depends on economic and political variables, using an ordered logit model defined over the three regimes. Our estimation results indicate a strong correlation between low incomes, weak political institutions and both forms of political violence.
American Economic Association
Journals
2009 EN
Roland Bénabou · Jean Tirole
Concerns of pride, dignity, and the desire to "keep hope" about future options often lead individuals and groups to walk away from rea sonable offers, try to shift blame for failure onto others or take refuge in political utopias. Costly impasses and conflicts result, such as trials, divorces, strikes, the scapegoating of minorities for economic hardships, and wars. A key and puzzling aspect of these processes is the role played by wishful rationalizations and delusions, as attested by field observers (e.g., Truman F. Bewley (1999) in the context of labor relations; Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray (2006) in that of war), as well as controlled experiments. Leigh Thompson and George Loewenstein (1992) and Linda C. Babcock et al. (1995) thus demonstrate how subjects in bargaining situations with common knowledge spontaneously generate, through self-serving processing and recall of the same evidence, divergent beliefs about the fairness of their cause and wishful predictions of outcomes, and how these are associated to costly delays and disagreements.
American Economic Association