How people organise cultural attitudes: cultural belief systems and the populist radical right

Political scientists generally agree that all individuals structure their cultural attitudes in the same unidimensional fashion. However, various populist radical right parties remarkably combine moral progressiveness with conservatism regarding immigration-related issues. This suggests that the structuring of cultural attitudes among the electorate may also be more complex than typically assumed. Applying Correlational Class Analysis to representative survey data, the study uncovers three cultural belief systems. For individuals adhering to an integrated one, all cultural attitudes are interdependent, as typically assumed. However, two alternative belief systems are also uncovered: intermediate and partitioned. In the latter, positions on one cultural attitude (e.g. ethnocentrism) are barely related to positions on others (e.g. rejecting Islam or opposing homosexuality). The existence of multiple cultural belief systems challenges the widely held assumption that all people organise their cultural attitudes similarly. Both political party agendas and individuals’ education level and religion appear key to understanding variation in belief systems.     

Promoting Daily Well-being in Adolescents using mHealth

Adolescents are at increased risk for developing mental health problems. The Grow It! app is an mHealth intervention aimed at preventing mental health problems through improving coping by cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-inspired challenges as well as self-monitoring of emotions through Experience Sampling Methods (ESM). Yet, little is known about daily changes in well-being and coping during a stressful period, like the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study aimed to elucidate daily changes in positive and negative affect, and adaptive coping, and to better understand the within-person’s mechanisms of the Grow It! app. The sample consisted of 12–25-year old Dutch adolescents in two independent cohorts (cohort 1: N?=?476, Mage?=?16.24, 76.1% female, 88.7% Dutch; cohort 2: N?=?814, Mage?=?18.45, 82.8% female, 97.2% Dutch). ESM were used to measure daily positive and negative affect and coping (cohort 1: 42 days, 210 assessments per person; cohort 2: 21 days, 105 assessments). The results showed that, on average, adolescents decreased in daily positive affect and adaptive coping, and increased in their experienced negative affect. A positive relation between adaptive coping and positive affect was found, although independent of the CBT-based challenges. Latent class analysis identified two heterogeneous trajectories for both positive and negative affect, indicating that the majority of participants with low to moderate-risk on developing mental health problems were likely to benefit from the Grow It! app.

     

Conditional political budget cycles: a review of recent evidence

Until recently, most research on political budget cycles was based on the (often implicit) presumption that these cycles do not differ across countries. However, more recent studies focus on heterogeneity. This paper surveys studies examining the factors conditioning the occurrence and strength of manipulation of fiscal policy for electoral purposes, at the aggregate level or at the level of a particular type of government expenditure. Conditioning factors discussed include: the level of development, institutional quality, age and level of democracy, electoral rules and form of government, transparency of the political process, the presence of checks and balances, and fiscal rules.     

Tri-allelic SNP markers enable analysis of mixed and degraded DNA samples

For the analysis of degraded DNA in disaster victim identification (DVI) and criminal investigations, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been recognized as promising markers mainly because they can be analyzed in short sized amplicons. Most SNPs are bi-allelic and are thereby ineffective to detect mixtures, which may lead to incorrect genotyping. We developed an algorithm to find non-binary (i.e. tri-allelic or tetra-allelic) SNPs in the NCBI dbSNP database. We selected 31 potential tri-allelic SNPs with a minor allele frequency of at least 10%. The tri-allelic nature was confirmed for 15 SNPs residing on 14 different chromosomes. Multiplex SNaPshot™ assays were developed, and the allele frequencies of 16 SNPs were determined among 153 Dutch and 111 Netherlands Antilles reference samples. Using these multiplex SNP assays, the presence of a mixture of two DNA samples in a ratio up to 1:8 could be recognized reliably. Furthermore, we compared the genotyping efficiency of the tri-allelic SNP markers and short tandem repeat (STR) markers by analyzing artificially degraded DNA and DNA from 30 approximately 500-year-old bone and molar samples. In both types of degraded DNA samples, the larger sized STR amplicons failed to amplify whereas the tri-allelic SNP markers still provided valuable information. In conclusion, tri-allelic SNP markers are suited for the analysis of degraded DNA and enable the detection of a second DNA source in a sample.     

Mechanisms for policy (dis)integration: explaining food policy and climate change adaptation policy in the Netherlands

Policy Sciences - Recent years have witnessed increased political interest to the challenge of organizing policy integration to govern societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional...     

Do Substance Use Risk Personality Dimensions Predict the Onset of Substance Use in Early Adolescence? A Variable- and Person-Centered Approach

Various studies found personality to be related to substance use, but little attention is paid to the role of personality risk dimensions with regard to an early onset of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use. Therefore, the current study used a variable-centered approach to examine whether anxiety sensitivity, hopelessness, sensation seeking, and impulsivity predict the onset of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use in early adolescence. Additionally, we adopted a person-centered approach to examine whether different personality subgroups could be identified, and whether these subgroups would be predictive of substance use. For that purpose, longitudinal data of a broader effectiveness study were used from 758 early adolescents (53?% female) aged 11–14?years. Structural equation models showed that hopelessness and sensation seeking were predictive of having ever used alcohol and tobacco. Also, sensation seeking was predictive of marijuana use. Latent profile analyses on the first wave data revealed a three-profile solution for boys (i.e., resilients, internalizers, and externalizers) and a two-profile solution for girls (i.e., resilients and internalizers). In contrast to our expectation, further analyses revealed no significant differences in substance use between the different subprofiles for both boys and girls. The separate personality dimensions thus seem more relevant in predicting the onset of substance use compared to the personality profiles. However, the personality profiles might be informative in explaining more excessive substance use behaviors.     

Policy change in nascent subsystems: Mozambican higher education policy 1993–2003

The Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), developed by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith in the late 1980s, has proven to be a valuable theory to explain policy change. At the same time, however, researchers have identified limitations in the ACF relating to various dimensions such as definitions of key variables, their operationalization, and the universal applicability of the framework to any context, be it Europe, the US, or countries outside the OECD. The key question addressed in this article is whether the ACF, like most other established public policy theories or frameworks developed in a western industrialized context, can be applied to very young (sub)systems in volatile contexts. We try to answer this question by applying the ACF to the development of the Mozambican higher education subsystem, a subsystem that fits the conditions of volatility and nascence. On the one hand this subsystem is characterized by a turbulent environment and a weak democracy. On the other hand, the higher education subsystem is built practically from scratch. The findings of the study suggest that the ACF is built on basic assumptions that do not apply to a country with a high degree of civil and political turbulence. Some revisions need to be made to improve the ACF’s fit to such a context.

Dynamics of Regulatory Policymaking in Sweden: The Role of Media Advocacy and Public Opinion

While extensive literatures study the responsiveness of policy to public opinion and the influence of interest groups, few studies look at both factors simultaneously. This article offers an analysis of the influence of media advocacy and public opinion on political attention and policy change for four regulatory issues over a relatively long period of time in Sweden. The data pools together measures of public support for specific policies with new data on attention to the policy issues in the Swedish parliament, policy developments over time and detailed coding of the claims of interest advocates in two major Swedish newspapers. Analyzing this data, a complex picture without a general tendency for either public opinion or media advocacy to act as dominant forces in producing policy change is revealed, although some evidence is found that the public is successful in stimulating political attention when it supports policy proposals aimed at changing the status quo.     

The Impact of New Public Management Reforms on Public Servants' Ethics: Towards a Theory

Recent years have witnessed an increasing concern about the impact of New Public Management (NPM) reforms on public servants' ethics. The academic literature about this topic is still characterized by considerable confusion and the article proposes a falsifiable theory as a way out of this. Specifically, it demonstrates that, when all the claims in the literature are translated into the proposed conceptual framework, they amount to an integrated set of propositions (that is, a theory) about the causal relationship between organizational processes (as changed by NPM-reforms) and public servants' ethics. Such an integrated theory is possible because, although the normative positions taken by the authors are clearly rival ones, their empirical claims are complementary. With the diverse claims thus integrated into one theory, the article provides a basis for empirical research and for the NPM-ethics debate to proceed in a more explicit and systematic way.     

Constructing Authoritative Answers to a Latent Crisis? Strategies of Puzzling,Powering and Framing in Dutch Climate Adaptation Practices Compared

While adaptation tends to be approached as an issue for policy analysis, framing and powering strongly interact with policy analysis (puzzling) and are at least as important for adequate outcomes in such an ambiguous context. The present contribution compares and analyzes two Dutch adaptation strategies in the Central Netherlands: (1) realizing a flood bypass channel near the town of Kampen and (2) exploring possibilities to raise the water level of Lake IJssel, enhancing the country’s freshwater storage capacity. The article concludes that in both trajectories there is an important role for policy analysis (puzzling) but the cases differ strongly in the way actors frame the intervention, their corresponding powering strategies and the policy outcomes.