Cross-national Comparative Analysis Research Articles

Latent class models for cross-national comparisons: the association between individual and national-level fertility and partnership characteristics

Multilevel modelling techniques such as random models or fixed effect are increasingly used in social sciences and demography to both account for clustering within higher level aggregations and evaluate the interaction between individual and contextual information. While this is justifiable in some studies, the extension of multilevel models to national level analysis — and particularly cross-national comparative analysis — is problematic and can hamper the understanding of the interplay between individual and country level characteristics. This paper proposes an alternative approach, which allocates countries to classes based on economic, labour market and policy characteristics. Classes influence the profiles of three key demographic behaviours at a sub-national level: marriage, cohabitation and first birth timing. Woman level data are drawn from a subset of the Harmonized Histories dataset, and national level information from the GGP contextual database. In this example, three country classes are extracted reflecting two Western patterns and an Eastern pattern, divided approximately along the Hajnal line. While Western countries tend to exhibit higher levels of family allowances albeit accounting for a lower share of spending which is associated with lower marriage and later fertility, Eastern countries generally show a higher share of spending but at lower absolute levels with lower cohabitation rates and early fertility.

I choose my business model! A cross-national analysis of business model choice in family firms

Purpose – Drawing on family-business and business model (BM) literature the purpose of this paper is to explore whether a relationship exists between the family involvement in the management (i.e. closed or mixed management) and BM choice. Design/methodology/approach – A multiple case study analysis of family-owned wineries in Chianti (Italy) and Côtes du Rhône (France) has been conducted. Findings – The analysis surprisingly reveals that no relationship exists between the BM ideal type chosen and the type of management composition. Rather, it seems that the choice of hiring non-family managers is dictated by the willingness to reinforce the BM chosen by the owner and that the role played by non-family managers is not revolutionary but reinforces the owner’s BM choice. The authors propose that the stewardship theory can contribute in explaining the findings. Originality/value – A twofold contribution is offered by this study: first, it links the strategic management research on BMs to family business (FB) research on corporate governance and specifically on the composition of management teams; second, it provides an empirical example of a cross-national comparative analysis on FBs using multiple case studies.

The Electoral Benefits of Opportunistic Election Timing

This study explores the effect of opportunistic election timing on the incumbent’s electoral performance. While the existing literature leads to contradictory predictions about the ability of incumbent governments to benefit from strategically timed elections. We advance the theoretical debate by presenting the first cross-national comparative analysis of this question, drawing on an original data set of 318 parliamentary elections in 27 Eastern and Western European countries. In order to identify the effect of opportunistic election calling, we rely on instrumental variable regression. The results demonstrate that opportunistic election calling generates a vote share bonus for the incumbent of about 5 percentage points and is thereby likely to affect electoral accountability.

Trust of Nations: Looking for More Universal Values for Interpersonal and International Relationships

The objective of this study is to review past research on people’s sense of trust as reflected in the data from longitudinal and cross-national comparative surveys by the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. First, I explain some history of our survey research. Second, I give a brief review of the studies on sense of trust. Third, I summarize some aspects of the fundamental social values of the Japanese and their sense of interpersonal trust as identified in our Japanese National Character Survey. Fourth, I present a crossnational comparative analysis of interpersonal trust and institutional trust, including the Seven Country Survey (Japan, the USA, and five European countries) (1987–1993), Japanese immigrant surveys, the East Asia Values Survey (2002–2005), the Pacific-Rim Values Survey (2004–2009), and the Asia-Pacific Values Survey (2010–2014). To overcome the limitations of the studies based mostly on the items of the General Social Survey or the World Values Survey, I explore more basic social values on human bonds that may underlie people’s sense of trust beyond differences in countries or time. The final section presents some comments for our future research.

Assessing sex differentials in under-five mortality in sub-Saharan Africa: A cross-national comparative analysis

This paper investigates and compares country-specific sex differentials in childhood mortality in thirty sub-Saharan African countries. Data from the demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) were analyzed to assess sex differentials in U5M rates before and after adjustment for individual, household, and community-level factors, using multilevel discrete-time hazard models. The findings show a systematically higher mortality for male children compared to female in all countries except Sierra Leone and Swaziland. The relationship is significant in nineteen of the thirty countries. Across the region, males have 17–54 per cent higher odds of dying before age five. These patterns remained when controls were added for individual and community-level factors, as well as unobserved community-level effects.

Evaluating newly acquired authority of nurse practitioners and physician assistants for reserved medical procedures in the Netherlands: a study protocol

AimThe study protocol is designed to evaluate the effects of granting independent authorization for medical procedures to nurse practitioners and physician assistants on processes and outcomes of health care.BackgroundRecent (temporarily) enacted legislation in Dutch health care authorizes nurse practitioners and physician assistants to indicate and perform specified medical procedures, i.e. catheterization, cardioversion, defibrillation, endoscopy, injection, puncture, prescribing and simple surgical procedures, independently. Formerly, these procedures were exclusively reserved to physicians, dentists and midwives.DesignA triangulation mixed method design is used to collect quantitative (surveys) and qualitative (interviews) data.MethodsOutcomes are selected from evidence-based frameworks and models for assessing the impact of advanced nursing on quality of health care. Data are collected in various manners. Surveys are structured around the domains: (i) quality of care; (ii) costs; (iii) healthcare resource use; and (iv) patient centredness. Focus group and expert interviews aim to ascertain facilitators and barriers to the implementation process. Data are collected before the amendment of the law, 1 and 2·5 years thereafter.Groups of patients, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, supervising physicians and policy makers all participate in this national study. The study is supported by a grant from the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in March 2011. Research Ethics Committee approval was obtained in July 2011.ConclusionThis study will provide information about the effects of granting independent authorization for medical procedures to nurse practitioners and physician assistants on processes and outcomes of health care. Study findings aim to support policy makers and other stakeholders in making related decisions. The study design enables a cross-national comparative analysis.

Are theories applicable across different contexts? A cross-national comparative analysis through the lens of firm life-cycle theory in the ICT sector

It is currently common practice in social and business research, to lift concepts and theories from one country context--and extending the validity of the results--using them in another. This paper discusses the question relating to such generalisability in the context of global, innovative industries. Statistical methods are applied to compare results of a quantitative investigation of firm life-cycle theory between two developed countries. Such comparison implemented with statistical rigour on a quantitative basis is not common, and difficult to execute. Results show that even though life-cycle theory has been found meaningful and valid on both country-specific populations, the quantitative comparison of these results has highlighted a substantial amount of statistically significant differences. This leads to the conclusion that extension of social theory between various country contexts needs to consider a variety of contextual parameters, cautioning computer scientists offering solutions to various problems around the world coming from their own, unique, country-specific perspectives to keep an open mind.

The comparative politics of courts and climate change

Disappointment with international efforts to find legal solutions to climate change has led to the emergence of a new generation of climate policy. This includes the emergence of courts as new ‘battlefields in climate fights’. Cross-national comparative analysis of the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia supplements research that has found that litigation plays an important governance gap-filling role in jurisdictions without comprehensive national-level climate change policies. The inductive research design identifies patterns in climate change litigation. The three countries illustrate the varieties of climate policies, and thus serve as a useful entry point for thinking more generally about the interplay between climate politics and legal mobilisation. To improve theoretical understandings of the role of courts in climate change politics, the range of litigants and the variety of cases brought to courts under the umbrella of the term ‘climate change litigation’ are identified.

The fleeting benefits of appointments commissions for judicial gender equity

Parity in gender representation on the bench is crucial if the judiciary is to reflect the population it serves. This article determines whether judicial appointments commissions, recently adopted in the UK, can increase judicial diversity on Commonwealth courts. Applying the synthetic control method to cross-national comparative data, the author finds that while the appointment of women judges increased in the first year after appointment commissions were established in the UK, any increase in the gender equity of appointments vanished soon thereafter. Not only does this result has important practical and theoretical implications for ongoing efforts to increase judicial diversity in Commonwealth countries, but it also highlights the utility of the synthetic control method for cross-national comparative political analysis.

Financing high speed rail in the United States and France: The evolution of public-private partnerships

Using cross-national comparative analysis, this paper discusses the reasons why France has succeeded in partially privatizing its most recently constructed high speed line, while the U.S. has not reached this stage. The authors argue that France, with an interventionist government, diverged from the U.S. during the Great Depression by nationalizing its private railways and regulating competition with highway-based transport, thereby establishing favorable conditions for the future development of high speed trains. The U.S., because of its strong free market orientation, delayed nationalization until 1971, by which time passenger railways were severely weakened, so the U.S. lagged far behind France. After accruing a large public debt on its high speed rail program in the 1980s and 1990s, the French government recently took steps to privatize construction and operations on its Tours–Bordeaux line. Similarly, in the U.S., the State of California is trying to attract private participation on its planned high speed line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Based on French high speed rail history, this paper argues that, to succeed, California must commit both a high level of public borrowing as well as public guarantees on private borrowing. Public credit is the sine qua non of financing high speed trains.

Web campaigning in the 2009 European Parliament elections: A cross-national comparative analysis

Political communication has transformed drastically since the Internet made its way into the political arena. Political parties seem unable to do without a website or a social networking profile any longer, particularly in election campaigns. One of the many approaches to studying online political communication is measuring specific website features political parties, politicians and candidates utilize in order to engage visitors in the political process. Even though the analysis of online political communication has evolved over the years, website-feature analysis is still a valid instrument to study political actors. The explanations sought to understand website-feature utilization are found in earlier cross-national comparative studies (technological and human development) as well as new ones (political systems characteristics, ideology, participation and engagement). This study looks back on two prior cross-national comparative research projects and reports on a cross-national comparative analysis of 1026 candidate and party websites from 17 countries participating in the European Parliament (EP) elections of 2009. To analyze these data, some methodological improvements are made compared to earlier studies.

The Mathematical Courses of Pedro Padilla and Étienne Bézout: Teaching Calculus in Eighteenth-Century Spain and France

The aim of this paper is to provide a cross-national comparative analysis of the introduction of calculus in Spanish and French military educational institutions through the works of Pedro Padilla y Arcos (1724–1807?) and Etienne Bezout (1730–1783), respectively. Both authors developed their educational work in the context of military schools and academies. Padilla’s Curso Militar de Mathematicas (1753–1756) was the first work published in Spain which introduced the teaching of calculus in formal education. Bezout’s Cours de Mathematiques (1764–1769) was the first work on calculus explicitly addressed to French military students and can be considered a representative of the canonical knowledge on eighteenth-century mathematics, both in France and abroad. Eighteenth-century Spain has traditionally been regarded as a country in the periphery whose scientific culture and education were pervaded by French science and education. This centre-periphery framework is often represented by a static model of one-way transmission from the centre to the periphery. A crossnational comparative analysis can help revisit this monolithic centre-periphery framework. A recent historiographical stream places the emphasis on appropriation, hence moving away from the idea of passive reception. In my paper I focus on the reading and writing of educational books, as practices which contribute actively to the development and circulation of knowledge. To assist the analysis, I explore the differences in communication practices in each case, in contents and approaches, and in particular, I give special attention to their inspiration in mathematical streams other than the French standpoint.

Education determines a nation's health, but what determines educational outcomes? A cross-national comparative analysis

This study is premised on the notion that public health policy should address not only health itself, but also primary determinants of health. We examined the effect of national policies on educational outcomes, in particular, on adolescent reading literacy (ARL). We compared the effect of traditional policy indicators--national income and educational spending--with income inequality, a measure of redistributive policies. We used Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data that provide a rare opportunity to test policy effects after accounting for competing individual-, school-, and country-level explanations. Our sample consisted of 119,814 students, 5126 schools, and 24 countries. Multilevel/Hierarchical regression findings were striking: GDP had a significant, but negligible effect on ARL scores (β=0.002, SE=0.0008), while educational spending had no significant effect. By contrast, income inequality exhibited a larger inverse association (β=-1.15, SE=0.57). Among the wealthy nations in OECD, additional economic prosperity and educational spending is trumped by distribution of income for its effect on ARL. Our study yielded a striking result about education, a major determinant of health. Not only is income inequality a significant determinant of ARL scores, but direct spending on education and overall national economic prosperity are not.

News media representations of a common EU foreign and security policy. A cross-national content analysis of CFSP coverage in national quality newspapers

This study is a cross-national comparative content analysis of the broadsheet press coverage of EU Common Foreign and Security issues (n=1453) focusing on the presence of indicators of a European Public Sphere. Specifically, we investigated the visibility of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) stories, featuring actors, the tone of coverage and the presence of ‘risk’ and ‘opportunity’ frames. We found that CFSP was more visible in broadsheets during key events. In terms of actors in the news, coverage was primarily Europeanized. When evaluative, CFSP news had a distinctive, positive dimension, especially with reference to the European Union (EU) as an entity. CFSP issues were more frequently framed in terms of ‘opportunity’ rather than in terms of ‘risk’. Our findings suggest that the news coverage of CFSP is truly different from the coverage of EU affairs in general. Implications for the formation of public opinion and the legitimacy of CFSP are discussed.

Evaluation of Color Application of Homepage of Domestic and Foreign Online bookstores - Focused on the Quantitative Evaluation of Aesthetic Measure and Cross-national Comparative Analysis -

Evaluation of Color Application of Homepage of Domestic and Foreign Online bookstores - Focused on the Quantitative Evaluation of Aesthetic Measure and Cross-national Comparative Analysis -

Structure, Governance, and Organizational Dynamics of University Medical Centers in the Netherlands

The Netherlands, a country of 16 million people, is home to eight university medical centers (UMCs), institutions that are closely analogous to U.S. academic health centers and play in important role in Dutch society. The authors' purpose was to test the extent to which an analytical framework developed in one setting can be transferred to another and to yield fresh insights into the value and limitations of different theoretical perspectives on organizational design in the specific context of the academic-clinical enterprise. The authors applied a conceptual framework originally developed in the U.S. context to analyze UMC structure, governance, and organizational dynamics. Three UMCs, selected for their differences, were used as case studies, and data were gathered through interviews and document review. A multilevel approach is used to present the data. At the highest level, an overview of the composition, functions, and accountabilities of UMC boards is provided. Below this, the authors describe how functional integration for delivery of the tripartite mission is achieved at the sub-board level. Finally, the authors describe some of the detailed mechanisms used to bind together different interest groups within the UMCs. The authors found that the U.S.-derived framework for analysis required modification for the context of the Netherlands, but that the study validates the view that many challenges involved in the management of the academic-clinical enterprise are international.

A cross-national comparative analysis of industrial policy and competitive advantage

While many schools of thought in economic planning agree that innovation constitutes the driving force behind the competitive performance of nations, the efficiency of its supporting industrial policy is still subject to debate. This paper applies the performance framework in competitive advantage issues associated with the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to evaluate the relative efficiency of industrial technology investments across countries. Each country's annual research and development (R&D) expenditures are treated as input while patents and academic publications, indexed by Science Citation Index (SCI) and Engineering Index (EI), are considered as outputs. Three of the ten countries studied were the most efficient: China, Singapore and Taiwan. The latter two are members of 'the East Asian Tigers'. Further, Malmquist Index (MI) analysis indicates that the total observed countries achieved higher efficiency in 2003 compared with 2002. Technological change contributed more to the improvement of MI than did technical efficiency change.

Individual and collective responsibility: mandated private pensions in a comparative perspective

For a growing number of social policy analysts, the privatisation of pensions should be understood as an integral element of welfare retrenchment. Driven by the core values of “neo-liberalism”, it is intended to diminish collective responsibility for retirement income futures. We take issue with this characterisation of pensions privatisation. A cross-national comparative analysis of mandated private pensions suggests that the market orientation of their design is generally ambivalent. While the architects of these arrangements have embraced market principles, they have also accepted the principle of collective responsibility. The privatisation of pensions has not been informed, universally or comprehensively, by the core values of neo-liberalism.

Framing the Iraq War

Some of the key findings are reported from a cross-national comparative content analysis of the flagship main evening TV news programs in five countries, as well as of the flagship Arab-language TV news on the Al-Jazeera network, during March and April 2003, the “official” 3-4-week period of the war in Iraq, to investigate the similarities and differences in the framing of the war in TV news. Despite some differences among networks within countries, the study reveals major lines of cross-national difference in the subtopics emphasized in the coverage, the tone of the coverage of the opposing sides, and the volume of news devoted to the Allies (the United Kingdom and the United States). It is concluded that the reporting of the war was conditioned by the national and international contexts in which the news was produced. The cross-country comparisons raise serious questions about the credibility and impartiality of TV news in the reporting of the war.

Ubiquitous computing and its effects on small businesses

Much of the previous literature on ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) has been limited to case studies, reporting innovative practices of specific technologies (e.g., RFID) and social issues. There is a general paucity of research on strategic application of UbiComp, especially to small businesses. To address this issue, this study provides a broad overview of the current practices of UbiComp in leading countries and presents possible future directions. Then, the effects of UbiComp on small businesses are discussed. Through a cross-national comparative analysis, we present four strategies to provide some guidance to the countries that are currently considering entering into the UbiComp race.