Cross-national Patterns Research Articles

The role of the public in shaping EU contestation: Euroscepticism and online news media

The participation of the public in framing and debating the news has added a new layer in the making of European Union contestation and the European public sphere, traditionally driven by journalists and political elites. Drawing on news coverage of the ongoing Eurocrisis (2010–2013) and the 2009 European Parliament elections, this article examines the structure and content of European Union contestation in mainstream online news media over time and across several European Union member states. The cross-national patterns that emerge from this analysis strongly suggest that, despite the differences between the observed online news spheres, the European Union is rather uniformly contested: national politics firmly remain the key defining ‘frame’; Eurosceptic claims are very much focused on the present rather than the future; and contributors often appeal to the public’s emotions rather than reason. Furthermore, the Eurocrisis appears to have consolidated European Union contestation on the more substantial issues of power, solidarity and accountability.

What Is Social Inequality and Why Does it Matter? Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

As distinct from income or wealth inequality, ‘social inequality’ is currently poorly understood and, at best, unevenly measured. We conceptualize social inequality as the relative position of individuals along a number of dimensions that measure achieved outcomes and, innovatively, expectations about future outcomes. Using data from 12 Central and Eastern European countries, we find that cross-national patterns of social inequality differ significantly from patterns derived from income inequality measures. Moreover, our measure of social inequality is much better correlated than income inequality with other country differences such as higher levels of economic performance and human development, and stronger political institutions.

Anxious and non-anxious major depressive disorder in the World Health Organization World Mental Health Surveys.

To examine cross-national patterns and correlates of lifetime and 12-month comorbid DSM-IV anxiety disorders among people with lifetime and 12-month DSM-IV major depressive disorder (MDD). Nationally or regionally representative epidemiological interviews were administered to 74045 adults in 27 surveys across 24 countries in the WHO World Mental Health (WMH) Surveys. DSM-IV MDD, a wide range of comorbid DSM-IV anxiety disorders, and a number of correlates were assessed with the WHO Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI). 45.7% of respondents with lifetime MDD (32.0-46.5% inter-quartile range (IQR) across surveys) had one of more lifetime anxiety disorders. A slightly higher proportion of respondents with 12-month MDD had lifetime anxiety disorders (51.7%, 37.8-54.0% IQR) and only slightly lower proportions of respondents with 12-month MDD had 12-month anxiety disorders (41.6%, 29.9-47.2% IQR). Two-thirds (68%) of respondents with lifetime comorbid anxiety disorders and MDD reported an earlier age-of-onset (AOO) of their first anxiety disorder than their MDD, while 13.5% reported an earlier AOO of MDD and the remaining 18.5% reported the same AOO of both disorders. Women and previously married people had consistently elevated rates of lifetime and 12-month MDD as well as comorbid anxiety disorders. Consistently higher proportions of respondents with 12-month anxious than non-anxious MDD reported severe role impairment (64.4 v. 46.0%; χ 2 1=187.0, p<0.001) and suicide ideation (19.5 v. 8.9%; χ 2 1=71.6, p<0.001). Significantly more respondents with 12-month anxious than non-anxious MDD received treatment for their depression in the 12 months before interview, but this difference was more pronounced in high-income countries (68.8 v. 45.4%; χ 2 1=108.8, p<0.001) than low/middle-income countries (30.3 v. 20.6%; χ 2 1=11.7, p<0.001). Patterns and correlates of comorbid DSM-IV anxiety disorders among people with DSM-IV MDD are similar across WMH countries. The narrow IQR of the proportion of respondents with temporally prior AOO of anxiety disorders than comorbid MDD (69.6-74.7%) is especially noteworthy. However, the fact that these proportions are not higher among respondents with 12-month than lifetime comorbidity means that temporal priority between lifetime anxiety disorders and MDD is not related to MDD persistence among people with anxious MDD. This, in turn, raises complex questions about the relative importance of temporally primary anxiety disorders as risk markers v. causal risk factors for subsequent MDD onset and persistence, including the possibility that anxiety disorders might primarily be risk markers for MDD onset and causal risk factors for MDD persistence.

Transitional Justice in Burma/Myanmar: Crossnational Patterns and Domestic Context

Since 2010, Burma/Myanmar has significantly liberalised. In this context, questions over if and how to address the country’s legacy of repression and armed conflict have received attention both domestically and internationally. This article draws upon interdisciplinary comparative transitional justice scholarship, both quantitative and qualitative, to better understand the prospects for transitional justice in the Myanmar context. It finds that while human rights trials are highly unlikely to take place in Burma, an official truth commission alongside the military’s 2008 self-amnesty is more realistic. The article then situates Myanmar within scholarship that compares truth commissions cross-nationally to determine likely outcomes for this course of action. Current scholarship suggests that a truth commission in contemporary Burma would at minimum be unlikely to undermine human rights and at maximum could make modest but significant contributions to stability and human rights.

Transitional Justice in Burma/Myanmar: Crossnational Patterns and Domestic Context

Since 2010, Burma/Myanmar has significantly liberalised. In this context, questions over if and how to address the country's legacy of repression and armed conflict have received attention both domestically and internationally. This article draws upon interdisciplinary comparative transitional justice scholarship, both quantitative and qualitative, to better understand the prospects for transitional justice in the Myanmar context. It finds that while human rights trials are highly unlikely to take place in Burma, an official truth commission alongside the military's 2008 self-amnesty is more realistic. The article then situates Myanmar within scholarship that compares truth commissions cross-nationally to determine likely outcomes for this course of action. Current scholarship suggests that a truth commission in contemporary Burma would at minimum be unlikely to undermine human rights and at maximum could make modest but significant contributions to stability and human rights.

A framework for social investment strategies: Integrating generational, life course and gender perspectives in the EU social investment strategy

Since 2013 the European Union has promoted social investments as a national reform strategy to increase individuals’ capacities and national economic growth. However, to take full advantage of social investments, the strategy needs a more coherent framework that takes into account the dynamic and multi-dimensional nature of social issues and social investments. Theoretically, this chapter establishes such a framework consisting of generational, life course and gender perspectives on social investments. The generational perspective demonstrates that social investments involve horizontal redistribution, underpin the productive and reproductive social contract between generations and increase diversity within generations. The life course perspective demonstrates how social issues and social investments in one life stage depend on the situation in prior life stages and affect the situation in later life stages and, possibly, in multiple dimensions. The gender perspective shows how social investments can improve economic and social returns when gender and ageing over the life course are taken into consideration. Empirically, cross-national patterns indicate a positive relation between social investment policies and returns.

An Empirical Evaluation of Explanations for State Repression

The empirical literature that examines cross-national patterns of state repression seeks to discover a set of political, economic, and social conditions that are consistently associated with government violations of human rights. Null hypothesis significance testing is the most common way of examining the relationship between repression and concepts of interest, but we argue that it is inadequate for this goal, and has produced potentially misleading results. To remedy this deficiency in the literature we use cross-validation and random forests to determine thepredictivepower of measures of concepts the literature identifies as important causes of repression. We find that few of these measures are able to substantially improve the predictive power of statistical models of repression. Further, the most studied concept in the literature, democratic political institutions, predicts certain kinds of repression much more accurately than others. We argue that this is due to conceptual and operational overlap between democracy and certain kinds of state repression. Finally, we argue that the impressive performance of certain features of domestic legal systems, as well as some economic and demographic factors, justifies a stronger focus on these concepts in future studies of repression.

Desperate Housework

This article investigates cross-national patterns in the gender division of housework in coresident couples. By using Generations and Gender Survey (GGS) data, we assess four key hypotheses proposed in the literature: namely, the relative resources approach (the partner who earns less does more housework), the time availability perspective (the partner who spends less time doing paid work does more housework), the economic dependency model (the partner who contributes proportionally less to the household income does more housework), and the gender ideology perspective (the beliefs on gender roles influence housework sharing in a couple), thereby verifying the presence of gender display. Our results reaffirm the significance of gender ideology, though with important differences across countries. Time availability and relative resources matter in the most egalitarian countries, whereas economic dependency matters in countries where partners contribute more unevenly to the household income.

Income Risk in 30 Countries

We present a measure of income risk that decomposes income dynamics into long‐run inequality, volatility (inter‐temporal variability around individual‐specific growth rates), and mobility risk (variation in individual‐specific growth rates). We measure these income risk components in panel data from 30 rich democracies. We use this comprehensive collection of panel data to analyze long‐terms trends in income dynamics for four countries (Canada, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States), and cross‐national patterns of income dynamics for an additional 26 countries. We find that tax and transfer systems lower income risk, but less so in the United States than in other comparable countries. We find that higher incomes tend to grow faster and to be more volatile than lower incomes. We find that the United States is exceptional in its level of, and increase in, each type of income risk. Various other measures of mobility are positively correlated with mobility risk.

Cross-National Patterns of Intergenerational Continuities in Childbearing in Developed Countries

Earlier work has shown that the association between the fertility of parents and the fertility of children has become stronger over time in some societies. This article updates and broadens the geographic coverage to assess the magnitude of intergenerational continuities in childbearing in developed and middle-income societies using data for 46 populations from 28 developed countries drawn from a number of recent large-scale survey programs. Robust positive intergenerational fertility correlations are found across these countries into the most recent period, and although there is no indication that the strength of the relationship is declining, the increasing trend does not appear to be continuing.

Revisiting Deterrence: Legal Knowledge, Use Context and Arrest Perception for Cannabis

Deterrence research has evolved considerably since the 1970s when a favourite offence for study was the emerging phenomenon of widespread cannabis use among mainstream populations. The deterrent model of crime prevention has expanded far beyond the study of objective and subjective in- dicators of certainty and severity to encompass social support, moral evalu- ations, peer involvement and, most recently, risk sensitivity and situational factors. Most earlier research found no evidence of deterrence of cannabis use, a fi nding attributed to its low actual and perceived risk of arrest and changes in public attitudes. This interview study with adult experienced cannabis users drawn from a representative survey base in Toronto, Canada, where possession is still treated as a criminal offence, provides a more nuanced interpretation of deterrence. The authors found that users had generally in- accurate knowledge about the current law and penalties and believed they would avoid arrest in the future. However, they were not oblivious to the pos- sibility of police intervention, and took precautions such as carrying small amounts and avoiding public use. Thus, users were not unaffected by the law, but rather these discreet practices illustrate the operation of restrictive deter- rence, shaping their choices of when, where and how to commit the crime of cannabis use. Further research on deterrence should examine situated choices by risk-sensitive offenders, and should also include cross-national patterns of arrest and user risk perceptions. While cannabis continues to be prohibited by international treaties, the reality of widespread use presents opportunities for innovative deterrence studies into this normalised yet illegal crime. The varia- tion in policies, penalty structures and enforcement across European nations, compared to those in other Western jurisdictions, can foster relevant research for a transatlantic discussion about global drug policy transformation.

Theorising the use of private military and security companies: a synthetic perspective

This article seeks to systematise and advance the theoretical debate on the causes and conditions for the privatisation of security. Drawing on previous research on private military and security companies (PMSCs) and theories from International Relations and Comparative Politics, it reconstructs functionalist, political-instrumentalist and ideationist explanations for why and under what conditions even ‘strong’ and democratic Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development states (extensively) use PMSCs. An analysis of inter-temporal and cross-national (United States, British, German and French) patterns of security privatisation indicates that all the three theoretical models point out causes and conditions that are relevant for a comprehensive explanation, but none is sufficient alone. Therefore, the article uses both the models and the empirical evidence to propose a synthetic perspective, which treats different explanatory conditions and logics as complementary, rather than rival. Going beyond the atheoretical conclusion that a multitude of disconnected factors are in some way relevant for a comprehensive explanation of security privatisation, I develop a thin and a thick synthesis that rely on a domain-of-application approach and sequencing, respectively. The thin synthesis spells out how different explanatory factors operate in specific domains, whereas the thick synthesis elaborates how different conditions and mechanisms apply to different phases of security privatisation and how they interrelate.

Science and Mathematics Achievement and the Importance of Classroom Composition: Multicountry Analysis Using TIMSS 2007

In this multicountry analysis, we generate a student-level measure of socioeconomic status (SES) “mixing” to understand the benefits or pitfalls of placing low-SES children with diverse peers. We conduct this analysis separately for equal and unequal countries that provide the same curriculum to all children regardless of ability level, and we find some surprising similarities. For example, lower mathematics and science test scores are associated with low-SES children in mixed classrooms. We then apply this analysis to the United States, a rich but unequal country where ability-based tracking is common. For the United States, we find that the cross-national patterns are reversed for mathematics, and socioeconomic mixing is beneficial for low-SES children; however, the results for science are not significant.

Exploring a ROSE-garden: Norwegian youth’s orientations towards science – seen as signs of late modern identities

The thesis is based on the view that science teaching must build on an understanding of the students' culture, priorities and concerns. The empirical material is collected through the ROSE project. ROSE (The Relevance of Science Education) is a comparative project meant to shed light on affective factors of importance to the learning of science and technology. The target population is students towards the end of lower secondary school (age 15). The research instrument was developed in cooperation with an international group of science educators. The resulting questionnaire consisted mostly of closed questions addressing the students' interests, attitudes, plans, views on the environmental challenges, etc. This thesis uses data from more than 26 000 students in 25 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. The research aims were to develop a student typology based on the Norwegian data, to characterise the student types' orientations towards science, and to study Norwegian youth's interests against a background of students from less modernised countries. The results can be summarised under three main conclusions: - Norwegian students can be divided into five student types with distinct orientations towards science. - Students' interests in science are sex-specific. - There are some characteristic cross-national patterns in youth's interests that follow a modern–traditional divide. The results are discussed in the light of sociological theories on youth in late modern societies, especially by drawing on perspectives on the late modern project of identity construction. The students' responses in the questionnaire are interpreted as identity expressions, and the typology is seen as signs of five different social identities. The study has an explorative and data-driven approach. The next step of the analysis has been successively adjusted according to the previous step and results. The following is a brief account for the way through the data material and a summary of the results

The ties that bind: the role of migrants in the uneven geography of international telephone traffic

AbstractRecent work suggests that migrants have been a major driving force in the dramatic growth of international telephony over recent decades, accounting for large rises in telephone calls between countries with strong immigrant/emigrant connections. Yet, the existing literature has done a poor job of evaluating the substantive importance of migrants in explaining large disparities in levels of bilateral voice traffic observed between different countries. It has also failed to go very far in examining how domestic and relational factors moderate (namely amplify or attenuate) the influence of migrant stocks on international calling. Our contribution addresses these gaps in the literature. For a sample, which includes a far larger number of countries than previous studies, we show that, together with shorter‐term visitors, bilateral migrant stocks emerge as the relational variable with one of the substantively largest influences over cross‐national patterns of telephone calls. We also find that the effect of bilateral migrant stocks on inter‐country telephone traffic is greater where the country pairs are richer and more spatially distant from one another.

“SECOND-ORDER” ELECTIONS AND ONLINE JOURNALISM

European Parliament elections are often classified as “second-order” and there are few pan-European media outlets through which European Union (EU) elites can address voters directly. Given these conditions, can online journalism help broaden the scope of European political communication, facilitate interaction across the borders and refocus European Parliamentary election coverage on EU issues? Using an analytical model based on the public sphere, this article assesses online reporting of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections in Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom, on three levels: publicization; participation; and public opinion formation. The results show that despite the differences between the selected countries in terms of online communication infrastructure and the maturity of the online public sphere, cross-national patterns of European Parliamentary election coverage emerge. This allows for reserved optimism regarding the role of online journalism in the building of a European public sphere.

Cross-National Patterns in FCPA Enforcement

This Note undertakes an empirical examination of U.S. enforcement actions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in order to explore the cross-national patterns associated with the United States’ international antibribery enforcement. I investigate a number of possible determinants of FCPA enforcement, including variation in the level of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI), cross-national variation in corruption levels, the level of foreign regulatory and enforcement cooperation with the United States, and U.S. foreign policy interests. I find that higher levels of U.S. FDI and higher levels of corruption are significantly associated with increased FCPA enforcement, as is the presence of bilateral mechanisms of enforcement cooperation. In contrast, other variables — including the level of foreign policy alignment between the host nation and the United States — do not appear to be associated with variation in FCPA enforcement. In addition, I find that cross-national variation in the number of FCPA cases in a given country is much more closely associated with actual recorded experience with corruption (as measured by cross-national survey instruments) than with more widely used measures of corruption perceptions. Finally, I employ data on past enforcement actions to generate a cross-national measure of the “FCPA enforcement-action intensity” of U.S. FDI, and I consider the potential use of such an index as a measure of FCPA country risk.

The Relationship Between School Perceptions and Psychosomatic Complaints: Cross-Country Differences Across Canada, Norway, and Romania

This study examined the predictive value of school climate and peer support for psychosomatic complaints, perceived academic achievement, and school satisfaction in Canada, Norway, and Romania. While the three countries used the same measures of each construct, the questionnaires were written in three different languages. Thus, we first established the linguistic equivalence of the instruments across the three countries. Having established linguistic equivalence, we next examined the extent to which the patterns of relationship were similar across the countries and for two age groups (13- and 15-year-olds). There were similar cross-national patterns in relationships with stronger links between school climate and the three outcomes than between peer support and the outcomes. The peer support–perceived academic achievement path was in all instances weak or non-significant. With respect to age differences, none were observed in Canada and Norway, but age differences were seen in Romania.

Elderly suicide rates: a replication of cross-national comparisons and association with sex and elderly age-bands using five year suicide data

:Background:Suicide rates generally increase with age. A recent cross-national study, using one-year cross-sectional data on suicide rates identified regional and cross-national patterns for elderly suicide rates. However, findings from studies using one-year cross-sectional data on suicide rates may be open to bias because of random year on year fluctuations in elderly suicide rates.Methods:One-year average of suicide rates for both sexes in the age-bands 65-74 and 75+ years were calculated from data on suicide rates for five consecutive years ascertained from the World Health Organization. Cross-national variations were examined by segregating different countries into four quartiles of suicide rates.Results:There was wide cross-national variation in elderly suicide rates. Elderly suicide rates were the lowest in Caribbean and Arabic/Islamic countries, and the highest in central and eastern European, countries emerging from the former Soviet Union, some oriental and some west European countries.Conclusions:The regional and cross-national patterns for elderly suicide rates observed in this study were almost identical to a similar earlier study using one-year cross-sectional data on suicide rates. This suggests that the findings of both studies were accurate and robust, and potential explanations for the observed cross-national variations in elderly suicide rates requires further study.

The medicine use and corresponding subjective health complaints among adolescents, a cross‐national survey

Medicine use among children and young people is under-researched. Studies that investigated cross-national patterns in adolescents' medicine use practice are rare. This study aims to investigate adolescents' medicine use for corresponding health complaints in Europe and USA. Nationally representative samples of adolescents from 19 countries and regions in Europe and USA completed an anonymous, standardised questionnaire as part of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children 2005/2006 survey. The prevalence of health complaints and medicine use were determined. The influence of the frequency of medicine use, age, gender and country of residence, on the likelihood of medicine use was assessed using multilevel multivariate logistic regression, with separate analyses for boys and girls. Both health complaints and medicine use were common among adolescents. Medicine use was strongly associated with the frequency of health complaints. The prevalence of both medicine use and health complaints was higher among girls than boys. Boys and girls with weekly health complaints were both similarly likely to report elevated rates of medicine use. The findings indicated that adolescents who report more frequent recurrent health complaints are also more likely to report more frequent medicine use for their health complaints. Adolescent boys with weekly health complaints have the same risk of medicine use as girls with weekly health complaints. The importance of educating school-aged children to interpret their bodily feelings and complaints and to use medicines appropriately is of high priority.