Public Ideology Research Articles

From the centralized national collection policy towards a decentralized collection management and resource sharing co-operation – Finnish experiences

Purpose – Finland had a legislation-based centralized collection policy until the mid-1990s. The main components were national resource centers (selected higher education libraries) and provincial libraries (selected public libraries). This paradigm changed during the recession of the 1990s when new public management ideologies were adopted by the government. This ended the centralized model and a new policy favoring a decentralized collection management which demanded resource sharing. The models designated for the print-only age became obsolete also when the digital dissemination of especially scientific documents began to be the norm. The Finnish libraries have started to implement a new strategy consisting of different elements including a new model of library automation systems, the National Repository which is the hub for the resource sharing of print materials, digitization projects (to be especially implemented by the National Library) and with new policies defining the roles and responsibilities of each of the libraries involved. This article aims to describe the history of the Finnish centralized collection policy, its shift to the modern management of the collection as well as the philosophy and tools used in this work. Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes the evolution of the Finnish national collection policy and its main trends. Findings – The National Repository Library has enabled Finnish university libraries to focus their collection policies and to make savings in the cost of premises. A new business model for the digital era is needed for document sharing between libraries. Research limitations/implications – The paper is based on Finnish experiences. Practical implications – Models for national and international collection and preservation policies are presented. Originality/value – The paper provides proposals for the building of global division of work in the long-tail management of documents.

An alternative to the Laffer curve: Theory and consequences

The Laffer curve is often used to analyze revenue-maximizing tax pressure and to provide normative suggestions to policymakers. We suggest that although the Laffer curve provides valuable insights, revenue maximization is not the only factor guiding policymakers’ decisions in regard to the suitable tax pressure. Thus, we try to broaden the spectrum by replacing the Laffer curve with a different graphical instrument, which takes into account three key variables: the quality of public expenditure, ideology (the role of populism) and rent-seeking. By means of this new graphical instrument, we derive results that shed light on the nature of the equilibria various countries can hope to obtain, as well as on the features of the imbalances. We then extend our insights to an open-economy contest featuring tax competition. In particular, we assess when tax competition is relevant, and we investigate whether the proposed remedy–tax harmonization–is credible. It is argued that tax harmonization is inferior to cooperation and that it is in fact an intermediate step on the way towards tax centralization.

Review: Individual Outcomes

Dr. Emma Miller's book sets out to explore the current policy emphasis on outcomes for those using, those delivering and those planning services within health and social care. She sets the scene with a brief history of the establishment of the welfare state and the subsequent tensions associated with the embrace of new public management ideologies and personalisation, that have been transposed into contemporary policy initiatives.

Beyond Al-Jazeera

BEYOND AL-JAZEERA Noha Mellor, Muhammad Ayish, Nabil Dajani, and Khalil Rinnawi, Arab Media: Globalisation and Emerging Media Industries, Cambridge, Polity, 2010, 206pp; £16.99 paperback Arab Media: Globalisation and Emerging Media Industries raises prescient questions on the subject ?? how to look at the rise and expansion of various media in the Arab world alongside some long held maxims about the role of those same media outlets. Mellor et al are keen to historicize and contextualize the proliferation of media, quantifying usage and critiquing content. What comes across quite swiftly in the book is the potency of the existing argumentative framework against which new ways of understanding the production of media meaning must be measured. Tank Sabry, in his book Cultural Encounters in the Arab World writes that, Due to the external threats from Imperialism and Zionism, it was, and still is, much more fashionable for Arab intellectuals to contextualise their work on 'culture' and 'identity' within frames of nationalistic, pan-Arab and pan-Islamist discourses (p48). Thus, the assumed and comfortable endpoint for the consumption of media, the strengthening of community discourses alongside local nationalist variations of Islamic and pan-Arab fraternity, is understood by the authors of Arab Media as an obstacle to complex socio-cultural research that would instead seek to understand media production and consumption across a wide spectrum of variants: literacy levels, income, gender, sexual orientation, ideologies of modernization, and so on. Arab Media deals with the above limitations by setting itself the challenge of reading the growth and changes in Arab media 'as a direct result of the acceleration of the globalization process' (p8). The book attempts and to some extent succeeds in overcoming the limitations posed by the 'Arab intellectuals' that Sabry speaks of and to tackle openly the ideological and theoretical impasses that face the scholar of Arab media. This makes it a very useful introduction for those new to the field as it historicizes Arab media studies whilst revealing the ways in which it has developed. Arab Media certainly casts the net wide and seeks to engage with a variety of media outlets - publishing and print; the press; radio; television; cinema and the internet. The section on the humble radio is crucial to the context of wide coverage in the Arab world across class and economic divides. With many books hailing the satellite channel Al-Jazeera as enabling a more open view of the intricacies of Arab regimes and allowing the Arab world to participate in cosmopolitanism and global debates, it is significant that the authors of Arab Media have chosen to look at more rudimentary and older forms of media that serve to highlight the long history and discursive power of the dissemination of public discourse, opinion and ideology. The addition of cinema is also very welcome as it introduces an element of creative media working at the level of representation and allows for a much broader look at how a variety of media forms negotiate socio-political circumstances alongside each other. An unavoidable overarching theme of the book relates to how media is viewed and utilized by individual Arab states and how media is, in turn, conceptualized as either a welcome modernizing force propelled by local needs and articulated through indigenous routes or vilified as a force of involuntary modernization imposed by a Western hegemony (the details of which, the authors argue, are often vague). In this context, the hierarchy of media outlets is constantly renegotiated, depending on cultural and political priorities within Arab culture. So, for example, burgeoning on-line access is used to, on the one hand, celebrate the business-oriented free market qualities that the Arab world wants to be seen to be participating in. On the other hand, the internet is criticized for accelerating the erosion of nationalist solidarity and encouraging an unbridled individualism. …

Some Reflections on Tourism and Tourism Policy in India

In 1982, the Indian Government presented its first tourism policy. In retrospect one could argue that the novely of the subject, its low priority and the belief in its potential as a social engineering tool (in keeping with Indian public ideology at that time), contributed to a rather simplistic piece of work. It took the government until 2002 to present an updated policy document. Those expecting a clear line of thinking and plan must have been quite disappointed by the new policy. It is based on a number of incompatible perspectives, of which those of the international development community and the international lobby group of tourism and travel related industries (the WTTC) are the most pronounced. As a result, it starts from the idea that tourism is both a threat and an engine of growth. By means of this paper, we want to focus on some of the central ideas and starting points of the Indian tourism policy. We will argue that there is something fundamentally wrong with the public ideas concerning the economic (growth) potential of (international) tourism and the role of tourism as a development tool. We will also contend that, even after all these years of tourism development, very little is known on who the tourists in India actually are and what they want. Our reflections are based on our own experience as tour operators and travel guides in India as well as on our (limited) reading of public documents and research papers. As research scholars, our fields of specialisation lie elsewhere. Nonetheless we think that our observations could provoke a fruitful discussion on central policy issues.

Public Opinion, Royal Apologetics, and Imperial Ideology: A Political Analysis of the Portrait of David, “A Man after God’s Own Heart”

This is a historical and political analysis of the early sources about David and his kingdom in the light of its broader ancient Near Eastern context. Under the headings (1) public opinion, (2) royal apologetics, and (3) imperial ideology, it attempts to trace and contextualize the development of the political and religious propaganda that undergirded David’s rule as he negotiated the difficult transition from a commoner to a royal usurper to the conquering founder of an imperial state. It ends with a brief hint at the rich and productive theological transformation and afterlife of these imperial traditions.

Public Ideology and Political Dynamics in the United States

This article explores the role that two theoretically distinct conceptions of mass “ideology”—operational and symbolic—play in shaping policy and electoral change in the United States. I consider both types of ideology as aggregate, dynamic concepts, and find that though the public’s operational and symbolic preferences change in broadly similar ways over time, there are consequential differences in how these two types of ideology respond to the political context and in how they intersect with important political and social outcomes. Changes in the public’s operational ideology—the dominant direction of public views on specific policy matters—react systematically to changes in the policy context and are strongly predictive of both electoral outcomes and federal policy change. Changes in the public’s symbolic ideology—the proportion of citizens who identify as liberals or conservatives—are essentially unconnected to changes in policy and only modestly predictive of electoral results.

Sentencing Juvenile Offenders to Life in Prison: The Political Sociology of Juvenile Punishment

Sentencing juvenile offenders to life in prison is the most severe criminal penalty available, yet we know little about the factors that produce jurisdictional differences in the use of such sanctions. Political explanations emphasize conservative values and the strength of more conservative political parties. Threat accounts suggest that this sentence will be more likely in jurisdictions with larger minority populations. After controlling for many explanations using count models, the results show that larger numbers of juvenile life sentences are handed out in more politically conservative states with a stronger Republican Party. Findings also show that racial politics is a factor in juvenile life sentences. Those jurisdictions that have the most blacks and have judicial elections sentence the most juveniles to life terms. By highlighting the explanatory power of public ideologies, these findings support political explanations for the harshest criminal punishment directed towards juveniles.

Less is more: International intervention and the limits of external stabilization

When we discuss problems and policy options in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the way we frame the problem will likely influence resulting policy. In what had been (in-)famously termed “AfPak”, based on regional considerations for policy towards Afghanistan, Afghanistan's failed state dragging down Pakistan has become the writing on the wall. This article claims that putting both countries into a single category runs the risk of neglecting their strikingly different paths ofstate formation and societal composition. While Pakistan has a post-colonial structure, which bears part of the governance problems in its Western provinces, Afghanistan has never had internal cohesion. It merely stayed in place mimicking statehood. Rather, external meddling coupled with an interest to tap external rents dominated internal politics. While public ideology in Afghanistan remains opposed to the state, in Pakistan the state and its institutions are a source of pride, identity and (critical) involvement. While Pakistan's rivalry with India and fears of encirclement by the latter's engagement in Afghanistan has influenced Pakistan's Afghanistan policy, less international involvement might turn out to be “more”. More engagement of the population in politics is needed in Pakistan, salvaging the state by strengthening civic rights and civilianizing governance through structural reforms which end the British colonial remnants of indirect rule. In turn, letting Afghans take responsibility for their politics might raise Afghan actors’ awareness of what is at stake forthem and at the same time diminish the power of the clientelist rentier-network. Lorsque nous discutons des problèmes et des choix politiques au Pakistan et en Afghanistan, notre manière de les formuler est probablement déterminante pour les décisions politiques qui émergent de ces discussions. Dans ce qui avait été nommé « Afpak », terme désormais tristement célèbre, fondé sur des considérations régionales devant aider à définir la politique à mener en Afghanistan, unÉ tat afghan défaillant qui affaiblit le Pakistan, est devenu l’écriture sur la muraille du Livre de Daniel. Cet article affirme que classer ces deux pays dans une même catégorie fait courir le risque de négliger les différences fondamentales dans ce qui les a conduits vers leur formation et leur composition sociétale. Alors que le Pakistan a une structure post-coloniale, en partie responsable des problèmes de gouvernance dans ses provinces occidentales, l'Afghanistan n'a jamais connu de cohésion interne, et c'est à peine s'il est resté en place en parodiant un É tat. D'ailleurs, c'est plutô t l'intrusion dans les affaires extérieures qui, associée àl'exploitation de rentes extérieures, a dominé la politique intérieure du pays. Si en Afghanistan,l'opinion publique s'oppose constamment à la notion d’É tat, au Pakistan, l’É tat et ses institutions représentent pour la population une source de fierté et d'identité, et l'opportunité de s'impliquer politiquement (implication critique). Alors que la rivalité du Pakistan avec l'Inde, et les craintes d'encerclement par l'engagement de cette dernière en Afghanistan ont influencé la politique afghane du Pakistan, « moins » d'engagement international pourrait finalement signifier « plus » d'engagement : la population pakistanaise doit accroıˆtre sa participation à la politique de son pays pour sauver l’É tat en renforçant les droits civiques et en civilianisant la gouvernance avec des réformes structurelles, afin d'en finir avec le modèle colonial britannique de gestion indirecte. Quant aux Afghans, les laisser assumer leurs responsabilités en matière de politique pourrait avoir comme effet de mieux les sensibiliser à leurs propres enjeux et, simultanément,d'affaiblir le pouvoir du réseau de rentiers clientélistes.

All Together Now: Putting Congress, State Legislatures, and Individuals in a Common Ideological Space to Assess Representation at the Macro and Micro Levels

Two problems hinder the ability of scholars to assess the quality of representation of state-level public opinion by elected representatives. First, the main tool measuring ideology in public opinion has historically been self-reported, but this is now well known to be severely plagued by measurement error. Second, and far more binding, we lack a common scale on which to place both constituents and representatives. While the literature has addressed a number of methods estimating a common space for politicians' ideal points across political institutions, little work exists that incorporates citizens into this space. The unified methodology in this paper solves both problems in order to assess representation of constituents by their individual state legislators, the parties in the state legislatures, and the state legislature as a whole. Bridging is accomplished using policy preference questions from a state and congressional candidate survey administered since the early 1990s. I ask those questions in my own 2008 survey of over 4,200 citizen respondents, representative at the state and national levels. Thus, citizens and state legislators can be located on the same ideological scale. I employ multilevel regression with poststratification to model state-level public ideology and obtain aggregate opinion estimates for all 50 states and 1942 upper chamber state legislative districts. State legislators and chamber and party medians are responsive to public opinion, but they are very often incongruent to it. Democrats and Republicans diverge from district and state opinion, but in an asymmetric fashion, with Republicans considerably more distant.

Karen Brodkin and the Study of Social Movements

■ This article highlights the intellectual contributions of Karen Brodkin in the analysis of gender and social movements through drawing on some of her key concepts and ideas, joining them with others, and applying them to the specific analysis of the pluralistic social movement in Oaxaca which emerged in 2006 and continues to this day. The article’s theoretical inquiry centers on two primary questions that are followed by specific concepts explored in the analysis of the Oaxaca social movement. 1. How does collective action operate in daily life through interlinked networks? What are the leadership styles and models that may be unique to women? (center women, interlinked activist networks, meshworks, and the values and ties of daily life) 2. How do individual and collective political identities develop, shape the politics of particular social movements, and participate in performing ideological work that shifts public political discourses and perceptions? (individual and collective identity development, public political ideologies, and political presence).

A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach to 'In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation'

In this paper I apply critical legal rhetoric to the judicial opinion rendered in response to the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Second Amended and Consolidated Complaint in 'In Re African American Slave Descendants', a case concerning the efforts of a group of modern-day descendants of enslaved African-Americans to obtain redress for the harms of slavery. The chief methodological framework for performing critical legal rhetorical analysis comes from the work of Marouf Hasian, Jr. particularly his schema for analysis which he calls substantive units in critical legal rhetoric. Critical legal rhetoric is a potent tool for exposing the way in which the public ideologies of society and the private ideologies of jurists, legislators and other legal actors are manifested in legal and law-like pronouncements. After introducing this case, I briefly tracing the evolution and meaning of the term rhetoric and examine the relationship between rhetoric and law. I next explore the connection between rhetoric and ideology, which is crystallized in the form of the ideograph and its use as a tool of what is known as critical rhetoric. Finally, I show how critical legal rhetoric is achieved by bringing critical rhetoric to law, and thereafter apply critical legal rhetoric to the case of 'In Re African American Slave Descendants'.

The Emotional Underpinnings of Male Fidelity in Imperial China

Although most studies of marital fidelity in imperial China have stressed the loyalty of wives to husbands, we should not ignore the complementary phenomenon of male fidelity. The affection and faithfulness of men toward their wives were repeatedly expressed as both ideal and norm. Various media conveyed messages of male fidelity, and each genre depicts men's behavior somewhat differently. Throughout time, rich traditions of discourse on the subject emerged, and discussions of male fidelity became increasingly subtle and sophisticated. Research on male fidelity provides fresh insights into the intimate emotional bonds underpinning Chinese family relations. This is an important subject of study, because it constitutes a subjective personal side to traditional Chinese ideas about marriage that allows us to get beyond public institutions and official ideology. In addition, the beliefs surrounding male fidelity provide useful background information for understanding some of the complex motivations underpinning female chastity.

At the Invitation of the Court: Eminent Domain Reform in State Legislatures in the Wake of the Kelo Decision

The Supreme Court's 2005 Kelo decision upholding a condemnation of private property for economic development purposes sparked a wave of reform legislation in state legislatures. However, there is considerable variation in the extent to which state legislatures restricted the power of eminent domain. This article seeks to account for this variation. It tests hypotheses drawn from the literature on state responses to Supreme Court decisions and research on factors shaping state policy change in the wake of federal actions more generally. The results show support for an organized interests explanation, a need/scope of the problem explanation, and some elements of an explanation featuring institutional characteristics of the state legislature; there are mixed findings with respect to the role of public ideology.

Estimating legislators' preferences using background characteristics

This paper develops a way of thinking about and measuring private ideology by applying research on attitude formation to the measurement of political ideology. The measure, called FILTER, is widely generalizable to the study of political elites in and out of government, within and across countries. Application of this belief formation model of political ideology avoids several measurement problems that afflict commonly used action-based measures of public ideology. The method can be used to estimate the personal political preferences of politicians whose preferences are either not directly observable, or those who may be punished for making their preferences public. The method is applied to generate estimates for the 107th US Senate.

The Remaking of an American Senate: The 17th Amendment and Ideological Responsiveness

The 17th Amendment established the direct election of senators. Although scholars have discounted the Amendment as inconsequential, we argue that it significantly changed patterns of election-seeking and legislative voting behavior. First, the Amendment negated the influence of state legislatures in senators' decisions to stand for reelection, inducing more incumbents to run. Second, the Amendment introduced incentives for senators to moderate their public ideologies in pursuit of reelection. We employ a selection model to test the impact of the 17th Amendment on the interdependent decisions to stand for reelection and to shift late-term roll-call behavior. Using W-Nominate scores for major party senators serving from 1877 to 1932, we show that post-Amendment senators, particularly Republicans, were systematically more likely to moderate ideologically as elections approached.

Deliberation or Tabulation? The Self-Undermining Constitutional Architecture of Election Campaigns

Perhaps the one completely uncontested truth in the shared public ideology of American politics is that an election campaign ought to be a serious occasion in the life of a democratic polity, a time when citizens reflect maturely on the great public issues of the day. On this view, the ultimate purpose of election campaigns is to offer voters and candidates a meaningful opportunity for deliberation and persuasion. Of course, the typical modern American election campaign does not seem seriously reflective and deliberative so much as shallow and unengaging. Reasoned persuasion seems to play a minor role, if that. The paper asks whether this gulf between American political ideals and reality might have its roots in any kind of flaw in our legal institutions. Do we have, that is to say, a constitutional infrastructure well suited to summoning forth the kind of electoral politics to which we aspire? The paper pursues this question through a close institutional analysis of the federal constitutional jurisprudence of ballot access, public financing of presidential campaigns, the associational rights of political parties, and the giving and spending of money in election campaigns. This analysis reveals that although the American constitutional regime pays emphatic lip service to the ideal of reasoned persuasion in elections, its actual institutional arrangements in fact presuppose just the opposite - election campaigns that are thin rather than thick, that are aggregative rather than deliberative, that are aimed at counting political preferences, not creating them. The paper concludes by examining briefly some of the implications of this disjunction between our democratic ideals and practices for our conceptions of democratic legitimacy, our aspirations for better quality campaigns, our notions of the venues in which democratic politics is actually conducted, and some important scholarly critiques of electoral regulation.

Choirs and Split Voices: Female Identity Construction in Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Moore's novel is, in many ways, a story about growing up. The fiercely intimate friendship Moore depicts between two girls, Berie and Sils, and the effects of that friendship on Berie and Sils as adults push us to ask ourselves: is this the way all girls mature into women, or is this just the path that these particular fictional girls follow? As it happens, Moore's portrayal of female maturation closely mirrors the path Adrienne Rich and Carol Gilligan argue many, if not all, girls follow. The novel's clever narrative structure, in which a discontented middle-aged woman remembers longingly the emotionally intimate friendship of her girlhood, reveals that, at least with Berie, women who experience such intimate friendships in adolescence may feel as though the rupture of such friendships results in a rupture of their sense of self. Moore's novel encourages us to re-examine the notion of sisterhood and how female friendships affect the lives of girls and women.

Does State Political Ideology Change over Time?

Students of politics in the American states agree that political ideology varies significantly between the states. Due to the path-breaking work of Wright, Erikson and McIver (1985) and their subsequent research, there is consensus that interstate differences in public ideology are important in accounting for notable differences among the states in the policies they adopt. Despite this consensus, however, there remains a fundamental debate among state politics researchers regarding whether public ideology changes within the states in the post-WW II era. Erikson, Wright, and McIver (1993) contend that state-level ideology is mostly stable, with over-time variations representing “noise.” Alternatively, Berry, Ringquist, Fording, and Hanson (1998) argue that meaningful ideological change occurs within states over time. We test the hypothesis that ideology is stable at the state level. In addition to using the data developed by these teams of researchers, we construct an alternative data set to provide an out-of-sample test of their conflicting expectations. The results have significant implications for the study of state political processes. Systematic analysis underscores the stability and relative dominance of between-state differences indicating that the effects of ideology commonly observed in many state policy studies are due to interstate variation rather than temporal change. However, we also find note-worthy longitudinal ideological variation within selected states during the last three decades. Scholars interested in studying the causes and consequences of state-level political ideology—particularly their implications for public policy adoption and change—might profitably focus on the handful of states where survey-based measures indicate the presence of ideological change.

Quand la jeunesse entre en scene: l'Action catholique avant la Revolution tranquille (review)

Reviewed by: Quand la jeunesse entre en scène: l'Action catholique avant la Revolution tranquille Michael Gauvreau Quand la jeunesse entre en scène: l'Action catholique avant la Revolution tranquille. Louise Bienvenue. Montreal: Boreal, 2003. Pp. 291, illus. $27.95 Since the 1980s, religious history in Quebec has experienced a considerable revival of interest among historians. To date, much of this work has [End Page 852] turned upon a debate surrounding the timing and 'revolutionary' nature of changing Roman Catholic popular religious practices over the five decades extending between 1840 and 1890. Unfortunately, this historiography has either consigned twentieth-century transformations of Catholicism and their relationship to society and culture to relative obscurity, or has preferred to repeat the conventional ideology of the Quiet Revolution, in which Catholicism was synonymous with the political power wielded by a clerical caste, destined to inevitable displacement and marginalization by the growth of the modern state. However, another current of historical study, focused on the various Catholic Action movements that arose during the economic and social crisis of the 1930s, has begun to suggestively delineate a new and more dynamic intersection between Roman Catholicism and Quebec society, one that has tilted the balance away from the clerical ideologies and actions and towards laypeople. Of these recent revisionist works, Louise Bienvenue's Quand la jeunesse entre en scène is the most sophisticated and far-ranging, for unlike works such as Jean-Pierre Collin's La ligue ouvrière catholique canadienne, 1938-1954 (1996) and Lucie Piché's Femmes et changement social au Quebec: L'apport de la jeunesse ouvrière catholique féminine, 1931-1966 (2003), Bienvenue's volume is not limited to a single movement or a part of a movement, but provides a comprehensive examination of the structure of Catholic Action, as well as its content and function as a coherent public ideology over the first two decades of its existence. The particular contribution of this study to the historiography of twentieth-century Quebec lies in its attempt to intersect the history of Catholicism with a wider international debate surrounding the history of youth. As Bienvenue notes in the introduction, the tendency among historians is to view 'youth' as an anthropological constant, rather than as a constructed, always fluctuating social category, one that can be analysed by historians to reveal wider social relationships. What was significant about the church's investment in Catholic Action during the 1930s was, according to the author, the explicit construction of youth as a social identity and as a category of public space. However, the author is well aware of the ambiguities of this new Catholic message: Although the youth movements deployed a generational language of contestation to critique the inability of adults to act as authority figures, these groups never intended to abolish age hierarchies or contest parental or clerical control in the private sphere. In contrast to previous studies of Catholic Action, which have largely accepted at face value the 'apolitical' and 'anti-nationalist' tenets of these movements, Bienvenue penetrates beneath this language to suggest a far more complicated relationship that prevailed between Quebec youth and nationalism and the political sphere. [End Page 853] By the late 1940s, despite continued suspicion of manipulation by state authorities, the leaders of Catholic Action youth had largely reworked the corporatist ideology of 'intermediate' bodies standing outside of politics, to view their role as a liberal pressure group seeking to act upon government institutions and policies. Throughout this study, the author does not lose sight of the central purpose: the elaboration of a dynamic relationship between Catholicism and changing definitions of youth as a social category. Indeed, the 'modern' definition of youth identity, which we would conventionally link with the cultural revolution of the 1960s - that youth was a time of preparation outside of work, narrowly identified with teenage years and student life, and characterized by excessive individual self-expression - was in fact a key aspect of post-Second World War developments within Catholic Action. The exposure of a number of Catholic youth leaders to a new 'internationalism' led significantly to the restriction of the broad social category of 'youth' - once inclusive of everyone aged fifteen to...