Cultural Rights and Internal Minorities: Of Pueblos and Protestants

This article considers the question: should rights extended to cultural communities to help them preserve themselves include the right to discipline dissident members who violate cultural norms? The case of the Pueblo Protestants is employed to consider two important defenses of cultural rights (revisionist liberal and cultural communitarian) that offer conflicting answers. Both are found unsatisfactory because of their implicit reliance on “cultural monism” (that is, the assumption that individuals identify with only one cultural community). An approach to defining cultural rights is then outlined that avoids this assumption and its application is illustrated with respect to the Pueblo case

The Workplace Relevance of the Liberal Arts Political Science BA and How It Might Be Enhanced: Reflections on an Exploratory Survey of the NGO Sector

Reflecting on a survey of employees of NGOs based in Ontario, Canada, the article considers two questions: How well are our BA programs preparing students for the workplace? Can we enhance workplace relevance without sacrificing our commitment to liberal education? Key findings are presented, including the BA continues to be a desired and employable degree and skills associated with it are valued; employers are not convinced that graduates with BAs necessarily possess these skills; and respondents associate their formal education with individual skills and extracurricular activities with interpersonal skills. Three strategies to enhance the workplace relevance of BA programs without sacrificing liberal education are suggested, and faculty are encouraged to think more holistically about their BA programs and what students need from them

The Opie Recordings: What’s Left to be Heard?

This chapter presents an analysis of selected recordings from the Opie Collection of Children's Games in the National Sound Archive. It contextualises them with an account of the Opies' research approach, and identifies three themes emerging from the recordings which are not found in published work by the Opies. These are: the strong rleatinoship between children's media cultures and traditional play cultures; more extensive variation of words and music in the singing games; and more extreme examples of obscene and scatological rhymes

Senioritis in repose

Media and other accounts of life after retirement suggest it to be “The Golden Years” of life, when the elderly have true leisure in the classic sense of freedom from responsibilities of work. However, like earlier time-diary studies, data from the 2003-07 Americans Time Use Project (ATUS) indicate that the great majority of seniors’ extra 20+ hours of free time is concentrated on three activities – TV, reading and rest. Only a few more hours are spent on sleep. Despite reports of increased work time among seniors, relatively few of those in Andy’s new age bracket remain in the labor force and they work fewer hours.Time use, elderly, retirement, free time, TV, aging

Liberal-Democratic States Should Privilege Parental Efforts to Instill Identities And Values

Liberal-democratic states’ commitments to equality and personal autonomy have always proven problematic with respect to state regulation of relations between parents and children. In the parental authority literature positions have varied from invoking children’s interests to argue for limitations on parental efforts to instill identities and values to invoking parental rights to justify state privileging of such efforts. This article argues that liberal-democratic states should privilege parental efforts to raise their children to share their identities and values. Its approach is distinctive in two ways: i) it engages in interdisciplinary reflection upon selected findings in psychological literature on immigrant youth, acculturation, and identity development to assess philosophical arguments about parental authority; and ii) it argues that children’s, and not parental, interests should be viewed as the primary basis for parental rights to instill identities and values. Ultimately, the article argues, parental authority to instill identities and values is justified by children’s interests in psychological wellbeing and personal autonomy

Student Use of the Internet for Research Projects: A Problem? Our Problem? What Can We Do About It?

The Internet and other electronic media have changed the way undergraduate students conduct research. The effects of this technological change on the role of the professor are still not well understood. This article reports on the findings of a recent study that evaluated the scholarly content of student citations in a political science course and tested two interventions designed to improve their quality. The study finds that these students’ use of electronic sources was not as poor as some may have assumed, and that the quality of bibliographies improved when in-class instruction was combined with academic penalties. This article reflects on the study’s findings, and offers suggestions for how instructors might encourage students to improve the quality of their research

Monetary Policy, Asset-Price Bubbles and the Zero Lower Bound

We use a simple model of a closed economy to study the recommendations of monetary policy-makers, attempting to respond optimally to an asset-price bubble whose stochastic properties they understand. We focus on the impact which the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates has on the recommendations of such policy-makers. For a given target inflation rate, we identify several different forms of `insurance' which policy-makers could potentially take out against encountering the ZLB due to the future bursting of a bubble. Even with perfect knowledge of the bubble process, however, which of these will be optimal varies from one type of bubble to another and, for certain bubbles, from one period to the next. It is therefore difficult to say whether the ZLB should cause policy-makers to operate policy more tightly or loosely than they would otherwise do, while a bubble is growing -- even after abstracting from the informational difficulties they face in practice. We also examine the implications of the ZLB for policy-makers' preferences as to their inflation target. Policy-makers who wish to avoid concerns about the ZLB should take care not to set too low a target -- especially if the neutral real interest rate is low.

Monetary Policy, Asset-price Bubbles and the Zero Lower Bound

We use a simple model of a closed economy to study the recommendations of monetary policy-makers attempting to respond optimally to an asset-price bubble whose stochastic properties they understand. We focus on the impact which the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates has on the recommendations of such policy-makers. For a given target inflation rate, we identify several different forms of ‘insurance’ which policy-makers could potentially take out against encountering the ZLB due to the future bursting of a bubble. Even with perfect knowledge of the bubble process, however, which of these will be optimal varies from one type of bubble to another and, for certain bubbles, from one period to the next. It is therefore difficult to draw general conclusions as to whether the ZLB should cause policy-makers to operate policy more tightly or loosely than otherwise, while a bubble is growing – even after abstracting from the informational difficulties they face in practice. We also examine the implications of the ZLB for policy-makers’ preferences as to their inflation target. Policy-makers who wish to avoid concerns about the ZLB should take care not to set too low a target, especially if the neutral real interest rate is low. Such policy-makers should also set a higher target inflation rate if the economy’s natural propensity to rebound from a shock to output is weak, or if output is relatively unresponsive to real interest rate settings.monetary policy; asset-price bubbles; zero lower bound