Does Germany Need a (New) Research Ethics for the Social Sciences?

This paper evaluates the German, UK, and US approaches to dealing with research ethics in the social sciences. It focuses 1) on the extent to which these research ethic frameworks protect the key rights of research subjects and 2) the extent to to which they take into account the methodology and approaches used in social science and do not simply emulate those of the natural sciences. The U.S. approach stands for a highly regulated, and partly bureaucratic, approach where the ethics review is modeled on the methodology of natural sciences. In the UK, in contrast, a social science research ethics framework has been developed that remedies some of these shortcomings. It is implemented through pressure from funding institutions and aims to respond to the needs of social science research. The German social science ethics framework consists of non-binding codes of conduct, guidelines about good scientific practice, and ethic codes of the German professional associations and funding institutions. We find that ethical behavior in Germany is most typically understood as ethical behavior towards the peers. We recommend the establishment of a new research ethics framework for the social sciences in Germany modeled on the UK's.research ethics, good scientific practice, institutional review boards

Local-Level Accountability in a Dominant Party System

This article investigates accountability in South Africa's dominant party system by studying how the African National Congress (ANC) reacts to electoral incentives at the local level. It compares the ANC's degree of responsiveness to voters across municipalities with different levels of political competition. The analysis focuses on whether and under which conditions the ANC is more likely to renominate better quality municipal councillors. It examines the relationship between renomination as ANC municipal councillor and local government performance - as measured by voter signals, service delivery and audit outcomes. The results show that the ANC does indeed adapt its behaviour to electoral incentives. In municipalities where the ANC has larger margins of victory, performance matters little for renomination. In contrast, in municipalities with higher electoral competition, local government performance is strongly correlated with renomination. These results suggest the need to expand dominant party research to topics of voter responsiveness and sub-national behaviour

The Policies for Reducing Income Inequality and Poverty in South Africa

Trends in inequality, poverty, and redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa have received intense attention especially in terms of measuring inequality and poverty levels and the proximate causes of these levels. We review this literature and find a set of established trends. Inequality levels have increased but the face of inequality has changed with present-day inequality displaying a lessened racial make-up than under apartheid. In contrast, poverty has decreased but is still bears the strong racial makers of apartheid. The labour market continues to drive inequality. A related literature has concentrated on fiscal redistribution in South Africa after the transition, arguing that social policies are well targeted towards the poor with social grants being central in lifting people out of poverty. At the same time, these policies have not succeeded in reversing inequality trends and in providing equal opportunities for all South Africans. To bulk of paper probes this further. We use fiscal incidence analysis to show that redistribution increased slightly since 1993, that this redistribution is higher than in Latin America but far below European levels. Second, looking at spending for all social services we find a mixed picture. There has been an increase in spending since the end of apartheid on social policy and for a number of social policy items in the progressivity of this spending. At the same time, spending has not increased as a percentage of GDP and has become less progressive for social grants. Finally, we examine education policy in more detail. We find that the importance of tertiary education, as a predictor of income has increased considerably whereas individuals with low or incomplete secondary education were worse off in 2008, compared to 1993. Second, we find that state spending on education has increased since the early 1990s. The spending gap between rich and poor provinces has become much narrower but spending equality has not been reached. The academic achievements of students display high inequality, compared to international standards and there is also evidence that the capabilities of students have decreased, rather than increased, suggesting that increased spending has not translated into an increase in the quality of education provision.

Inequality Traps in South Africa: An overview and research agenda

There has been considerable eort in ascertaining with condence the trends in income inequality in South Africa. South Africa has traditionally been among the most unequal countries in the world and continues to be so. Surprisingly, levels of inequality have not decreased despite the transition to democratic rule in the 1990s; if any, they seem to have increased. There has also been considerable work on the proximate causes of these high levels of inequality on the basis of inequality decompositions (See Leibbrandt, Levinsohn and McCrary 2010, Leibbrandt. Woolard, Finn and Argent 2010, and Bhorat et al. 2009 for recent analyses). However, much less is known about the underlying causes of this high level of inequality and of its persistence.

Who votes for Islamist parties - and why?

"When parliamentary elections were held in Tunisia in late October 2014, the Islamist Ennahda party, which had won most of the votes in 2011, was defeated. This shows that if Islamist parties make no concrete improvements, the people who voted for them will punish them. Voters for Islamist parties are often described as poor and easily manipulated, people who trade their votes for the social services provided by Islamist charitable organizations. However, surveys reveal that support for Islamist parties is not primarily about patronage. Even in countries where Islamists supply social services for many people, their voters are not less educated or more often unemployed than voters for "more secular" parties. The fact that Islamist voters agree with central issues of Islamist party programmes suggests that these parties partly use content, rather than offers of selective material incentives, to mobilize voters. Whether a party wins more for clientelistic reasons or more because of its programme influences how accountable it will be to voters. Data from opinion polls show that Islamist voters' values tend to coincide with Islamist party policies, for example, conservative attitudes regarding social issues such as gender equality, the acceptance of homosexuality and the condemnation of corruption. Despite the upheavals of the "Arab Spring", in many countries Islamist parties have no particular influence on political decisions. Opinion polls conducted between 2011 and 2013 revealed that it was the group of Islamist party voters who considered politics and democracy to be most important. The authoritarian consolidation that is taking place in most Arab countries could, however, cause these voters to become alienated from institutional politics or even become radicalized." (GIGA

Does Germany need a (new) research ethics for the social sciences?

"This paper evaluates the German, UK, and US approaches to dealing with research ethics in the social sciences. It focuses 1) on the extent to which these research ethic frameworks protect the key rights of research subjects and 2) the extent to to which they take into account the methodology and approaches used in social science and do not simply emulate those of the natural sciences. The U.S. approach stands for a highly regulated, and partly bureaucratic, approach where the ethics review is modeled on the methodology of natural sciences. In the UK, in contrast, a social science research ethics framework has been developed that remedies some of these shortcomings. It is implemented through pressure from funding institutions and aims to respond to the needs of social science research. The German social science ethics framework consists of non-binding codes of conduct, guidelines about good scientific practice, and ethic codes of the German professional associations and funding institutions. We find that ethical behavior in Germany is most typically understood as ethical behavior towards the peers. We recommend the establishment of a new research ethics framework for the social sciences in Germany modeled on the UK's." [author's abstract

Health conceptions under the perspective of lay caregiver women accompanying hospitalized children

Objetiva-se apresentar e discutir uma parte dos achados de investigação realizada em um hospital escola. É um estudo qualitativo descritivo-exploratório e intervencionista junto a nove mulheres cuidadoras-leigas, acompanhantes de crianças com câncer, hospitalizadas. Os dados foram coletados por meio da técnica de grupo focal, organizados pelo software QSR Nvivo e analisados mediante análise temática. Os resultados, provenientes da problematização das concepções de saúde das participantes, apontaram para a necessidade de um (re)pensar os direitos do acompanhante e a instrumentalização dos diversos segmentos sociais, políticos e institucionais no (re)planejamento das ações em saúde, que podem ser desenvolvidas desde a formação e qualificação dos profissionais, nos contextos de atenção à saúde, assim como, também, podem ser foco de discussão em diferentes contextos da sociedade.El objetivo es presentar y discutir una parte de los resultados de una investigación realizada en un hospital escuela. Se trata de un estudio cualitativo, descriptivo exploratorio e intervencionista realizado en nueve mujeres cuidadoras, no profesionales, acompañantes de niños hospitalizados con cáncer. Los datos fueron recolectados por medio de la técnica de grupo focal, organizados por el software QSR Nvivo y analizados mediante análisis temático. Los resultados provenientes de la problematización de las concepciones de salud de las participantes, apuntaron para la necesidad de repensar los derechos del acompañante y la instrumentalización de los diversos segmentos sociales, políticos e institucionales para replantear las acciones en salud que pueden ser desarrolladas en la formación y calificación de los profesionales, dentro del contexto de la atención a la salud, así como ser foco de discusión en diferentes contextos de la sociedad.This study aims to present and discuss part of the findings of a research carried out at a teaching hospital. It is a qualitative descriptive-exploratory and interventionist study with nine lay caregiver women accompanying hospitalized children with cancer. Data were collected through the focal group technique, organized in the QSR Nvivo software and analyzed through thematic analysis. Results originated during the discussion on participants' health conceptions indicate the need to (re)think the rights of patients' companions and provide instruments to several social, political and institutional stakeholders in order to (re)plan health actions that can be developed during professionals' education and qualification in the context of health care, which can be the focus of discussion within diverse contexts of society

Female caregivers accompanying children with cancer in the hospital setting.

The possibility of having a companion is a constitutional right guaranteed to children, elderly and parturients.Independently of their stage in the life cycle, having a companion is a situation socially and culturally determinedin Brazil. This is a qualitative, descriptive-exploratory and interventionist study that aims to describe and discussthe perceptions of female caregivers of children with cancer while accompanying them at the hospital. Data werecollected through a focal group with nine women, between March and May, 2007 at a teaching hospital in PortoAlegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The thematic analyses shows the participants’ passive and kind behavior in theface of daily adversities, reflection of the power and authority conditions of the institutional objectives, so commonin health scenarios in the Brazilian reality. Emancipation could be reached through educative strategies, characterizedby information and dissemination of users’ rights as well as critical and demanding attitudes from the user whenconfronted

Poor People\u27s Beliefs and the Dynamics of Clientelism

Why do some poor people engage in clientelism whereas others do not? Why does clientelism sometimes take traditional forms and sometimes more instrumental forms? We propose a formal model of clientelism that addresses these questions focusing primarily on the citizen’s perspective. Citizens choose between supporting broad-based redistribution or engaging in clientelism. Introducing insights from social psychology, we study the interactions between citizen beliefs and values, and their political choices. Clientelism, political inefficacy, and inequality legitimation beliefs reinforce each other leading to multiple equilibria. One of these resembles traditional clientelism, with disempowered clients that legitimize social inequalities. Community connectivity breaks this reinforcement mechanism and leads to another equilibrium where clientelism takes a modern, instrumental, form. The model delivers insights on the role of citizen beliefs for their bargaining power as well as for the persistence and transformation of clientelism. We illustrate the key mechanisms with ethnographic literature on the topic

Wer wählt islamistische Parteien und warum?

Ende Oktober 2014 fanden in Tunesien Parlamentswahlen statt. Die islamistische Ennahda-Partei, die noch bei den Wahlen im Jahr 2011 die meisten Stimmen von den Wählern bekommen hatte, ist nun lediglich die zweite Kraft im Parlament. Dies zeigt, dass auch die Wähler islamistischer Parteien im Fall ausbleibender konkreter Verbesserungen diese Parteien abstrafen. Wähler islamistischer Parteien werden oft als arm und leicht manipulierbar dargestellt, die ihre Stimme gegen die sozialen Dienstleistungen islamistischer Wohlfahrtsorganisationen eintauschten. Umfragen zufolge hat die Unterstützung islamistischer Parteien primär jedoch keinen klientelistischen Charakter. Sogar in Ländern, in denen Islamisten mit sozialen Diensten viele Menschen unterstützen, sind ihre Wähler nicht weniger gebildet oder häufiger arbeitslos als Wähler anderer, etwa "säkularer" Parteien. Außerdem teilen islamistische Wähler zentrale Punkte islamistischer Parteiprogrammatik, was für ihre inhaltliche politische Mobilisierung spricht. Ob Parteien eher aus klientelistischen oder aus programmatischen Gründen gewählt werden, beeinflusst stark, in welcher Art sie ihren Wählern gegenüber rechenschaftspflichtig sind. Daten von Meinungsumfragen zeigen, dass sich die Wertvorstellungen islamistischer Wähler in vielen Punkten mit der Programmatik islamistischer Parteien decken. Dies betrifft z.B. eine konservative Einstellung in gesellschaftlichen Fragen wie der Gleichstellung der Geschlechter oder der Akzeptanz von Homosexualität und die Verurteilung von Korruption. Trotz der Umbrüche im "Arabischen Frühling" haben islamistische Parteien in vielen Ländern keinen nennenswerten Einfluss auf politische Entscheidungen. In Meinungsumfragen von 2011 bis 2013 standen die Wähler islamistischer Parteien noch für die Wählergruppe, für die Politik und Demokratie am wichtigsten waren. Die autoritäre Konsolidierung in den meisten arabischen Ländern kann jetzt zu ihrer Entfremdung von institutioneller Politik oder sogar zu Radikalisierung führen