Media policy for ethnic and national minorities in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia

This chapter describes legal, institutional and professional frameworks for media policy concerning national and ethnic minorities in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It considers four models of minority media policy – the autonomous; anti-discrimination; minority protection and assimilation models – in an attempt to examine how minority access to the media can be facilitated through regulation. In particular, the author argues for greater emphasis to be placed on minority protection and anti-discrimination measures

Monitoring ethnic minorities in the Netherlands

Item does not contain fulltextThe article first summarises the history of ethnic minority policy in the Netherlands and the development of the ‘ethnic minority’ and ‘allochthonous’ categories, which are peculiar in comparative perspective in emphasising socio-economic disadvantage as a constitutive dimension of minority status and in setting the minority question within the broader Dutch political principle of ‘pillarisation’. The article then examines the use of statistics in public policy, in a context where the national census has been discontinued since 1971, focusing more specifically on the case of education, where major statistical efforts have been devoted to identifying patterns of disadvantage and integration. Finally, the article briefly examines current debates on the situation of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands in the context of growing questioning of established Dutch models of minority policy.13 p

Ethnic minority business in the uk: a review of research and policy development

Part of a series produced to support a ESRC/CRE/DTI/emda workshop on ethnic minority entrepreneurship. This paper comprised a review of research literature on ethnic minority enterprise and an overview of UK policy developments

Minority Representation and Policy Choices: The Significance of Legislator Identity.

Disadvantaged groups tend also to constitute population minorities. One consequence of this is that the policies implemented by electorally accountable governments often fail to reflect minority interests. A policy solution is to enhance the political power of minority groups as a vehicle for promoting their policy interests. This paper analyzes the success of an electoral law, which does so by reserving seats for minority groups in legislatures, in promoting minority interests. The paper develops a theoretical model of the political process to analyze the policy impact of such a law. The key theoretical assumption, that candidates cannot commit to policies, implies that identity is relevant to policy choices. The analysis identifies economic reasons why this may lead parties to never field minority candidates. In such cases the model predicts that an electoral law of political reservation will influence policies. The paper takes advantage of the existence of such a law in India to test this prediction empirically. The principal finding is that minority representation has increased transfers to minorities. This suggests that political representation is central to the design of strategies that aim at promoting minority interests. More generally, the results indicate that legislator identity influences policies, and provide some support for the contention that politicians cannot fully commit to policies.Political economy, minorities, electoral law, India, panel data.

Ethnic minority business: policy and practice review

Part of a series produced to support a ESRC/CRE/DTI/emda workshop on ethnic minority entrepreneurship. This paper identifies the key problems in addressing racism and ethnicity in extant cross-governmental policy and practice relating to entrepreneurship

Court-ordered Busing and Housing Prices: The Case of Pasadena and San Marino

In 1970, the Federal District Court ordered that no school in the Pasadena School District would be allowed to open with a “majority minority population.?To comply with this order, Pasadena began busing many of its minority students to other within-district schools with smaller minority populations. This article will examine the effect of this integration policy on housing prices, using home sales data gathered from within the Pasadena and San Marino Unified School Districts (busing was not implemented in the latter district). The results indicate that the busing policy does not have a significant effect on the house prices.

Urban Extremism

Consider two types of residents, who prefer two different values of a policy. A current majority in some city, seeking to increase the probability that it will set policy in the following period, may adopt current policies that are particularly unattractive to the minority, leading some members of the minority to emigrate. Such behavior can lead to extremist policies, to wasteful taxes, and to similar inefficiencies.

Retail Minority Shareholders and Corporate Reputation as Determinant of Dividend Policy in Australia

This paper investigates the influence of retail minority shareholders in the determination of corporate dividend policies of Australian companies. While retail investors are typically also minority shareholders and therefore perceived in academic literature to have limited influence on corporate dividend decisions, casual empiricism suggests the contrary. We hypothesise that corporate reputation serves as a device aligning managers’ incentives with retail minority shareholder interests, and that the propensity to manage for corporate reputation is positively related to the degree of retail shareholder base. We find empirical evidence of managers of Australian companies catering to the retail investors’ preference for dividends when setting dividend policy, even when they are minority shareholders, so long as the proportion of these retail shareholders relative to the total shareholder base is high. Our results are robust when controlled for the factors of size, profitability, financial leverage, signalling, agency costs and franking credits.Dividend policy, retail shareholders, minority shareholders, Australia, catering theory, corporate reputation

Government-mandated discriminatory policies

workers;discrimination;minority groups;government policy;labour market

Can State Language Policies Distort Students' Demand for Higher Education?

This paper takes advantage of a recent policy experiment in Ukraine's secondary education system to study the effect of stricter requirements for proficiency in the state language on linguistic minority students’ demand for, as well as opportunities to pursue, further studies at the university level. The reform that we consider obligated all minority students, including those studying in public schools with a full cycle of education in minority languages, to take a standardized school exit test (which is also a university entry test) in Ukrainian, the state language, thus denying them previously granted access to translated tests. Using school-level data and employing the difference-in-difference estimator we find evidence that the reform resulted in a decline in the number of subjects taken by minority students at the school exit test. There was also a notable shift in the take-up of particular subjects, with fewer exams taken by minority students in more linguistically-demanding subjects such as History, Biology, and Geography, and more exams taken in foreign languages and Math. Overall, our results suggest some distortions in the accumulation of human capital by linguistic minority students induced by the language policy.language policy, economics of minorities, education, Ukraine