Political Geography Quarterly最新文献

This paper challenges the prevailing views that women's support of feminism is primarily a function of personal experiences which result in a transformation of political consciousness. Rather, interests deriving from family context are the more plausible motivating factors. This approach has greater explanatory power because it generalizes easily to the study of men's attitudes as well. An empirical test confirms the usefulness of the approach in explaining support of feminist goals in a sample of American men and women. The paper concludes with a discussion of the particular social or psychological mechanisms which are most likely to underlie the empirical results.

Recent research shows that certain conditions can lead to change in party attachment by individuals. This essay develops and tests three hypotheses derived from the established literature that suggest individual partisanship is unstable. These tests are arrayed in increasing order of complexity. How the length of residence affects partisanship is addressed. A second test asks if the information flow during elections contributes to change in party attachment. The third test looks at the way interaction among partisans affects partisanship. Strong instability is indicated through interaction effects not found in the other models. The consequences for vote-choice models are addressed.

While all of us exist within social networks of friends and neighbours which shapes our views of the political world, empirical substantiation of this process has been hard to find. In this introduction we discuss objections to the contextual approach and the way in which the papers in this volume address those criticisms.

The question of how individuals affect each other politically has drawn considerable interest in the social sciences for some time. Unfortunately, little in the way of a theoretical formulation of the social interaction process has been developed. Using party identification as an attitude subject to social influence, this paper evaluates the general hypothesis that individual party identification is affected by the party identification of a politically significant other, as well as specific hypotheses about the conditions that facilitate this process. Using data collected specifically for this task in South Bend, Indiana, the analyses indicate that individual partisanship responds to discussant partisanship, and that this effect is enhanced in situations of homogeneous political content, frequent discussion, and where the partisanship of the discussant is known.

This paper explores how women's employment context affects their attitudes towards the women's movement. Previous research finds a relationship between employment and gender attitudes. We examine three mechanisms which might account for this relationship: the social status of some occupations provides specific benefits which cause women to adopt more non-traditional attitudes; employment experiences such as entering the workforce and working in a non-traditional occupation increase feminist attitudes; and, the social networks and context acquired through employment alter traditional sex-role attitudes. A regression analysis of survey data from South Bend, Indiana, finds that experiences in male-dominated jobs and social networks with employed women significantly increase support for the women's movement.

By far the dominant approach in the study of religious characteristics and political behavior has been to analyze different denominations and the varying ways in which each denomination affects the political behavior of its members. Using a unique data set collected in South Bend, Indiana, during the 1984 presidential campaign, this paper replicates one such analysis (Segal and Meyer, 1974) based on neighborhood influences and further tests its major hypotheses concerning the effects of religion. This paper measures and considers the effects of church context as well as neighborhood contexts, thus addressing two questions: how does the neighborhood environment affect members of different denominations and religions; and to what extent are individuals influenced by church environments as opposed to neighborhood environments? The structure of the South Bend data allows for neighborhoods and individual churches to be utilized as the primary units of analysis, and for contextual measures to be calculated as well. The results indicate that the neighborhood environment does have differential effects for different denominations, especially in regard to partisanship, and further shows that church environments play an important role in influencing individual political behavior (voting), even after controlling for other individual-level variables. These findings strengthen the argument for considering churches and other religious institutions as significant units of political influence.

The study of constituent-congressman relations often ignores the potential importance of the social nature of the constituency itself as it may influence the relationship. It has been believed that seeking casework was almost completely associated with individual attributes. Furthermore, it was believed that social class was not an important predictor of who would write. This paper shows that social class and the class context of an individual are important contributors to whether or not a person will write to his or her congressman.

Zimbabwe's liberation struggle yielded a government publically committed to socialist transition. The plan was for ZANU-PF, the ruling party, to seize control of the state and restructure the economy as part of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. A primary transformation objective was to develop black agriculture through the establishment of producer cooperatives and state farms while increasing support to peasant farmers.

Internal and external constraints, international pressure, and a growing class alliance between the black bourgeoisie, white-settler farmers and emergent peasant producers effectively stifled prospects for radical agrarian restructuring. A conservative bi-modal agricultural strategy became the backbone of government policy. Large-scale capitalist agriculture was maintained and supported. A small-farm development effort was increasingly targeted to ‘progressive’ black farmers.

At the present time, class formation in Zimbabwe's labor reserves is accelerating. Food surpluses have not resulted in improved nutrition nationally. Historical processes of black farm marginalization—particularly in semi-arid regions and amongst unwaged households—continue. Capitalist consolidation of white-settler agriculture is accelerating the substitution of labor for capital at a time when national unemployment is skyrocketing. The capital and land resources necessary to restructure agriculture are monopolized by large-scale capitalist farmers.

The development of capitalism in Zimbabwean agriculture is generating growth but intensifying spatial and social agrarian differentiation. This is consistent with classical Marxian interpretations of the agrarian question. It is unlikely that rural Zimbabweans will experience anything resembling a socialist transition in the short-term. But numerous contradictions associated with capitalist agricultural development may ultimately create socio-economic conditions supportive of a socialist economic development strategy. Political pressures for land reform are presently intensifying.

In Zimbabwe, the struggle for control of political power and economic resources has shifted from race to class in a very short period of time.

Post 1967 Jewish settlement activities in the occupied territories are described in the light of the historical development of the Zionist settlement process, and in the light of data from a field survey conducted in August 1985. The paper considers the implications of these settlement activities for Israel's settlement structure as a whole, for the social geography of Israeli—Palestinian relations, and for previous attempts to build a theoretical framework for a study on the Israeli—Palestinian issue.