How Road Traffic Injuries Affect Household Welfare in Cambodia Using the Millennium Development Goals Benchmarks

This paper reveals the welfare costs of traffic injuries in Cambodia at the beginning of a decade in which greater research and resources will be focused on road safety. The results quantify how road traffic injuries affect progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) using survey data from 100 Cambodian households. The median age of the police-reported casualties was 28 years and 68 per cent were male. In terms of poverty (MDG1), injuries resulted in a 21 per cent loss of income for the 542 household residents. The poorest households, and those with a seriously injured resident, were worst affected. Primary education (MDG2) drop-out rates were eight times the province average. The gender (MDG3) income gap widened by 28 per cent, whilewomen bore 88 per cent of the burden of care for the injured. In terms of child health and mortality (MDG4), 31 per cent of respondents reported adeterioration in child health, while 24 per cent of respondents reported a deterioration in maternal health (MDG5). The households reported rates of priority diseases (MDG6) at twice the national average. Environment (MDG7) outcomes included increased wood fuel use and stagnation in improving drinking water access, with no apparent development partnership (MDG8) to address the negative welfare impacts of road traffic injury.     

Explaining Gun Deaths: Gun Control,Mental Illness,and Policymaking in the American States

Seeking to test two commonly proposed solutions to gun deaths in the United States, we examine the extent to which (1) tougher gun control laws, (2) greater access to mental health services, and (3) a combination of both approaches affect the rate of gun deaths in American states. We find that tougher gun control laws, as well as a combination of both approaches, are associated with a lower overall rate of gun deaths, and with a lower rate of nonsuicide gun deaths, while only tougher gun control laws are significantly associated with a reduction in the rate of gun-related suicides. Our findings serve as an initial guide to policymakers seeking to reduce the rate of gun deaths in their states.     

Political Science and U.S. Health Policy in the Era of the Affordable Care Act

Few laws have a profound and lasting impact on an entire political system. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), despite its incremental nature and bipartisan heritage, has been one of those remarkable landmarks. Even a decade after its passage, the political struggle is far from over, as the ACA is still facing near constant threats from the incumbent president, Congress, the courts, statehouses, attorneys general, and governors across the nation. How have political scientists responded to the continued struggle? This article provides an overview of the effects of health reform and the ACA on political science research since 2008. While political scientists have written much about the subject, coverage has been distinctly uneven within the discipline. Indeed, it has almost been entirely confined to scholars of public and health policy. Nonetheless, there have been important contributions across disciplinary fields. This article provides an overview of contributions embedded within the study of federalism, policy feedback effects, and political framing. It concludes by emphasizing the need for more engaged scholarship on health policy issues from across the entire discipline, and by highlighting other areas of study that could benefit from broader attention by political scientists.     

Trans lives in the ‘gay capital of the UK’

Recent geographical interventions have begun to question the power relations among lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people, challenging assumptions that LGBT communities have homogeneous needs or are not characterised by hierarchies of power. Such interventions have included examinations of LGBT scenes as sites of exclusion for trans people. This article augments academic explorations of trans lives by focusing on ‘the gay capital’ of the UK, Brighton & Hove, a city that is notably absent from academic discussions of gay urbanities in the UK, despite its wider acclaim. The article draws upon Count Me In Too (CMIT), a participatory action research project that seeks to progress social change for LGBT people in Brighton & Hove. Rather than focusing on LGBT scenes, the article addresses broader experiences of the city, including those relating to the city as a political entity that seeks to be ‘LGBT inclusive’ and those relating to the geographies of medical ‘treatment’ that relocate trans people outside the boundaries of the city, specifically to the gender identity clinic at Charing Cross Hospital in London. It argues that trans lives are both excluded from and inextricably linked to geographical imaginings of the ‘gay capital’, including LGBT spaces, scenes and activism, such that complex sexual and gender solidarities are simultaneously created and contested. In this way, the article recognises the paradoxes of the hopes and solidarities that co-exist – and should be held in tension – with experiences of marginalisation.     

Culture,emotional transnationalism and mental distress: family relations and well-being among Taiwanese immigrant women

Immigrant women's vulnerability to mental distress has been recognized in the literature and yet the socio-cultural causes of their distress have rarely been explored. On the basis of a case study of Taiwanese immigrants residing in Chicago, this article illustrates the dynamic contexts within which Taiwanese immigrant women's distress is produced at home and explains the social and cultural factors that engender the women's distress. In this article I argue that Taiwanese immigrant women frequently shift back and forth between Taiwanese and American cultural norms in an effort to apply effective behavioral guidance and justifications to interactions with their spouses, children and in-laws. The term ‘emotional transnationalism’ is used to describe the psychological experience associated with transnational cultural practices. Distress is often generated as these women struggle with feelings of ambivalence and contradictions that confront them in their search for cultural identities. The severity of distress is largely determined by the power hierarchies between women and those with whom they interact. Married women's status as subordinate to their in-laws creates more negative experiences than any other status.     

Renegotiating the Primary School: Children's Emotional Geographies of Sport,Exercise and Active Play

The current UK policy concern with children's health has led to primary school practices of sport, exercise and active play aimed, in particular, at constructing children's bodies as ‘healthy’. Qualitative explorations of children's own values and experiences however, reveal that their understandings of sport in school differ considerably from its potential to be healthy, instead emphasising emotional geographies of pleasure and enjoyment. This article aims to develop a better understanding of children's ability to modify and reconstitute discursive corporeal regimes through their own agency, thus highlighting the fluid nature of the primary school as an institution. Adult discourses and children's bodily challenges to these mingle and intersect, creating spaces of competing values and discourses that work to transform and renegotiate the primary school. Although this article focuses particularly on the UK context, the findings will be relevant for any country in which child obesity is of current concern for social and education policy.     

Unions,Parties, and the Politics of State Government Legacy Cost

Many American state governments have made extensive promises to pay for employees’ health care and other benefits in retirement. Currently estimated at over $1 trillion in unfunded liabilities, these other postemployment benefits (OPEB) are creating a major fiscal problem for state governments. In this article, we examine the politics of OPEB. We seek to explain the variation in the generosity of OPEB across U.S. states. We argue that party competition theories do not adequately explain the outcomes we observe. Instead, we draw on the emerging Schattschneiderian approach to the politics of public policy to show that public union strength conditions a party's incentives to represent unions’ interests. In states where public sector unions are strong, unions can find their way into either party's coalition. We find that Republicans are more responsive to public union interests than either their ideological brand or prior research would suggest. It is only in states where public employees are weak that Republicans can act unilaterally and enact their preference for less government spending. To test our theories, we carry out an empirical analysis using a newly assembled data set of per capita OPEB liabilities across 49 states.     

HEALTH OF HOME-BASED SEX WORKERS AND THEIR CHILDREN IN RURAL ANDHRA PRADESH,INDIA

This study uses secondary data from 2006 to assess the physical and mental health of rural, home-based sex workers and their young children in rural Andhra Pradesh state of India. The analyses of survey and clinical data show a high level of morbidity amongst sex worker women and their children. Women show high levels of nutritional deficiencies, anaemia, weight loss and hospitalisation. Women's mental health is particularly serious, with 92 per cent being depressed and 57 per cent having attempted suicide. The majority have experienced domestic and work-related violence, including rape. Clinical assessments of sex workers’ children show that most have received vaccinations, but almost half have parasites, dental problems and nutritional deficiencies. Both the physical and mental health of sex worker mothers are associated with the health of their children. Therefore, health interventions focusing on sex worker mothers have the potential to improve the health of their children.     

THE HEALTH OF OLDER WOMEN AFTER HIGH PARITY IN TAFT,IRAN

High parity has been hypothesised to lead to a shorter and less healthy life. Using the 2007 Taft Ageing Health and Fertility Survey consisting of 696 women aged 50–79, this paper examines the extent to which women's health in middle and older ages is affected by their childbearing histories. The results show that high parity (>8) is associated with a reduction of GP-rated health by 0.094 points on a scale from 1 to 10. These health reductions are four times as large as those of an extra year of age, and are robust to controlling for birth interval, age, area of residence, education, marital status, work history, economic satisfaction and surviving daughters. There is a positive but curvilinear relationship between shorter birth intervals (<2 years) and GP-rated health accounting for socio-demographic factors. Our analysis suggests that parity and birth intervals, along with socio-demographic characteristics, affect women's well-being in later life.     

Governing population, public health, and malaria in the early Turkish republic

In the early Turkish republic of the 1920s, population was a central question of concern for the leadership of the Kemalist state. This article focuses on how a demographic discourse concerning population – in terms both numerical and medical – provided a basis for emerging programs in public health, confronting the very real threats posed by disease. Employing the example of the nascent republic’s anti-malarial campaigns, this study thus examines the discursive, cartographic, and legislative measures employed in combating this widespread disease in the wider contexts of nation-building. In doing so, it traces one vital trajectory of the development of modern governmentality (i.e., that of public health) in the case of Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s, prior to the wartime slowing of state investments (due to national defense priorities), the post-World War II infusions of foreign aid and the incorporation of DDT in confronting malaria.