Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Recent assertions that the gendered paradox in health and mortality (that men experience higher age-specific death rates and lower life expectancies than women, while women have higher rates of sickness, worse health status and more health care consumption than men) has been explained by measurement innovations are re-examined using the same source data: multiple years of the National Health Interview Survey. Procedures that help model comorbidity structures may yield more complete measures of chronic conditions; however, in explaining the paradox, alternative explanations were largely ignored. This paper explicitly tests competing hypotheses using an array of sensitivity analyses based on: sample selection; response processes (self vs. proxy reporting); alternative morbidity measures; variable mortality follow-up periods; modeling and inference specifications; and different theoretical perspectives and interpretations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Drawing on the work of Frank Michelman and Jürgen Habermas, I outline two interconnected paradoxes of constitutional democracy. The paradox of the founding shows that a purely democratic constitution can never be founded, because the procedures needed to secure its legitimacy cannot be spontaneously self-generated. It displays an infinite regression of procedures presupposing procedures. The paradox of the Nth amendment heads off any attempt to resolve this problem through constitutional amendment. It shows that a developing constitution needs some standard to guide it towards legitimacy. Without such a standard, constitutional reform is aimlessly indeterminate. I outline a solution to these paradoxes based on the ideas of dynamic constitutionalism and reflexive citizenship. It shows how a dynamically evolving constitution can promote its own legitimacy from within, resolving both paradoxes in one stroke.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: A recent national study shows that aggregate levels of civic engagement among high school youth remain relatively high compared to previous generations, while political engagement lags. Authors conducted a large-scale community ethnography in which more than eighty high school aged youth were interviewed about the forms and meaning of their civic and community activities. The results raise questions about the deeper meaning of youth civic engagement. Current high levels of activity may be related more to achievement anxiety and college ambition generated by increasing uncertainty over life-chances than the development of moral motivation and transmission of community social capital. Minority and working-class youth were a significant, if partial, exception, exhibiting motives linked to both achievement and community development.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: No abstract available at this time.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In designing for the novel programmes characteristic of industrial society, modern architects’ exploration of modern themes heightened the critical role of the work of architecture; Critical Reconstruction, the dominant movement among Berliner architects and planners, explores these same themes, but from within the context of Berlin’s peculiar political-architectural legacy, which conduces to politicization but not critique. Modern architecture at its best, it can be argued, reflected the fragmentation and alienation of its world in the forms, materials, and functionalist orientation characteristic of it, but it unified all of these into a compelling ‘machine aesthetic’ that pointed to something beyond the troubled world of which it was a part. Critical reconstructionists adopt the formal language of the Modern Movement, as well as something of its aesthetic; but they are hostile to the revolutionary-utopian ideals cherished by the architectural avant-garde that invented the language and fashioned the aesthetic.

Critical distance boils over into outright hostility and urbanistic aggression when it comes to appropriating the spaces of the East German past, spaces that, like any other important cultural legacy , can be seen as crucial to the identity of those who survived the GDR. But this radical inclination is not carried over into the buildings that critical reconstructionists tend to build, which either seem removed from social meanings in their geometric abstractness, or eagerly highlight the affinities between the aesthetic of ‘simplicity’, ‘severity’, ‘austerity’, and so on, and the aesthetic produced by an older, far more troubled synthesis of architecture and politics.