Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is frequently labeled “charismatic,” but this aspect of his leadership has mostly escaped direct argument and analysis. The authors offer a measure of charisma and a reciprocal account of the relationship between charisma and performance evaluations. Data from a national survey of Venezuelans confirm that perceptions of Chávez’s charisma in 2007 were comparative…
In this article the author argues that politicians’ time horizons affect the differing levels of state intervention against AIDS. Using data measuring government spending, AIDS policy, and political constraints, the author tests the presumption that the leader of a country can determine a country’s level of AIDS intervention. She looks at countries in eastern and southern Africa to explore the …
This article introduces the themes of children’s rights and citizenship and surveys the authors’ contributions to this volume of The Annals. The volume marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). As the most widely ratified of all human rights covenants, adoption of the CRC represents a landmark achievement in …
The United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was a by-product of international commitments to human rights, but its history lies in the complex and contradictory developments of the twentieth century, when elevated expectations regarding the welfare of children confronted the realities of war. In the late nineteenth century, material conditions and reform efforts redefine…
This article discusses the author’s concept of multigenerational citizenship, arguing that for citizenship to be relevant for children, there needs to be a more flexible and relational approach to citizenship. Tom Paine’s theories are expanded upon, by examining the increasing acceptance, by both international and regional fora in both political and human rights, of a child’s autonomy in bringi…
After 20 years of implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), it is increasingly clear that states bear the responsibility to promote, guarantee, respect, and fulfill the realization of children’s rights by all members of the national and international communities. An initial emphasis on legal reforms to adapt national law to the CRC—absolutely necessary but not sufficien…
This article explores the ideas behind the promise of citizenship to children in Brazil. The human rights of children has become a very important issue in Brazil. This has been especially true since the inclusion of Article 227 in the 1988 Constitution referring to children’s rights and the approval of the Statute on the Child and the Adolescent in 1990, less than a year after the ratification …
This article discusses the significance of the United States’ ratification of the CRC, concluding that even if the treaty is not self-executing, ratification would make a major difference. It would enable the United States to better promote children’s rights abroad, and it would push the United States to develop its domestic law in dramatically new directions that empower children. The CRC prov…
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) emphasizes the importance of the temporal dimension of childhood and children’s need for special protection. Such protection is necessary because of their susceptibility to domination, especially intergenerational domination. The same is true for past and future generations, where such domination includes the domination of and by the current gener…
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) justifiably emphasizes welfare over participation rights of children for two reasons. First, children are by nature an at-risk population. Second, democratic citizenship rights require a minimal bundle of cognitive and emotional capacity—which may be called “political maturity”—that children, again by nature, lack. However, the CRC …
This article explores notions of the “child as citizen” and “children’s citizenship” in the context of possibilities and promises for the rights of children that are laid out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It poses the question, Can “children’s citizenship” ever be fully accomplished for and/or by children? The article begins with an examination of contemporary the…
This article is based on the assumption that the right to vote in national elections is not an essential dimension of citizenship for early adolescents as long as adolescents’ other competencies and attitudes are nurtured in their everyday settings. The article addresses the issue of children or early adolescents and their political and civic participation from three perspectives. First, it exa…
American 16- and 17-year-olds ought to be allowed to vote in state and national elections. This claim rests upon a line of argument that begins with an exegesis of legal and philosophical notions of citizenship that identify core qualities of citizenship: membership, concern for rights, and participation in society. Each of these qualities is present in rudimentary form in childhood and adolesc…
Given the host of tragic events that children experience, it is often compelling for well-intended adults to respond in a protective and charitable fashion. The child rights approach asks for more. Building on their collective experiences in the developmental and social sciences, the authors present in roughly chronological fashion a synopsis of the theoretical explorations and scientific evalu…
This article explains several core aspects of the experience of the Omar Dengo Foundation of Costa Rica in the development of the Deliberative Capabilities in School Age Children project, a set of citizenship education programs based on the conception of children as citizens and on a particular conception of the role of digital technologies in the promotion of children’s high-order skills. It a…
This study explores why South Korea’s top leadership combined a merit-based principle with region-based particularistic elements in the recruitment and promotion of career bureaucrats of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) during its industrial takeoff in the 1960s and 1970s. It also investigates how this recruitment and promotion style was emulated by business sectors as a way of secur…
Concerns about failed and fragile states have put state- and nation-building firmly on the academic and policy agenda, but the crucial role of public services in this process has remained underexplored. The 1960s and ‘70s generated a substantial set of literature that is largely missing from current writing. It identified state penetration, standardisation and accommodation as key processes in …
This article makes three linked arguments. (i) USAID's decentralisation portfolio in Uganda was launched, ironically, at precisely the time when the government was reorienting itself toward recentralisation. (ii) Because of the prevalence of dehistoricised approaches to policy, design, practice and evaluation, USAID programmers could not fully assess the contextual situation of their decentrali…
Infrastructure privatisation aimed to finance capital investment and improve efficiency, but the results have been disappointing because of the mismatch between privatisation theory and the characteristics of infrastructure and utility projects in developing countries. This article reviews the evidence and seeks to explain the results in terms of the high capital costs and low revenues that hav…
The current global financial and economic crisis has severely impaired social and economic progress throughout the world. Does this mean the end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)? This article addresses this question, considering selected theoretical and strategic issues, including new and incremental approaches, the role of governmental leadership and operational integrity and the und…