Who Registers? Village Networks, Household Dynamics, and Voter Registration in Rural Uganda

Who registers to vote? Although extensive research has examined the question of who votes, our understanding of the determinants of political participation will be limited until we know who is missing from the voter register. Studying voter registration in lower-income settings is particularly challenging due to data constraints. We link the official voter register with a complete social network census of 16 villages to analyze the correlates of voter registration in rural Uganda, examining the role of individual-level attributes and social ties. We find evidence that social ties are important for explaining registration status within and across households. Village leaders—and through them, household heads—play an important role in explaining the registration status of others in the village, suggesting a diffuse process of social influence. Socioeconomic factors such as income and education do not explain registration in this setting. Together these findings suggest an alternate theory of participation is required.

The unequal commute: Comparing commuting patterns across income and racial worker subgroups

The spatial dimension of the journey-to-work has important implications for land use and development policymaking and has been widely studied. One thrust of this research is concerned with the disaggregation of workers into subgroups for understanding disparities in commute. Most of these studies, however, were limited to the disaggregation by single socioeconomic class. Hence, this research aims to examine commuting disparities across commuter subgroups stratified by two socioeconomic variables—income and race—using a visual analytics approach. By applying the doubly constrained spatial interaction model to the 2014 Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data, this research first synthesizes commuting flows for Downtown Houston workers across income-race subgroups at the tract level in Harris County, Texas, USA. It then uses bivariate choropleth mapping to visualize the spatial distributions of major Downtown Houston commuter neighborhoods by income-race classes, and significant commuting disparities are identified across income-race subgroups. The results highlight the importance of considering income and race simultaneously for commuting research. The visualization could help policymakers clearly identify the unequal commute across worker subgroups and inform policymaking.

Gender, Social Change and Urbanisation in Four North Indian Clusters

Urbanisation in India is reshaping established social and economic patterns of behaviour in ways that scholars are struggling to analyse. This article introduces this special issue presenting new empirical research on the interconnections between gender, social change and urbanisation in India. It does so by relying on a unique dataset drawn from nearly 15,000 households across four consequential urban clusters—Dhanbad, Indore, Patna and Varanasi—in North India. The collection of articles in this issue informs new inquiries into women’s employment, women’s agency and the construction and shaping of social attitudes. Specifically, the articles disentangle the practical barriers to women’s economic empowerment, measure how employment and household dynamics shape women’s agency and explore ways in which status hierarchies and variation in access to information colour women’s social attitudes and political preferences. Collectively, they demonstrate the uneven nature of gender empowerment in the shadow of an urbanising, but highly stratified economy and society.

Digital Disruption in the COVID-19 Era: The Impact on Learning and Students’ Ability to Cope with Study in an Unknown World

The COVID-19 pandemic will forever be known as a disruptive dilemma that impacted many industries in Australia. For the university sector, sudden lockdown and social distancing rules resulted in an acceleration in the provision of learning and teaching via online platforms, creating new challenges for students and educators. This project explored the ways in which an enabling course supported students through the forced transition from face-to-face classes to online learning due to the COVID-19 restrictions, and the students’ ability to adjust to the disruption caused by the pandemic. This unexpected change provided the opportunity to explore how enabling students perceived this experience and the effect it had on their ability to complete their units of study. This paper presents findings on the impact that the abrupt transition to online learning had on the students’ educational experience and on their psychological and emotional wellbeing. It was found that most students experienced increased stress due to the changes in household dynamics, responsibilities and a different learning context, yet many reported improved study and technological skills, as well as an improved awareness of their ability to cope with change.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Parenting

This chapter highlights parental behavior and household dynamics as one key set of factors that play a vital role in the regulation of development and behavior in children. It shows the benefits of using an evolutionary-developmental model and discusses fundamental points to consider when applying such a model to research. The application of Darwinian principles to domains of parenting and development provides a benefit to researchers by integrating the results of proximate-level research into a unified and interconnected framework. It also reorients within- and between-household differences in parenting as strategies molded by natural selection to maximize survival and reproduction under varied ecological circumstances. The chapter begins with a review of the theoretical foundations of evolutionary developmental psychology, followed by a brief explanation of methodological approaches used by developmentalists. It then looks at current research and future directions.

Impact of Covid-19 on Informal Sector: A Study of Women Domestic Workers in India

The COVID-19 pandemic has left severe impact on livelihood, security and health of informal sector workers, especially domestic workers, majority of whom are women. Being least organised and lacking institutional support, domestic workers are extremely vulnerable to exploitation and human rights violations, and the pandemic has aggravated the situation. Telephonic interviews were conducted with 260 domestic workers from three cities, namely Delhi, Mumbai and Kochi with focus on working conditions, livelihood and household dynamics, health scenario and state support during the pandemic. The data was substantiated with qualitative inputs from in-depth interviews conducted with 12 domestic workers across the cities. In the results, widespread job loss is reported among domestic workers during March–June 2020 along with drastically reduced income and increased workload. About 57% domestic workers reported stigma and discrimination at workplace, and 40% worked without any safety measures. Incidence of domestic violence at home, increased work burden at home, issues in access to health care, etc., were reported. The study findings point out the urgent need to have a national-level policy and state support specifically targeting women domestic workers, without which the situation of poverty, health hazards and social exclusion will continue to exist. JEL Code: J4, J46

Migration and fuel use in rural Zambia

What is the effect of migration on fuel use in rural Zambia? Opportunities to increase income can be scarce in this setting; in response, households may pursue a migration strategy to increase resources as well as to mitigate risk. Migrant remittances may make it possible for households to shift from primary reliance on firewood to charcoal, and the loss of productive labor through migration may reinforce this shift. This paper uses four waves of panel data collected as part of the Child Grant Programme in rural Zambia to examine the connection between migration and the choice of firewood or charcoal as cooking fuel and finds evidence for both mechanisms. Importantly, this paper considers migration as a process, including out as well as return migration, embedding it in the context of household dynamics generally. Empirical results suggest that while out-migration helps move households away from firewood as a fuel source, return migration moves them back, but because the former is more common, the overall effect of migration is to shift households away from primary reliance on firewood.