Suchergebnisse

This paper explains why large-scale reform of a civil-law prosecution system will be abandoned, fail, or succeed in exceptional cases, focusing on the strategic interaction between an incumbent president and prosecutors, through a comparative analysis of the South Korea and Russia cases. A civil-law prosecution system could hardly be reformed, although there were several attempts to correct the politicization of the prosecution service, in new presidential democracies. An incumbent president sometimes considers major reform against the prosecutors, but he or she tends to abandon it and seek to form alliance with them, expecting short-term political benefits under intense political competition. Moreover, although a president strongly pushes for large-scale prosecution service reform, he or she also cannot easily achieve this goal, since the prosecutors' willful initiation of criminal proceedings will cause his or her momentum to decline. Indeed, only Putin exceptionally succeeded in major reform of the prosecution system under weak political competition, among South Korean and Russian Presidents after democratization.

AbstractWhy did Korea integrate multiple health insurers into a single insurance body in 2000? This study argues that the combination of institutional frictions and reinterpretations of them led to institutional changes by reshaping coalitions of healthcare policies. This study demonstrates how the interaction between institutional mismatches and policy feedbacks caused by policy transfer distortions and actors' ideas can trigger the institutional changes. When Korean policymakers adopted the Japanese health insurance system in the 1970s and 1980s, they deliberately modify some institutional sub-components to reflect the interests of bureaucrats and dominant groups. As a result, the mismatched institutional and ideational patterns created frictions for institutional changes. The self-governance of health insurance societies has hardly been achieved in Korea and it reduced individual health insurance societies to no more than a governmental body that collected contributions. In problem-solving mechanisms, there was a weak commitment for support such as loosely institutionalized finance assistance for rural health insurance schemes since the nascent democratic regime wanted to manipulate the subsidy for political reason, with low financial burden. Due to these distorted institutional practices, the health insurance system was seen as a symbol of the social exclusion of the disadvantaged and as a malfunctioning social policy stemming from an irresponsible government. Meanwhile, by reshaping its orientations and preferences, Korean labor reinterpreted the meaning of the health insurance system and socially oriented labor movements in Korea have formed a coalition with civil movement for the health insurance reform.

AbstractThis article aims at an empirical verification of prosecutors' partisan behavior through a case study based on the Russian President Yeltsin and Putin periods. According to Gretchen Helmke's original theory of strategic defection, dependent judges may occasionally check their principal, the executive leadership, by withdrawing their support in the course of an electoral cycle. However, a modified theory of strategic defection can be readily applied to civil-law prosecutors' behavior in new presidential democracies, where several presidents dominated that office during most of their tenure but experienced prosecutorial defection in their final phase. Russia provides a textbook case for examining the modified theory in relation to prosecutors' partisan behavior against an incumbent president. Meanwhile, this paper uses within-case analysis based on a qualitative method, because the methodological approach can have more advantages in discovering whether prosecutors acted 'really' strategically when an incumbent government was outgoing in Russia, and in further explaining a pattern of prosecutors' partisan attitudes in new presidential democracies, through the modified version of Helmke's theory.

Abstract

Background
The aim of this study was to develop a new Korean Construction Job Exposure Matrix (KoConJEM) for the construction industry based on 60 occupations consolidated by the Construction Workers Mutual Aid Association.


Methods
Evaluation of the probability, intensity, and prevalence of exposure as binary (Yes/No) or four categories (1–4) to 26 hazardous agents for 60 consolidated occupations was performed by 30 industrial hygiene experts. The risk score (1 to 16) was calculated by multiplying the exposure intensity by the prevalence of exposure. The JEM was expressed on a heatmap and a web-based dashboard to facilitate comparison of exposure characteristics according to each occupation and hazardous agent. Hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was applied for identification of similar patterns in exposure characteristics of different agents across occupations.


Results
Hazardous agents evaluated as exposure is probable by at least one or more experts in all occupations included awkward posture, heat/cold, heavy lifting, and noise. The hazardous agent with exposure in the smallest number of occupations (n = 5) was asphalt fumes. The highest risk value of 16 for awkward posture was observed for almost all occupations except safety officer. The results of HCA using risk values showed that the pattern for the welding-related occupational group differed the most from that of other occupational groups.


Conclusion
The KoConJEM provides information on the probability, intensity, and prevalence of exposure to harmful factors. It might be useful in the conduct of epidemiological studies on health risk assessment of construction workers.

Abstract

Background
This study was conducted as an effort to develop a Korean construction job exposure matrix (KoConJEM) based on 60 occupations recently consolidated by the construction workers mutual aid association for use by the construction industry.


Methods
The probability, intensity, and prevalence of exposure to 26 hazardous agents for 60 consolidated occupations were evaluated as binary (Yes/No) or four categories (1 to 4) by 30 industrial hygiene experts. The score for risk was calculated by multiplying the exposure intensity by the prevalence of exposure. Fleiss' kappa for each hazardous agent and occupation was used to determine agreement among the 30 experts. The JEM was expressed on a heatmap and a web-based dashboard to facilitate comparison of factors affecting exposure according to each occupation and hazardous agent.


Results
Awkward posture, heat/cold, heavy lifting, and noise were hazardous agents regarded as exposure is probable by at least one or more experts in all occupations, while exposure to asphalt fumes was considered hazardous in the smallest number of occupations (n = 5). Based on the degree of agreement among experts, more than half of the harmful factors and most occupations showed fair to good results. The highest risk value was 16 for awkward posture for most occupations other than safety officer.


Conclusions
The KoConJEM provides information on the probability, intensity, and prevalence of exposure to harmful factors, including most occupations employing construction workers; therefore, it may be useful in the conduct of epidemiological studies on assessment of health risk for construction workers.