Rethinking measures of democracy and welfare state universalism: Lessons from subnational research

ABSTRACT

Democracy and the welfare state are two of the most extensively studied concepts and themes in the field of comparative politics. Debate about how to best measure the two concepts has failed to contemplate the extent to which political and social rights are uniformly present across distinct regions of the national territory, despite the presence of substantial subnational research that underscores wide variation inside countries. We argue that this omission hampers our understanding of the two phenomena and we propose a new measure of democracy and healthcare universalism, which we call the Adjusted Measures of Democracy and Welfare Universalism. The new measures integrate territorial inequality into existing national-level indicators, providing a more accurate picture of country performance and opening the door to new, multi-level theory building.     

THE SEXUAL SUBALTERN IN CONVERSATIONS “SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN”: LAW AND THE OLD POLITICS OF COLONIALISM

Ratna Kapur’s recent book entitled Erotic Justice proposes a new politics of postcolonialism whereby the sexual subaltern disrupts the normative principles of the universal, liberal, legal domain. Kapur traces legal strategies regarding censorship, sex-work, homosexuality, sexual harassment, trafficking and migration which travel a treacherous path, countering allegations of ‘unIndian’ and Western practice with cultural histories of ‘authentic’ sexual legitimacies, towards a new politics of desire. Kapur frames her analysis through postcolonial feminist theory as providing a tool for feminist struggle, yet distinct from and disruptive of a liberal project of global sisterhood. This review deeply values the role of the sexual subaltern which disrupts the tenets of a linear, progressive liberalism. Drawing upon Indian feminist and Western feminist perspectives, the review considers how the distinct position of the postcolonial sexual subaltern subject informs the generic role of law as a tool constructing relations of domination regarding gender, sexuality, caste, property and religion. Kapur observes that both the West and the Hindu Right have engaged with liberal legal principles. This engagement, I argue, exposes and informs law as a historical and contemporary tool of gendered legal colonialism, for sisters to disrupt across the Western and Eastern terrains.Review of Ratna Kapur’s Erotic Justice, Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism, London: Glasshouse Press, 2005, 219 pp., ￡26, ISBN 1-90438-524-9     

Negotiating universalism in India and Latin America: Fiscal decentralization,subnational politics and social outcomes

ABSTRACT

This is the introductory paper for a special issue which focuses on an exploration of how vertical inter-governmental political and fiscal bargains and horizontal variation in political, social and economic conditions across regions contribute to or undermine the provision of inclusive and sustainable social policies at the subnational level in Latin America and India. The papers incorporate both federal, as well as decentralized unitary states, pointing to common political tensions across unitary and federal settings despite the typically greater institutionalization of regional autonomy in federal countries. Jointly, the papers examine the territorial dimension of universalism and explore, in greater and empirical detail, the causal links between fiscal transfers, social policies and outcomes, highlighting the political dynamics that shape fiscal decentralization reforms and the welfare state. This introductory essay reviews existing scholarship, and highlights the contribution of the special issue to understanding these issues beyond OECD contexts.     

The Attlee government and welfare state reforms in post-war Italian Socialism (1945–51): Between universalism and class policies

The purpose of this article is to analyse how the Italian socialist movement viewed the social reforms of the Attlee Labour government introduced just after the Second World War. The intention is to study the extent and limits of the labour influence on Italian socialism. The Labour Party made the re-founding of a new interclass social pact, a universal matter intending to meet the needs of both the working and middle classes. The Italian socialist movement monitored the Labour government’s changes with interest, assessing them from two different perspectives. The reformist wing had a better grasp of the political–ideological implications of Labour’s approach to the welfare state. Vice versa, the majority of the Italian socialists pursued a class socialism and a strong alliance with the Communist Party, rejecting the Labour social policy model. After the split of 1947, however, the two views of Italian socialism failed to develop and implement a political programme for a welfare state based on the British universalistic tendency model. The political weaknesses of Italian socialist organizations in the field of social policy contributed to the characterization of the Italian welfare state in the post-war period and fundamentally delayed its universalistic implementation, at least until the 1960s.     

妇女和发展的范式:全球性与地方性的实践张力——基于中国和坦桑尼亚实践的反思

妇女和发展的范式是西方女性主义与发展主义在建构和实践中结合而形成的,是针对发展中国家在发展中赋权的理论体系和实践框架。这一范式本身对于充分发挥妇女的能动性、提升妇女的地位有着积极的意义,但由于其在本质上存在着西方女性主义思潮和发展主义的建构性,虽然针对了发展中国家妇女的现实,但在不同的发展社会文化语境下依然出现了一系列实践困境。在中国和非洲坦桑尼亚的实践显示了这一框架与当地社会文化可能产生的不适应性。在中国,应用妇女和发展范式的干预在技术层面出现了不适应性,在结果上出现了"机会和福利异化"的现象;而在坦桑尼亚推广非国际主流妇女和发展范式的中国玉米密植增产项目,却使当地妇女提升了收入,产生了"逆向赋权"现象。这都显示出妇女和发展范式遭遇到发展中国家性别社会关系的复杂性景观。     

CULTURE AS HISTORY: ENVISIONING CHANGE ACROSS AND BEYOND “EASTERN” AND “WESTERN” CIVILIZATIONS IN THE MAY FOURTH ERA

Abstract

This essay examines an influential debate that took place during China's May Fourth era (circa 1915–1927) concerning the character of “Eastern” and “Western” civilizations. In this debate, both moderates and radicals wrestle with a growing awareness that cultures have not only a spatial existence but also a historical career, which has encouraged the development of certain institutions and attitudes and discouraged others. Spatial terms mark not only the places where knowledge circulates, but also the particular pasts-and thus futures-toward which Chinese thinkers align themselves. This way of figuring “East” and “West” enables May Fourth thinkers to do more than sort civilizational characteristics into categories of the inevitably universal and the irredeemably particular, as many commentators have assumed. It also facilitates the travel of cultural products and practices across the spatial as well as temporal boundaries originally seen to contain them.     

Imagined Races: From Environmental Determinism to Geographical Authenticity in Twentieth‐Century Argentina

This article explores how Argentine intellectuals incorporated the natural environment into their accounts of the racial, cultural and political features of the nation. In the late nineteenth century environmental determinism, based on the assumption of a cause–effect relationship between geographical and racial factors, entered Argentina through three main routes: Lamarckism, Darwinism and Spencerianism. By the mid twentieth century, however, anti‐positivist philosophies had been fully incorporated into a body of work that analysed Argentina's socio‐historical foundations. This article examines the shift that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century in how those seeking to define race incorporated the environment into their arguments. The raza was commonly taken to be synonymous with nation. Selected works by sociologist and legal scholar Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875‐1918) and by writer and ensayista Bernardo Canal Feijóo (1897‐1982) will be analysed as influential yet overlooked examples of how ‘the problem of Argentine culture’ could not be separated from the question of nature understood in terms of both physical and human geography. The goal will be to reveal, firstly, the extent to which the notion of the interior as geographical and anthropological desert deeply informed the political vision of the early national period in relation to race and nation and, secondly, how later interpretations of the nation recast American nature as a foundational element of cultural authenticity based on a sentiment of geographical belonging.     

From Subjects to Citizens: On Educational Reforms and the Demarcation of the “Israeli-Arabs”

Based on a critical analysis of the Arab educational policy, from Israel's independence in the 1970s, this article examines the pivotal role of the state in engendering the trends of Palestinianization and Israelization that arguably characterize the attitude of the Arab minority to the Israeli state. Exploring the educational reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, it shows the contingent relation between ethnicity and the state, and also, the interrelationship between the intra-Jewish and Jewish-Arab divides. Looking at the ethnicization of social relations not as a preordained upshot of primordial realities, the history of the reforms unravels the changing patterns of inclusion and exclusion that result in demarcating the Arab minority as both Israeli and Palestinian, and in constructing the oxymoronic category of “Israeli-Arabs”. Seen from the perspective of the goals for Arab and Jewish education, this category manifests the internalization of the “Arab Question” and the shift in educational policy from preclusion to incorporation, but also the limits of inclusion. These goals thus epitomize the ways in which the new discourse of meritocracy (resulting from the liberalizing of the economy and society) had determined civic equality between Arab and Jewish citizens, but equally important, the seclusion of the Arab minority from both the Jewish (ethnic) society and the Palestinian (national) collective. In this sense, I argue, neither Israelization nor Palestinianization were a matter of choice. Rather, both constitute the inevitable dual path for social and political inclusion, limited as it is.     

Legislative Committees as Uncertainty Reduction Devices in Multiparty Parliamentary Democracies

Most research on committees in multiparty legislatures in parliamentary democracies focuses on their role in solving intra-cabinet delegation problems. Using a straightforward spatial model, this article discusses how committees can also solve uncertainty problems that arise in settings characterised by unstable coalitions, weak governmental agenda control and a lack of government change. In order to explore empirically how committees solve these problems, the article focuses on the success (and later decline) over the last 30 years of the sede legislativa, a law-making procedure that formalises ‘universalism’ in Italian legislative committees. The statistical results largely confirm the theoretical expectations.     

Ubuntu as public policy in South Africa: A conceptual framework

ABSTRACT

Beginning with an overview of the origin and core elements of ubuntu, this article focuses on the idea that the analytic process required to illustrate how a social theory and a political ideal can be extracted and developed out of their constitutive elements has not been given the rigorous attention it deserves. Without such rigour it is extremely difficult to recommend a coherent conceptual framework for political action. It then suggests guidelines for policy development and implementation, confident that nuanced variations in the various understandings of ubuntu are not so fundamental as to prevent trend-data analysis and generalisation.