The courts,politics, and the ACLU

She is co-director of the Arthur Garfield Civil Liberties Program where she teaches and writes in the areas of family law, constutional law, and health law.     

The remarkable quango: Knowledge,politics, and walfare reform

This paper describes the passage of the Family Support Act of 1988 (FSA), focusing on the politics of welfare reform. It considers especially the role played by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation's assessments of experimental state programs designed to move welfare recipients out of dependency. The paper argues that those assessments were pivotal to the passage of FSA and that they demonstrate the growing potential power of policy research. It also argues that achieving that potential required conditions not often found together: timely and clearly relevant findings based on convincing research methods employed by an organization regarded as impartial, and the lucid and persistent presentation of those findings in many forms and at many forums.     

The Panglossian politics of the geoclique

ABSTRACT

Solar radiation management (SRM) – a form of geoengineering – creates a risk of ‘termination shock’. If SRM was to be stopped abruptly then temperatures could rise very rapidly with catastrophic impacts. Two prominent geoengineering researchers have recently argued that the risk of termination shock could be minimised through the adoption of ‘relatively simple’ policies. This paper shows their arguments to be premised on heroically optimistic assumptions about the prospects for global cooperation and sustained trust in an SRM deployment scenario. The paper argues that worst-case scenarios are the right place to start in thinking about the governance of SRM.     

Empire,Rifondazione Comunista,and the politics of spontaneity

Hardt and Negri's Empire has emerged as an ambitious and influential attempt to theorize some of the most pressing political concerns of our time. I examine Empire's reach into contemporary politics—a hitherto neglected aspect of its influence—by explaining how it came to be at the center of fierce debates at the last national congress of Rifondazione Comunista, a political party of the Italian left. I then develop a critique of Empire as a failed attempt to transcend the theoretical and political horizons of Marxism. While Empire presents itself as a radically new theory, it is better understood as the latest of incarnation of spontaneity, a conspicuously old orientation. Finally, I recover Lenin's critique of spontaneity, using it to make sense of some of the most peculiar ambiguities in Empire and to critique it as neither original nor adequate to face the political challenges of our time.     

Reaganism,pluralism, and the politics of pesticide regulation

A key priority of the Reagan Revolution was an attack on the system of health, safety, and environmental regulation that arose in the 1970s. This article evaluates Reagan's regulatory reforms through the lens of one particularly important case study, the regulation of pesticides. This case will be used to explore two issues: (1) an empirical question about the magnitude of policy change achieved by the Reagan administration in the area of environmental regulation; and (2) a conceptual and theoretical question about the dynamics of subgovernments or issue networks, and their relationship to policy change. The analysis reveals that while the Reagan administration has produced important changes in both policy style and substance, in comparison to the changes that occurred around 1970, they have been relatively modest. Reagan's reform efforts failed largely because the President only controls a subset of the relevant components of the policy regime. Environmental interests were strongly entrenched in regime elements beyond Reagan's immediate control - in particular Congress, the courts, and the ruling public philosophy - and were thus able to thwart many of Reagan's initiatives.     

Economics,politics, and the cycle of presidential popularity

Does the economy hold the key to the ups and downs of the popularity of American presidents? This study, which is based on quarterly data from 1961 to 1980, employs stochastic models for time series (Box-Jenkins). For inflation, though not for unemployment, the findings confirm a significant effect at a lag of one quarter. The worries of political leaders about the inflation side of macroeconomic performance appear to be justified. Nevertheless, the influence of noneconomic factors such as international events, the Vietnam War, and Watergate proves even more potent. Moreover, presidential popularity is subject to a cycle whereby each president begins his service with an unearned popularity bonus that subsequently erodes. Economic performance is not found to be responsible for this inauguration-erosion cycle, but neither are rallies, wars, or scandal.     

The politics of productivity and the politics of anti-communism: American and European labour in the Cold War

The ‘politics of productivity’, an attempt to raise levels of industrial productivity in Europe by transcending class conflict and creating a consensus in society for economic growth, was a prominent element in Marshall Plan thinking. It constituted a central focus of the European Recovery Program's labour programme administered by American trade union officials who staffed the Marshall Plan's Labor Division. This programme was initially supported by the American Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), until hostility to collective bargaining in the local business community, combined with the unwillingness of senior Marshall Plan administrators to insist on collective bargaining as the price of receiving American assistance, blighted the project. This contribution contrasts the CIO's initial support for the productivity programme with the American Federation of Labour's (AFL) more direct strategy of combating communism at the level of organization and propaganda. It concludes by describing how the competing claims of these two American labour organizations for US government funding became a significant factor in American labour's conduct of Cold War politics.