Politics,Prisons, and Law Enforcement: An Examination of the Emergence of “Law and Order” Politics in Texas

This article examines the rise of “law and order” politics in Texas, providing an in‐depth archival case study of changes in prison policy in a Southern state during the pivotal period when many U.S. states turned to mass incarceration. It brings attention to the important role an insurgent Republican governor and law enforcement officials played in shaping crime policy. Law enforcement's role is considered within a broader examination of political strategy during a period of intense socioeconomic volatility. The findings suggest that within particular political contexts, especially those with low levels of political participation, law enforcement agents might play a key role in shaping punishment.     

PARTISAN POLITICS,ELECTORAL COMPETITION AND IMPRISONMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF STATES OVER TIME*

The now well‐documented explosion in prison populations over the last 30 years has spurred significant attention in the literature. Early research focused primarily on economic explanations. More recently it has focused on political explanations of prison growth. Here we extend research on political explanations of imprisonment by drawing on the literature on state politics and public policy. We argue that the effect of partisan politics on punishment is conditional on how much electoral competition legislators face. We test this hypothesis using annual state level data on imprisonment from 1978 to 1996. Our findings show that the effect of Republican state legislative strength on prison admissions depends on time and the level of competition in state legislative elections. We argue that these findings suggest the need for a more nuanced understanding of the link between partisan U.S. politics and imprisonment.     

Law's Allure and an Interbranch Perspective on Law and Politics

This essay views Gordon Silverstein's book Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics (2009) from the perspective of the burgeoning interbranch literature on law and courts, which seeks to place judicial decision making within the context of ongoing political and policy-making processes. It argues that Law's Allure reflects the strengths and weaknesses of this literature. On the plus side, it compellingly reinterprets the concept of legal precedent in political terms, showing how the content of judicial decisions serves as an iterative framing mechanism within and across various policy areas. On the downside, it struggles to provide a rigorous framework for analyzing the risks of the juridification of American politics. Despite any weaknesses, its attempt to map different pathways of legalistic court-based policy development in diverse settings represents a useful step for those interested in bringing the study of law and courts back into the core of analyzing American politics and policy making.     

Presidential Candidates and State Crime: Views of Some U.S. College Students

This is a preliminary investigation of hawkish public opinion, understood as criminogenic in that it provides political support for state crimes of aggressive militarism. Our critical criminology approach treats public support for, or acceptance of, state aggression as part of criminogenic political culture. Despite growing interest among critical criminologists in broader perspectives on state crime and the politics of culture, there has been no work on this topic. Our survey of 53 criminal justice students at a liberal arts college finds both hawkish (militarist) and dovish (peaceful) beliefs and preferences regarding U.S. policy and the two major 2008 presidential candidates, Obama and McCain. We investigate whether authoritarianism helps explain hawkish opinions, but find little evidence for that expectation. We find evidence of respondent underestimation of the hawkishness of U.S. politics. We also find extensive evidence of dovish policy preferences, such as approval of diplomacy, a major attraction to Obama.     

Political Liberalism and Political Embeddedness: Understanding Politics in the Work of Chinese Criminal Defense Lawyers

This article examines the meanings of politics in everyday legal practice using the case of Chinese criminal defense lawyers. Based on 194 in‐depth interviews with criminal defense lawyers and other informants in 22 cities across China, we argue that lawyers’ everyday politics have two faces: on the one hand, lawyers potentially can challenge state power, protect citizen rights, and pursue proceduralism in their daily work; on the other hand, they often have to rely on political connections with state agencies to protect themselves and to solve problems in their legal practice. The double meanings of politics—namely, political liberalism and political embeddedness—explain the complex motivations and coping tactics that are frequently found in Chinese lawyers’ everyday work. Our data show that the Chinese criminal defense bar is differentiated along these two meanings of politics into five clusters of lawyers: progressive elites, pragmatic brokers, notable activists, grassroots activists, and routine practitioners. They also suggest that a principal manifestation of political lawyering is not merely short‐term mobilization or revolutionary struggle against arbitrary state power, but also an incremental everyday process that often involves sophisticated tactics to manage interests that often conflict.     

法院政治功能的学理疏释

现代的法院制度与古代的相比,其区别主要不在于法院纯司法功能的变化,而在于司法与政治关系发生了实质性的嬗变。法院作为国家政治权力架构中的重要一环、法治得以实现的基本机关、民主制度的维持者与裁决者以及人民的法院,就必然要与政治发生关系,具有相应的政治功能,从而在权力分立的政治架构中,通过个案的审理与相关政治行为的判定,发挥着制约其他国家权力,规范权力运行秩序并维护宪政制度的功效。     

Movement Litigation and Unilateral Disarmament: Abortion and the Right to Die

Detractors have long criticized the use of courts to achieve social change because judicial victories tend to provoke counterproductive political backlashes. Backlash arguments typically assert or imply that if movement litigators had relied on democratic rather than judicial politics, their policy victories would have been better insulated from opposition. We argue that these accounts wrongly assume that the unilateral decision by a group of movement advocates to eschew litigation will lead to a reduced role for courts in resolving the relevant policy and political conflicts. To the contrary, such decisions will often result in a policy field with judges every bit as active, but with the legal challenges initiated and framed by the advocates' opponents. We document this claim and explore its implications for constitutional politics via a counterfactual thought experiment rooted in historical case studies of litigation involving abortion and the right to die.     

Street politics in Damascus: Kinship and other social categories as bases of political action, 1830–1841

The study examines popular politics in Damascus during the 1830s with a focus on kinship and other social categories that served as bases for political action. It is based on a close reading of one text, an anonymous Arabic chronicle known as ‘Historical Memoirs’ (Mudhakkirāt tārīkhiyya), which is analysed as a repertoire of contemporary social and political concepts. This analysis reveals an ideology of ‘localist’ resistance against the centralising state and its ‘loyalist’ allies in Damascus. Kinship played an important role in this struggle on the social plane (e.g. by using family networks for political ends) as well as on the cultural plane (e.g. through the use of kinship metaphors or through criticism of kinship ties in politics). It is concluded that the function of kinship in Damascene politics can only be understood in the context of other social categories such as factionalism, religious affiliation, class and ethnicity.     

The political management of managed care: explaining variations in state health maintenance organization regulations

In the 1990s, strong incentives for managed care organizations to control costs, once regarded as a fortuitous confluence of interests, came to be seen as antithetical to consumers' interests in quality of care. In response to this change in political climate, many states have greatly increased their regulatory control of managed care organizations since the mid-1990s. This activity is surprising in an era when public policy on health care issues is usually described as frozen, gridlocked, and/or stalemated as a result of intense activity on the part of organized interests. We take advantage of the variation in state regulations of health maintenance organizations (HMOs) to discover why some governments are able to address policy problems that are often perceived as intractable in a political if not in a true policy sense. From the history of HMOs, the backlash against managed care, and state responses to that backlash, we first extract a number of hypotheses about state regulatory activity. We then test these hypotheses with data on regulatory adoptions by states during the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Last, we discuss the findings with special attention to the role of politics in health care.     

Public Expectations of State Legislators

When members of Congress neglect the needs of their districts or vote contrary to the wishes of their constituents, their public approval suffers. Does the same hold true for representatives at the state level? Using experiments, I explore whether people dole out similar rewards and penalties to state legislators and members of Congress for their successes and shortfalls in representing constituents. I find that a similar model of political accountability travels from national politics to state politics. People value policy representation, casework, and attention to the district as much from state legislators as they do from members of Congress.     

Hidden convergence: toward a historical comparison of U.S. and U.K. health policy

The social science literature on the comparative history of the welfare state offers conflicting accounts of the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. At first blush, the comparative history of health care policy in the United States and the United Kingdom seems to affirm the dominant view that the U.S. and U.K. welfare states have diverged substantially during the twentieth century. A comparison of U.S. and U.K. health policy, however, suggests that there are more parallels and points of tangency between the two systems than are readily apparent. The comparative history of health policy over the past century reveals common political and policy challenges and frequent interchanges of policy ideas, and helps uncover the political dynamics behind the development of health policy in the two countries, which can, in turn, help illuminate the contemporary politics of reform in both countries.     

The politics of discretionary Medicaid spending, 1980-1993

Why do some states choose to spend more than four times as much as others to provide health care to the disadvantaged? Political scientists who have traditionally explored this question by analyzing trends in overall Medicaid expenditures lumped states' discretionary spending in with other money that states are mandated to spend. Analyses of total expenditures found that socioeconomic factors drove spending but that party control of state legislatures made no difference in health policy making. By isolating discretionary state Medicaid expenditures from total spending figures, I reexamine the influences of political as well as economic and demographic factors. The often-doubted importance of party control becomes clear. This study investigates spending patterns in the discretionary portions of state Medicaid programs in forty-six states from 1980 to 1993 and analyzes both incremental program changes and absolute differences in state spending. To discover how greatly the researcher's choice of dependent variables can affect results, optional spending is separated from total spending levels and the variation is modeled in both. Focusing not on the spending that the federal government requires of state officials but on the policies that state officials actually choose allows a balanced exploration of both political and economic effects on welfare expenditures. This research also provides new insights about which forces will shape policy decisions if more and more control of the public health care system is devolved to the states.     

马克思政治起源思想的黑格尔主义来源及其早期论述

在批判和继承黑格尔政治哲学思想的基础上,马克思提出了社会个人主义的人学方法。在此基础上,马克思认为,现实的社会个人是政治(国家)的逻辑起点;政治是人的社会性和政治性的体现与对象化,政治是人的社会存在与活动方式;根源于人的社会本性和政治本性的政治是社会政治,政治国家(即国家政治)的形成就是对社会政治的扬弃。     

A systematic justification for the EU's pouvoir constituant mixte: Principles of constitutional politics in supranational polities

This article presents a rational reconstruction of the practice of constitutional politics in supranational polities. In doing so, it seeks to refocus the ongoing debate about constituent power in the EU on the question of who, under what conditions, is entitled to decide on the EU constitutional order. The analysis leads to a number of principles of democratic legitimacy, which include the political autonomy of the members of the state demoi as well as the political autonomy of the members of a cross‐border demos. In explicating these parallel entitlements to political autonomy, I provide a systematic justification for the notion of a pouvoir constituant mixte, according to which the citizens should take control of EU constitutional politics in two roles: as European citizens and as Member State citizens.     

Purchasing power: business and health policy change in Massachusetts

As in many states around the country, health care costs in Massachusetts had risen to an unprecedented proportion of the state budget by the early 1980s. State health policymakers realized that dramatic changes were needed in the political process to break provider control over health policy decisions. This paper presents a case study of policy change in Massachusetts between 1982 and 1988. State officials formulated a strategy to mobilize corporate interests, which were already awakening to the problems of high health care costs, as a countervailing power to the political monopoly of provider interests. Once mobilized, business interests became organized politically and even became dominant at times, controlling both the policy agenda and its process. Ultimately, business came to be viewed as a permanent part of the coalitions and commissions that helped formulate state health policy. Although initially allied with provider interests, business eventually forged a stronger alliance with the state, an alliance that has the potential to force structural change in health care politics in Massachusetts for years to come. The paper raises questions about the consequences of such alliances between public and private power for both the content and the process of health policymaking at the state level.     

Child abuse and neglect:A National Summary Of State Statutes

Effective court improvements must be based on comprehensive, baseline analysis of state child abuse and neglect statutes. This information will provide policy makers with improved tracking and evaluation opportunities as significant statutory changes are contemplated in pending federal initiatives and state court improvement activities. This article provides excerpts of a comprehensive national study undertaken to determine the level of uniformity or variance in statutes since the initiation of federal legislation attempting to improve state practice in the handling of child abuse and neglect cases. The state-by-state information is designed to provide diverse jurisdictions with an opportunity for comparative statutory analysis. The complete, 50 state Matrix of State Statutes Pertaining to Child Abuse, Neglect and Dependency is scheduled for publication later this year.     

论政治运行中的人伦关系与道德基础

政治的静态结构如组织、制度、法律、政策等,是政治过程的物质载体,同时也是政治运行的客观基础.但是,政治的原理及其结构安排既基于政治之基本要素即“人”的现实基础,同时也正是因为其“人”的要素而被赋予了复杂的意义.这其中,关于政治过程中人伦关系与道德基础就是一个不可忽略的因素.一定社会的人伦关系和道德基础孕育着一定的政治行为主体,使其在政治行为中不可避免地打上其人伦关系和道德基础的烙印;由此,现代的政治结构和政治规则,也必须以既定的道德基础和人伦关系为依据.以积极的取向充分发挥道德基础和人伦关系在现代政治中的作用,对于政治的稳定和发展具有积极的意义.     

Obesity, courts, and the new politics of public health

Health care politics are changing. They increasingly focus not on avowedly public projects (such as building the health care infrastructure) but on regulating private behavior. Examples include tobacco, obesity, abortion, drug abuse, the right to die, and even a patient's relationship with his or her managed care organization. Regulating private behavior introduces a distinctive policy process; it alters the way we introduce (or frame) political issues and shifts many important decisions from the legislatures to the courts. In this article, we illustrate the politics of private regulation by following a dramatic case, obesity, through the political process. We describe how obesity evolved from a private matter to a political issue. We then assess how different political institutions have responded and conclude that courts will continue to take the leading role.     

The Mutation of International Law in Contemporary Constitutions: Thinking Sociologically about Political Constitutionalism

This article proposes a sociological critique of theories of political constitutionalism, which distinguish sharply between political and judicial constitutionalism and express hostility towards constitutions allowing extensive judicial control of legislation. It argues that such theories are usually undermined by a sociologically deficient account of politics. As an alternative, this article proposes a theory of politics based in a model of systemic inclusion. Using this perspective, it claims that constitutions with a strong judicial emphasis, especially where judicial functions are supported by international norms, have served, in many societies, as an effective precondition for the emergence and persistence of a relatively secure, differentiated political domain. These claims are exemplified through analysis of recent constitution‐making experiments in Russia, Kenya and Bolivia.