Caring for the elderly in the family or in the nation? Gender,women and migrant care labour in the Lega Nord

This article aims at gendering our understanding of populist radical right ideology, policy and activism in Italy. It does so by focusing on migrant care labour, which provides a strategic site for addressing the relationship between anti-immigration politics and the gendered and racialised division of work. Three arrangements and understandings of elderly care are analysed, whereby care work should be performed ‘in the family and in the nation’, ‘in the family/outside the nation’ and ‘in the nation/outside the family’. Party documents and interviews with women activists are used to show how the activists’ views and experiences partly diverge from the Lega Nord rhetoric and policy on immigration, gender and care work. The article locates populist radical right politics in the context of the international division of reproductive labour in Italy and suggests the relevance of analysing gender relations in populist radical right parties in connection with national care regimes.     

An Italian Perspective on U.S. Federal Credit Reform

The experiences of the U.S. and of Italy in government credit programs are compared by their forms of assistance as well as in budgetary and accounting aspects. Public consensus and political implications in the two countries underly the different paths and foci, offering other perspectives for consideration of the current U.S. federal credit reform efforts.     

TRANSLATING THE PROBLEMS OF THE ELDERLY INTO EFFECTIVE POLICIES: AN ANALYSIS OF FILIAL ATTITUDES

This paper examines the political implications of current decision making efforts that underpin recent cost-cutting measures of federally supported programs serving the elderly. Current policy changes that favor the private sector (e.g., shifts of the cost of care to other levels of government and to elderly individuals and their families) have also generated a renewed interest in the policy of mandating family responsibility. The paper also examines attitudes concerning filial responsibility, such as multigenerational living. The inadequacy of current policy analysis that has encouraged the disestablishment of the current long-term care system and the shifting of care costs to the private sector, especially to the individual and the family are also examined.     

THE STATES' ROLE IN HEALTH CARE COST CONTAINMENT*

Under the Social Security Act of 1935, the federal government expanded its involvement in maternal and child health care programs through grants-in-aid to state and local health departments. The Medicaid legislation of 1965 vastly enlarged federal expenditures, and state responsibilities. State performance was frequently criticized, especially in health care cost containment. Recently, the states have initiated several efforts to link cost containment and the quality of health care.     

Health Care Reform in Britain and Germany: Recasting the Political Bargain with the Medical Profession

Health care systems in the postwar period have been governed by political bargains between the state and the medical profession that have delinzated their respective powers and jurisdictions. Recent health care cost containment reforms in Britain and Germany are altering these bargains, and thereby challenge the prerogatives and autonomy of the medical profession in health policy formulation and in administration of the health care systems. But these challenges to doctors' power and autonomy vary between the two countries. Britain's 1989 “internal market” reforms attack the corporatist bargain with physicians by introducing market mechanisms into the National Health Service and, at the same time, strengthening central state control of the health care system. In Germany, on the other hand, the government's 1992 reforms only partially breached the corporatist bargain with doctors in order to strengthen rather than destroy this governance arrangement. The government has tried to curb what it views as excessive power of doctors while still allowing them a significant degree of corporatist self-governance. The reform efforts in both countries highlight some of the problems with different governance arrangements in health care systems and, more specifically, the difficulties associated with a market in health care.     

The Italian party system in transition: The end of polarised pluralism?

This article examines Giovanni Sartori's polarised pluralist model and its application to the Italian party system. It suggests a more appropriate alternative method for testing the model's applicability to present‐day Italy. This modification, far from changing the model of polarised pluralism, improves its empirical usefulness. The suggestion then is put forward that Italy, rather than being an example par excellence of polarised pluralism, as Sartorisees it, is neither characterised by increased polarisation nor by centrifugal competition. Instead, Italy today witnesses the prevalence of depolarisation and centripetal electoral competition.     

Centre parties and anti‐system oppositions in polarised systems

This article seeks to show the connection between the ‘positive’ integration of anti‐system oppositions and governmental coalitional strategies in four European polarised democracies (the French Fourth Republic, the Weimar Republic, Finland and Italy). It tests the possibility of a stabilisation of some polarised systems (Finland and Italy) through the extension of co‐operation between anti‐system oppositions and centre parties in government. The aim of this research is therefore to locate some of the factors which can halt the ‘enfeeblement of the centre’ in polarised systems, namely through the ‘conversion’ of at least part of the anti‐system oppositions into loyal or semi‐loyal ones, and the extension of the centre area of the party system.     

The Politics of Universalisation: Establishing National Health Services in Southern Europe

Italy, Portugal, Greece and Spain have enacted reform laws during the last 20 years with the intention of turning their health insurance systems into national health services. Universalisation of access to public health care was at the centre of the political debates which led to the passing of the reform laws. This article analyses the policy-making processes that allowed for such institutional change, as well as achievements and shortcomings of the implementation processes that followed. The analysis draws on the insights of the actor-centred neo-institutionalist approach in the policy sciences.     

The Necessity of Autonomy

A public ethic of care is a powerful tool for understanding and developing ethical and effective social policies. After sketching care theory and its central values and claims, this article identifies hospice programs as embodying a public ethic of care. Then, it scrutinizes the care needs and practices of terminally ill patients and families who are served by hospices. Building on this analysis, I argue that in the United States caregivers are made unduly vulnerable, and that impediments and strains to caregiving can be detrimental to the development and exercise of basic human capabilities. Accordingly, the article makes the case for a right to give care. It also concludes that public efforts to mitigate the burdens of informal caregiving are necessary to make such a right meaningful.     

Special Issue on electronic media,markets and civil society in East and Southeast Asia: Introduction

Abstract

The government of Hong Kong has been trying to reform the territory's health care financing system since the early 1990s and is finally on the verge of succeeding. The objective of this paper is to assess the reform efforts and explain the causes of repeated failures and eventual success. It will argue that the government's fortunes changed only after it abandoned the core reform goal and decided to pursue peripheral objectives. It will explain the abandonment with reference to the peculiar political system in Hong Kong that makes it difficult for the government to adopt substantial policy reforms in the face of even moderate opposition. The reason for the government's policy incapacity is the existence of liberalism in a non-democratic setting, which allows the government to neither suppress opposition nor mobilize popular support. This has been illustratively evident in its health care reforms when its proposals to improve the system's fiscal sustainability invariably met an early death because they imposed costs on employers, the population or both. The current proposal has fared better not only because it addresses a simpler peripheral problem but also because it offends almost no one and pleases many among the powerful.     

Introduction: Gender Parity and Quotas in European Politics

Since the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which clearly endorsed measures to ensure the equal participation of women in decision-making, many nations across the globe have adopted and implemented laws requiring political parties to nominate gender-balanced slates of candidates. This symposium brings together new research on the fairly recent gender quota and parity reforms in Portugal, France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain and the efforts of the European Union to promote them. In keeping with the single-case, comparative, and international gender quota literature, the articles stress the role of domestic and international actors/factors (political parties and elites, women's groups active inside and/or outside political parties, and international and European organizations) in the adoption of reforms as well as the reforms' specific provisions (placement rules and sanctions for non-compliance) and how well they fit in with the electoral system when assessing their impact. At the same time, the articles also offer intriguing insights related to the labelling of reforms as either ‘parity’ or ‘quota’ or both in different contexts, the involvement of different political parties in their adoption, and, finally, their qualitative upshots and, more specifically, their impact on citizens and elites' attitudes towards women in politics and measures to enhance it.     

Party system dynamics and the making and breaking of Italian governments

This paper explores the dynamics of the highly fluid Italian legislative party system. It uses the same theoretical approach as the paper by Laver and Kato (this issue) to explore the making and breaking of governments in Italy following electoral reform. Under office-seeking motivational assumptions, the electoral system provides incentives for parties to band together into cartels in order to fight elections, with the winning cartel forming a government coalition. Inter-electoral legislative party competition, however, within a structure of permissive rules on the formation of legislative party groups, provides incentives for at least some members of the winning cartel to defect. The facility with which legislative parties can split and combine in Italy creates a highly dynamic decisive structure underpinning the making and breaking of governments. This cannot usefully be analysed with traditional models that take parties as unitary actors and assume that the party system is essentially fixed for the entire inter-electoral period.     

Performance‐Related Pay and the Crowding Out of Motivation in the Public Sector: A Randomized Field Experiment

This article advances our understanding of the effects of monetary rewards on public employee performance and of the contingencies that may moderate these effects. In a randomized control‐group experiment with nurses working at a local health authority in Italy, performance‐related pay (PRP) had a larger effect on task performance when the rewards were kept secret than when they were disclosed. The negative interaction between PRP and visibility was stronger among participants who were exposed to direct contact with a beneficiary of their efforts, which heightened their perception of making a positive difference in other people's lives. These results are consistent with theoretical predictions that monetary incentives for activities with a prosocial impact may crowd out employee image motivation. There were no crowding‐out effects when a symbolic reward was substituted for the monetary incentive.     

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: The Family and Medical Leave Act as Retrenchment Policy

abstract This article discusses recent efforts by states to adopt paid family leave since the original passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993. In proposing their legislation, 21 of 26 states dropped the family component of the original law and, instead, reduced coverage to baby care or parental leave. I explore the potential policy implications of what appears to be a retrenchment of the FMLA, as it shifts from an emphasis on family (including care of elderly parents) to parental (baby care only). This discussion is particularly important in light of a growing aging population that will demand greater assistance from family caregivers who will most likely be in the workforce and in need of benefits such as family leave.     

Political parties and the transnational mobilisation of the emigrant vote

The relationship between political parties and voters is usually analysed in a national framework. However, the majority of states worldwide allow their emigrant citizens to have an absentee vote. This article analyses how parties confront the challenge of mobilising voters across borders. It presents an analytical framework for comparing the scope of party transnational mobilisation strategies across different electoral systems. Drawing on a contextualised qualitative analysis, the article analyses transnational electoral mobilisation of the emigrant vote in recent elections in Spain, France, Italy and Romania. The analysis shows that a cost–benefit analysis of electoral incentives explains the scope of transnational campaign efforts of many of the political parties. Yet the article also suggests locating the analysis of party strategies in the particular context of the transnational electoral field, including the high dispersion, uncertainty and volatility of the emigrant vote and the overlap between the electoral arenas among emigrants and at home.     

A Second Republic for Italy?

Radical change in the representative dimension of Italy's political system was expected to bring a transition to a 'Second Republic' in Italy. That has not happened. Nevertheless, after three consultations using the new parliamentary electoral system, studies focusing on the 'input' side of Italian politics are beginning to agree that substantial change has occurred. It is, however, too early to identify the extent of change in public administration and centre–local government relations, whilst even in parliament it is argued that consensual decision-making continued at least into the late 1990s. The impact of party system change on policy-making has thus been shown to be less direct than many expected, providing rich material for research into the relationship between institutional and policy change. Nevertheless, institutional change continues, particularly with regard to the decentralisation of government, and some studies suggest that this is the key to Italy's political transformation, rather than electoral reform or even change in the form of government. Still, the election of Italy's first right-wing majority government in 2001 may yet bring change in parliamentary practice and policy-making more generally.     

Coping with the Global Economic Crisis: The Regional Political Economy of Emergency Social Shock Absorbers in Italy

This article contributes to the debate on governing the global financial crisis, focusing on the regional governance of emergency social shock absorbers in Italy. The article seeks to make two related contributions. First, it argues that subnational governments have been the main drivers of change in labour market policies. Second, it shows that state–local governance elicited a path-altering system by ‘patching up’ a hybrid administrative structure and by ‘converting’ the traditional goals of social shock absorbers from income maintenance to welfare-to-work. The article provides qualitative evidence on the changing organizational bases of the labour markets of two large Italian regions: Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna. Evidence suggests that administrative innovation and path dependence intertwined in the governance of the global economic crisis in Italy, mitigating the entrenched distortions of labour market policies.     

The Spillover of Racialization into Health Care: How President Obama Polarized Public Opinion by Racial Attitudes and Race

This study argues that President Obama's strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, racial attitudes had a significantly larger impact on health care opinions in fall 2009 than they had in cross‐sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those reinterview surveys found health care policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these same proposals were framed as President Clinton's 1993 reform efforts. Dozens of media polls from 1993 to 1994 and from 2009 to 2010 are also pooled together to show that with African Americans overwhelmingly supportive of Obama's legislative proposals, the racial divide in health care opinions was 20 percentage points greater in 2009–10 than it was over President Clinton's plan back in 1993–94.     

未决羁押制度的比较分析

英、美、法、意、日等国家的未决羁押制度融入了法治的理性,未决羁押基本上已经成为一种制度化的刑事诉讼强制措施,并在程序与实体上均由法律加以控制,从而较大程度地防止了对羁押权的滥用,对被羁押人的人身自由等合法权利给予了较为充分的保障。相比之下,中国的未决羁押制度已经越来越凸现出诸多的根本性缺陷,制度的借鉴与重构成为司法改革之亟需。     

Health Care Reform in China: An Analysis of Development Trends and Lack of Implementation

ABSTRACT

China's health care system, under the direction of the central government, has undergone continuous reform in recent decades. Many problems have been encountered, with successive measures attempting to deal with shortcomings and failings of previous reforms. To what extent can implementation failures account for the recurring problems, and what explains these failures? The analysis adopts the theoretical lens of structural-instrumental and cultural-institutional perspectives, respectively, and draws also on recent developments in implementation theory. The historical trajectory of health reform is described, with particular reference to why health policies formulated by the central government during different periods repeatedly failed to achieve their objectives. The empirical analysis finds that structural factors, such as departmentalism and regional separation resulting in complex, overlapping horizontal and vertical actor patterns, have been a primary reason for implementation failures and suggests that they will continue to dog future reform efforts.