Renormalizing citizenship and life in Fortress North America

The relation between the concepts of sovereignty and citizenship are being rearticulated through what is popularly referred to as ‘Fortress North America’. The ‘War on Terror’ has amplified previously emerging shifts in governance, control and surveillance. One significant consequence is the development of increasing border harmonization schemes between the United States of America and Canada. This development has led to newly emerging technologies of citizenship in both Canada and the USA. This paper pays particular attention to the shifts that are taking place with regards to the revocation of citizenship, the creation of new categories of citizenship through programs such as ‘Nexus’ and the proposed introduction of bio‐metric ID cards in Canada and the introduction of the discourse of the ‘new normal’. Through new border harmonization programs established in the ‘Smart Border Declaration’ citizens and non‐citizens in both Canada and America will be organized, controlled and subjected to new forms of state surveillance. The discourse of the ‘new normal’ is meant to signal a shift in our expectations of daily life. Whether we are experiencing the ‘new normal’ due to disease, fear, risk, loss of faith or security, we are being called into place as subjects of this discourse. The ‘new normal’ is used in reference to the need for greater control, the expectation of greater security and surveillance of cells, microbes, bodies and society. This paper will explore the logic that is embedded within the discourse of the ‘new normal’.     

Illegal mining strengthens criminal groups in Latin America

Governments across Latin America are enhancing their efforts to tackle the lucrative business of illegal mining. They are seeking to bring small-scale miners into the formal economy and to regulate their operations, while simultaneously shutting down operations run by criminal groups.     

Beyond Unionism versus Nationalism: the Rise of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has always been a polity noted for its strong links between national identity, religion, and voting, and acute British unionist versus Irish nationalist divisions. The constitutional question of whether Northern Ireland should be part of the UK or a united Ireland dominates. Yet, recent surveys have suggested a sizeable and growing section of its electorate declares itself neither unionist nor nationalist. This development may have assisted the growth of the centrist Alliance Party, which rejects unionist and nationalist identities and claims to be neutral on Northern Ireland’s constitutional status. Alliance doubled its vote across three elections in 2019 and is now the third largest party in the region. This article examines the importance of ideological dealignment relative to other factors, such as Alliance’s opposition to Brexit, in explaining the rise of a non-binary party in a divided society.     

Worldwide experience in sales taxation: Lessons for North America

Worldwide fiscal experience over the past twenty-five years indicates steady expansion in the political and academic constituency for expenditure taxation, including indirect taxes on consumption. Retail levies have emerged as the preferred method of indirect taxation of consumption, as older, pre-retail sales taxes have proven unsuited to modern economic structures. Increasingly, reform of sales taxation has involved a shift to one particular form of tax, the European Community type of value-added tax (VAT). This consumption tax option is again a topic of policy debate in North America, particularly in Canada where a VAT was under active consideration in 1985.This paper sifts through worldwide experience with broad-based sales taxes to identify lessons for tax policy in North America both in the short and longer-run. It indicates that the reputation of such taxes as regressive instruments may have been much exaggerated, and that in any case methods are available, particularly in Canada, for resolving equity issues in sales taxation. The VAT is shown to have marginal economic and administrative advantages over single-stage federal retail taxes in both Canada and the US. However, these advantages are not nearly so significant as in European countries where the VAT was adopted there. Further, sensible debate over the merits and limitations of the VAT in North America will call for much closer scrutiny of the problems unique to this form of tax. Finally, three political issues that were not significant in Europe will likely have an important bearing on any future choices of sales tax instruments, both in the U.S. and in Canada.     

Regulating biomedicine in Europe and North America: A qualitative comparative analysis

Abstract.  This article explains the variation in policy design processes and the resulting policy-outputs of 'biopolicies' implemented within the domain of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) for eleven European and North-American countries. By applying the method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the comparison describes and defines the 'multiple conjunctural causation' to explain the divergences or similarities of ART policies in Europe and North America. The policy preferences of the actors involved in the relevant ART policy network and the institutional rules characterizing the respective polity need to be considered together in order to explain why different countries adopted similar or different ART policies. In particular, the analysis stresses the influence of party politics, the self-regulation of ART by the physicians, the mobilization of interest groups, the number of institutional arenas involved in the designing process and the nature of decision-making rules (power-sharing versus majority) on the designing processes and the resulting policies. Thus, different policy designs are linked to different designing processes, encompassing four ideal-typical decision-making modes: 'designing by non-decisions', 'designing by elites', 'designing by accommodation' and 'designing by mobilization and consultation'. These results shed new light on the challenges for developing a policy design theory that could provide a robust framework for describing and explaining policy formulation.     

冷战结束后北美的马克思主义研究

冷战结束后,北美马克思主义研究领域涌现出许多新学派.在总结苏东剧变教训的基础上,这些学派大多认为马克思主义和社会主义没有"死亡",资本主义并不是历史的终结,并对马克思主义的未来发展方向和社会主义的未来发展道路进行了积极的探索,其中以分析的马克思主义、生态主义的马克思主义和市场社会主义的相关观点最具代表性.     

Beyond sticks and stones: Human capital enhancement efforts in response to violent crime in Latin America

Violent crime has been commonplace in Latin America over the past decades. While existing research has made progress in explaining the rationale and outcomes of government coercive strategies against crime, it has overlooked the non‐coercive strategies implemented to improve public security. It is argued in this article that political authorities make human capital enhancement efforts to shape actors’ incentives about criminal activity and mitigate crime. Accordingly, it is hypothesised that violent crime increases human capital enhancement efforts, and that the effect of violent crime on human capital enhancement efforts is larger when left‐oriented governments are in power because they stress actors’ motivations over windows of opportunities as the main drivers of crime. Support for these hypotheses is found in a sample of Latin American democracies in the period 1990–2007.     

Quality Is Job One: Professional and Volunteer Voter Mobilization Calls

Campaigns rely upon both paid and volunteer phone calls to mobilize voters. Past field experiments show calls from volunteers to increase turnout and paid calls to be wholly ineffective. This article argues that the quality of phone calls rather than the presence or absence of a payroll explains this regularity. Three aspects of quality are considered: monitoring pace and interactivity, timing, and message. A fully randomized field experiment with over 100,000 subjects comparing professional and volunteer phone banks simultaneously was conducted during the 2002 congressional elections to test this hypothesis. The experiment discovers precisely the opposite relationship of prior research: effective professional phone banks and inefficient volunteer phone calls. The experiment also finds substantial temporal decay. The specific messages appear less important than tone or timing. The implications for the role of campaign consultants, replacing social capital, voter psychology, and the capacities of civic organizations are discussed.