Equal Employment Policy in Germany: Limited Results and Prospects for Reform

This article contributes to feminist debates on equal employment policy in Germany by pointing out the shortcomings of current German equal employment policy in the private sector and by suggesting a new approach to shore‐up the gaps of current policy. The first section of the article critically assesses existing legislation and the voluntary regulation of gender equality in the private sector by the social partners. The second section addresses prospects for reform and discusses a new approach to gender equality in the workplace. The article concludes with suggestions for a more effective equal opportunity law as a crucial part of a labor policy that includes issues of gender equality.     

Symbolic reform in France: Egalite professionnelle during the Mitterrand years

This article examines the 1983 égalité professionnelle law adopted under the Socialist government. Using a policy process approach, the analysis shows how the 1983 law failed to go beyond symbolic reform in policy formulation and implementation. In symbolic policy the outcome fails both to effectively reallocate resources and to generate policy feedback. The article concludes that while symbolic policy in the case of égalité professionnelle brought public attention to problems of gender discrimination in employment it failed to generate a permanent policy community, inside and outside of government, interested in the enforcement of programmes from the 1983 law.     

我国大学毕业生平等就业保障研究

伴随我国经济社会的转型与发展,大学毕业生"就业难"已经成为一个备受关注的社会问题。在大学毕业生"就业难"的各种深层次原因中,不平等就业违背了不歧视的法律原则,是大学毕业生"就业难"的根源。保障大学毕业生平等就业,是有效促进大学毕业生就业的关键,主要措施包括从需求、供给和匹配三个方面完善大学毕业生平等就业的保障制度。     

Europeanization and Domestic Employment Policy Change: Conceptual and Methodological Background

The article deals with the differential domestic employment policy adaptation to the European Employment Strategy that occurred over the past years in two European countries—Italy and France. Building on the Europeanization and welfare state change literature, the contribution operationalizes the “goodness of fit” hypothesis and develops a “policy structure” approach for the analysis of domestic employment policy change. The main argument is that domestic adaptation to the European Union depends primarily on the preferences of key institutional and social actors, and not on the specific design of domestic institutions. More in general, the article not only supports the validity of the misfit hypothesis but also shows how the nature and intensity of domestic preferences do explain differential patterns of adaptation to Europe (policy transformation in the Italian case, policy adjustment in the French case) in similar conditions of policy “misfit.”     

Assessing Material and Symbolic Variations in Punctuated Equilibrium and Public Policy Output Patterns

Numerous researchers have confirmed sharp and punctuated policy change. Newer findings in U.S. forest policy in the Pacific Northwest and U.S. state tobacco policy have found largely nonpunctuated changes. What are the implications for punctuated equilibrium theory? U.S. state tobacco policy‐making from 1990 to 2006 indicates a wide variety of nonpunctuated policy output patterns including: linear and constant, gently oscillating and increasing, linear and increasing, and linear and constant and then nonexponentially increasing. All nonpunctuated policies resulted in symbolic policy output change except state tobacco licensing, higher tobacco taxes, and enactment of clean indoor air legislation, which resulted in partially material and partially symbolic policy output change. Emerging from this research is a new public policy model based on social policy realism. Public policy output change can be quite complex, sometimes punctuated and sometimes not, reflecting the balance of power between sometimes competing and cooperating interest groups.     

Actively Cultivating Policy Similarity. A Regional Strategy in Education Policy in France and Germany

Regionalization processes across Western Europe have triggered analyses of regional policy divergence. Yet, in a number of cases, regional governments appear to have deliberately strived to achieve policy conformity. Previous research tends to emphasize exogenous explanations of regional policy convergence. In contrast, this paper addresses the issue of regional policy convergence by focusing on endogenous explanatory factors. Its objective is to carry out an investigation of when, how, and with what effect a ‘desire for conformity’ arises, and contends that regional governments may actively cultivate policy similarity as a strategy to develop or secure their policy capacity. Specifically, the paper argues that the adoption of this strategy is contingent upon two requirements that may or may not be met, and that its outcome is the convergence on targeted dimensions of regional policies. The two requirements are: (i) a countrywide public preference for policy uniformity in the policy area of concern, and (ii) the presence of a threat posed to regional policy capacity by various political entrepreneurs, including the central state, who blame regions for providing divergent policies on particular dimensions. This paper is based on the comparison of two case studies where regional governments deliberately pursued policy conformity on targeted dimensions of their education policy: school-building policy in France and curricula policy in Germany. The two case studies also present dissimilar features that make it possible to investigate the effects of institutional setting and policy distribution on the adoption and operation of the active-cultivation-of-policy-similarity strategy.     

Economic Elites and Support for Housing Affordability Policy: How a Housing-Health Belief Matters

Political Behavior - To investigate economic elites’ housing policy preferences and test the attitudinal, contextual, political, and economic conditions that drive support for affordable...     

Farm Conflict in France and the Europeanisation of Agricultural Policy

This article investigates farm conflict in France from 1958 to the present in relation to the dynamics of Europeanisation. The framework emphasises how institutions shape farm conflict by mediating market forces, structuring the political opportunities of contending groups and shaping their world views. The analysis investigates the relationship between institutional politics and contentious politics at three junctures of the development of the CAP: its formation (1958-69), consolidation (1970-87), and reform (1988 to present). The findings suggest that European institutions have played a significant role in the production and transformation of farm conflict in France.     

湖南就业问题与税收政策探讨

近年来,湖南就业形势总体趋好,就业规模不断扩大,就业结构趋于完善,企业自主经营、个人自主就业机制逐步形成.但同时也面临着劳动力供求矛盾突出,就业需求增长放缓,农村人口比例居高不下,就业困难群体持续增加等问题.湖南省实施就业税收优惠政策已经取得了一些成效,为进一步完善促进就业的税收政策,扩大就业和再就业,我们要调整和完善现行税收政策,发展民营经济和中小企业、鼓励第三产业发展以及实行城乡统一劳动力市场等.     

混合型监管：政策工具视野下的中国药品安全监管

在当代中国,社会性监管正在被越来越多地运用到公共卫生、生产安全和环境保护等公共治理过程.以药品安全监管为个案,结合西方社会性监管的有关理论,从建章立制、设立标准、建立奖惩机制以及优化执行系统四个政策工具角度,对当代中国药品安全监管的政策过程进行分析,结果表明,由于受到社会治理模式转型的影响,中国药品安全监管模式可以被界定为"混合型监管".一方面,中国的药品安全监管政策在形式上已经具有了一些现代监管型政府的特点,例如建章立制、设立标准,并综合运用经济、法律和行政等手段;另一方面,却在许多方面仍然带有许多前监管型政府特征,而这些特征大都是计划经济时代的产物.虽然监管型政府正在逐渐取代全能型政府而成为未来中国政府可能的治理模式,但是从政策分析的角度来看,监管型政府的建设在中国并不是一蹴而就的.建设一个高效的现代监管型政府,仍然是市场经济时代下中国国家政权建设过程中的重要目标.     

Equal citizenship,neutrality, and democracy: a reply to critics of Equal Recognition

The commentators in this Special Issue raise questions about a number of aspects of the book. One group of critics questions the book’s overall normative strategy, asking whether too much weight is placed on the idea of neutrality. A second group raises doubts about the account of neutrality itself. A third zeroes in on the book’s discussion of language rights. And a fourth group is critical of the book’s assumptions about democracy, and about its relevance to public policy disputes. In this reply, I seek to address each of these clusters of concerns. In some places, I suggest, my commentators have misunderstood my position. In other places, I argue, they have not sufficiently thought through the implications of their alternatives to that position.     

残疾人就业问题与就业保障政策思考

残疾人群体是就业弱势群体,长期以来,有劳动能力(包括部分劳动能力)的残疾人主要通过在福利企业就业、分散按比例就业等几种有限的途径和形式实现就业。在社会转型期,残疾人群体面临新的挑战,形势严峻,本文着重分析了当前残疾人就业存在的主要问题,并对调整就业保障政策提出若干建议。     

International Constraints and Domestic Choices: Economic Convergence and Exchange Rate Policy in France and Italy

As tensions in the European Monetary System demonstrate, international capital flows can have a decisive influence on countries' economic policies. The external constraint of high international capital mobility led the countries of Western Europe in the 1980s to attempt to stabilize their exchange rates and converge toward low levels of inflation. Yet this process was not uniform: French governments pursued a rigorous anti-inflationary policy of high interest rates and a strengthening currency, while Italian governments had difficulty controlling inflation and maintaining the lira in the European Monetary System. This difference is best explained by comparing political institutions and policymaking processes in the two countries. Particular attention is given to political leaders' access to economic policy tools and their capacity to design and implement long-term goals.     

Regional Identity and Support for Europe: Distinguishing Between Cultural and Political Social Identity in France

Much has been written about the “crisis of the nation state” in Europe. The shifting of state competencies to the European and regional levels is expected to generate new loyalties to these levels, possibly at the expense of national solidarity. While numerous studies show that individuals with an exclusive national identity are less likely to support integration than those with an inclusive identity, much less is known about the interaction between regional identity and European identity. Using public opinion data collected in 16 French regions, I show that exclusive regionalists are less likely to feel attached to Europe and support the EU. However, I also find that the impact of regional identity on European identity varies by the type of identity invoked—cultural versus political. While cultural regional identity lowers support for European institutions, political regional identity has the opposite effect.     

British Employment Policy in the 1980s: Learning from the American Experience

During the 1980s the Thatcher Government implemented numerous changes to the British employment system. Most of these changes had the effect of linking the receipt of welfare benefits to an individual's willingness to participate actively within a government sponsored employment or training scheme. These changes culminated in the Social Security Act (1989) which linked the receipt of welfare payments to an individual's active job search and willingness to accept any officially offered job after a maximum grace period of 13 weeks. While these changes are important in their own right, more interestingly, most trace their origins back to the American welfare-to-work system initiated by the Reagan administration during the early 1980s. This article will demonstrate why the Thatcher government turned to the United States in the development of their employment policy. Once an explanation for this has been provided the article will highlight the key policies transferred by the Thatcher Government in the development of the British welfare-to-work system. This entire analysis will be placed within a policy transfer framework in order to illustrate its usefulness in the analysis of policy development.     

Support for Le Pen in France: Two Elections in Trompe l'œil

There is a comforting consensus among political commentators that the 2007 presidential election marked the end of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a force in French politics. The shock election of the Front National leader to the presidential run-off in 2002, by contrast, is explained as a surge in the Le Pen vote specific to the prevailing electoral conditions. This article challenges that interpretation of both elections. It shows that, despite Le Pen's unforeseen success in 2002, there was no surge of support for him, and that despite Le Pen's supposed collapse in 2007, he won close to 4 million votes while popular agreement with his ideas rose to its highest recorded level. The article concludes that Le Pen remains a powerful presence in French politics and that his supporters continue to constitute a large and highly influential constituency.     

Renewal of Public Policy via Instrumental Innovation: Implementing Automated Speed Enforcement in France

This article examines the renewal of public policy via instrumental innovation since the adoption in France of an automated sequence of detection and sanctioning of speed limit violations. Involved here is an instrument of public policy that points up the changes that have taken place in recent years in respect of road safety policy and provides a clearer view of some aspects of ongoing state reorganization. The change in public policy permitted by this instrumentation results from an increasingly close focus on the road hazard issue, which has allowed specialists from different epistemic fields to advocate a system used in other countries for over a decade now. However, this success with policymakers is also explained by the fact that the new system involves the return of the state as the core shaper of this public policy, after 20 years of emphasis on local and partnership‐based policies.     

Dilemmas in Policy Support for the Arts and Cultural Sector

This article questions the specific challenges that the management of culture poses for government.² Unlike some ‘public good’ policy domains, such as prisons, defence or infrastructure, or benefit provisions such as unemployment, disability or health measures, the complex area of cultural policy cannot be justified in instrumental terms as an essential ‐ or unavoidable ‐ policy of government. Nonetheless, the cultural lobby is an effective and indefatigable pressure on government. The area of culture is just one small component of the public agenda that governments are obliged to support. Given other pressing portfolios, why do governments continue to take an interest in culture? Moreover, recent government policies seem to be setting up problems for the future such that governments will find it hard if not impossible to extricate themselves from a problematic relationship. So, what is the hold that culture has over governments? Traditionally, the answer seemed to be a combination of boosterism and cultural capital. Governments liked to bask in the reflected glory of cultural success believing that it contributed to their legitimacy and cultural competence. The glow of elite culture was seen to rub off onto political incumbents and their regimes. But in an age of pressures on government to justify public expenditure and meet accountability regimes, cultural support continues to appear on the funding agenda and governments continue to become embroiled in debates about competing support formulae. This relates to both the nature of ‘culture’ and broader definitions under the banner of ‘cultural policy’ as well as the nature of the sector which is, at once, elitist, institutionalized, commercial, highly specialist, niche and industry ‐ all premised on intangible nature of ‘creativity’. Paradoxically, contrary to other trends in public policy, arts and cultural funding has reverted to forms of patronage as the centrepiece of broadly defined policies of access, equity and self‐sufficiency. How has this policy portfolio managed to buck the trends of other domains of government attention? This article attempts to open some new ways of examining the question.³