The Politics of Immigration and Public Health

The Conservative party's recent proposal to introduce compulsory medical examinations for immigrants should it win the upcoming election marks a departure in the politics of immigration and public health. For many years, the public health impact of immigration was kept out of party competition and successive governments pursued a voluntaristic approach to health checks. In this article, I outline the political history of immigration and public health, and consider the implications of attempts to raise the subject onto the public agenda. I argue that recent developments militate against a calm and balanced approach to the genuine public health concerns associated with immigration, which threatens not only to stigmatise immigrants and stoke anti-immigrant popular opinion, but also prevent the development of effective policies. In particular, the introduction of compulsory examinations may create perverse incentives for migrants to circumvent legal channels and thereby actually increase public health risks.     

Politics, Economics and the Measurement of Power

To what extent is political power fundamentally different from or, alternatively, comparable to economic power? While it is true that the basic institutions of democratic political life - the electoral arena and the sovereign representative assembly - differ from such capitalist economic institutions as the market and the joint-stock company, the logic of the power game which takes place in both settings is quite similar. In both institutions power will be a function of the capacity to enter decisive coalitions with other players: individuals, political parties, stockholders or groups of stockholders. Power indices may therefore be employed in order to reveal aspects of the strategic gaming that takes place both in representative assemblies and at yearly stockholders' meetings. This article discusses and compares various quantitative measures of voting power in the two kinds of voting bodies.     

Policy Legacies,Visa Reform and the Resilience of Immigration Politics

Comparative scholarship tacitly assumes immigration politics to be relatively rigid. A state's immigration policy legacy is said to institutionalise policy preferences, thereby making it difficult to implement lasting reforms that are inconsistent with that legacy. This presents difficulties for states with restrictionist legacies wanting to implement liberal reforms in response to the emergence of labour shortages or demographic problems. The supposed rigidity of immigration politics is scrutinised in this article through a systematic process analysis of developments in the United Kingdom over the past decade, where the Blair government confounded the UK's characterisation as a ‘reluctant immigration state’ to implement various liberal work visa reforms. The uncoordinated nature of policymaking and implementation, and the limited involvement of state and societal institutions in the reform process, reflect the UK's historical experience with restrictionist policies, and help to explain the subsequent reintroduction of strict visa controls. The case demonstrates that policy legacies indeed play a significant role in defining the character of the policymaking institutions that shape a state's immigration politics.     

The EU,UKIP and the Politics of Immigration in Britain

Immigration politics in Britain have been transformed by high levels of immigration, the effects of EU free movement, strong anti‐immigration sentiment and UKIP's rise. All are compounded by a more general discontent with politics and politicians. In face of claims that something must be done, politicians seek tougher controls on immigration and free movement, but these may be difficult to attain because of entanglement with EU rules, while failure to achieve stated objectives can further compound the disconnect that fuels support for UKIP.     

The Politics of Space and the Spatialisation of Politics: New Directions for Examining the Connections between Immigration and Contagion

Politics is thoroughly spatialised and space is thoroughly politicised. Whilst there has been a renewed interest in this contention, marked by the so-called “spatial turn” in political science and related sub-disciplinary fields, much of the literature continues to treat “space” as a mere empirical referent, rather than a product of prior political conflict(s) and competing political discourse(s). This article draws upon an emerging body of literature in political science that treats borders as sites where the inextricable links between space and politics crystallise most clearly, bringing their imbrications sharply into focus. It argues that this body of work underscores the constitutive role of the political in the construction of space and consequential notions of who is “inside” and “outside,” and suggests this is codified in the enactment and administration of immigration law(s). Drawing on examples from migration politics in the Australian context, pertaining to the ways in which HIV and tuberculosis are figured, it illustrates how the proximity of the supposedly “infectious” outsider, their perceived literal and moral “contagiousness” and the supposed “threat” they pose to the “wider community,” is constructed. This always involves the invocation of notions of space through the construction of frontiers delineating who is “inside” and “outside.” The article argues that this approach opens up promising avenues of inquiry that seek to explore the connections between immigration and contagion; two enduring tropes in the public and political imagination.     

The Economics and Politics of the Structure of Public Expenditure

The paper derives a complete system ofdemand equations for public consumptionexpenditures as the outcome of rationalbehaviour in a model where governmentmaximizes expected electoral support. Theallocation of expenditures is found todepend not only on the prices of publicservices and total expenditure and tosatisfy the constraints of demand theory,which have been the focus of attention ofprevious empirical studies of theallocation of public expenditures, but, inaddition, on the prices of privateconsumption goods, the distribution ofvoter incomes and the expected change invoter support from varying the levels ofpublic provision.     

Managerialism, Politics and Legal Bureaucratic Rationality in Immigration Policy

Against claims that public sector reforms have made the functions of managers similar to those in private firms, critics of the managerialist model point to constraints on public sector managers that make their decisions on resource allocation and policy development different from those affecting corporations. Through an examination of policy formulation, program management and decision-making in the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, this article demonstrates that managerialist program planning, outcome orientation and performance measurement have been introduced, but that this has not precluded an expansion in non-market oriented routine, non-discretionary decision-making involving bureaucratic legal rationality within a legislative and regulatory framework. While some clients have been defined and assessed in terms of economic criteria, they access departmental processing not in terms of market signals, but according to their compliance with the Migration Act and Migration Regulations. Managerialism has not occurred at the expense of classical administrative practices, rather managerialist and legal bureaucratic forms have both grown and influenced political calculations on policy-making.     

Looking after Number One? Politicians'Rewards and the Economics of Politics

The nature and level of rewards to politicians is an important issue in public management. It receives little theoretical attention in academic political science today, although it offers the basis of a Popperian 'crucial experiment' for testing the explanatory claims of the rent-seeking rational choice model of politics. This paper discusses the extent to which thecore rent-seeking modelcan explain observed patterns of political rewards. It considers the core model against two modified models (each with two variants), using data from Australia and the UK and a limited number of observations drawn from other countries. The core-rent-seeking rational choice model appears to have poor explanatory power. A familiar overdetermination problem arises in testing the explanatory claims of modified models. Some disaggregation may be needed to refine the approach.     

Immigration,Latinos, and White Partisan Politics: The New Democratic Defection

Immigration is profoundly changing the racial demographics of America. In this article, we seek to understand if and how immigration and increasing racial diversity are shaping the partisan politics of individual white Americans. We show that whites’ views on immigration and Latinos are strongly related to their core political identities and vote choices. Using a range of different surveys, we find that, all else equal, whites with more anti‐immigrant views or more negative views of Latinos are less apt to identify as Democrats and less likely to favor Democratic candidates. This rightward shift harkens back to an earlier period of white defection from the Democratic Party and highlights the enduring but shifting impact of race on American politics.     

The Chinese Ideology: Reconciling the Politics with the Economics of Contemporary Reform

Political scientists and economists fundamentally disagree in their assessment of ideology in contemporary Chinese reform. Whereas the former emphasize its functional value legitimizing the overall course of reform, the latter warn of indoctrination and negative welfare effects. We argue that ideology is pervasive in China’s political economy of reform—past, present, and future. Moreover, a common assessment is both necessary and feasible. The presented case studies (loyalty signaling, message control, policy learning, and anti-corruption) underline the highly ambiguous role of ideology oscillating between alignment and adaptation. In the end, ideology can unite or divide Chinese society as well as increase or diminish economic efficiency.     

对西方经济学教学的几点建议

经济学作为一门致用的科学,在西方经济学的教学过程中,我们应该本着科学的态度,以"传道、授业、解惑"为宗旨,客观地对待我们所讲述的理论,在与其他流派的理论进行比较分析的同时、通过案例教学和理论实践效果分析、老师讲授与学生在实际调查研究中主动学习相结合,让学生尽可能客观、全面、深入地理解和认识我们所讲授的经济学理论,培养学生的经济学分析思维。