Interweaving Aboriginal/Indigenous Rights with Urban Citizenship: A View from the Winnipeg Low-Cost Housing Sector,Canada

State-society relations around low-cost housing in Canada changed from a period of strong federal leadership centred on social rights to a period of state retrenchment. A coalition of housing stakeholders from the public, private, and voluntary sectors self-organized in Winnipeg to create new low-cost housing following the 1993 discontinuation of federal social housing programs. This move toward urban citizenship was not received in the same way by Aboriginal peoples pursuing a distinctive set of rights centred on self-determination alongside common social (housing) goals. While Aboriginal rights are given regard at the federal level, they were not embedded in localized citizenship processes. Expanding the theorization of urban citizenship, the empirical results in this article reveal that discourses of democratic racism and cultural neutrality permeate mainstream views, running counter to Aboriginal citizenship pursuits.     

Retrenchment of Social Policy by Other Means: A Comparison of Agricultural and Housing Policy in Turkey

Abstract

In many low- and middle-income countries, conventional welfare state institutions provide social protection only for the formally employed. In contrast, the rural and urban poor are often protected by “social policy by other means”. Based on a comparative analysis of two major unconventional welfare programs in Turkey, agricultural state support and access to squatter housing, this article explains retrenchment of social policy by other means. Agricultural retrenchment was the result of coercive policy transfer from international organizations in a post-crisis context, while the retrenchment of squatter housing was driven by domestic political entrepreneurs responding to decreases in the availability of urban land and the number of informal squatters. In both cases, retrenchment became politically sustainable due to functional replacement with more conventional welfare programs. This analysis challenges the narrow focus of mainstream welfare state research, provides an explanation of retrenchment of social policy by other means, and enhances our understanding of Turkey’s uneven welfare state development.     

Policy Entrepreneurs,Issue Experts,and Water Rights Policy Change in Colorado

Policy entrepreneurs can influence policy changes and decisions. These people invest their time, knowledge, and skills into promoting policies with which they agree. This paper investigates the influence that entrepreneurs had in the case of recreational water rights policy in Colorado to build a model of policy entrepreneurship. Almost 20 Colorado communities have constructed white‐water kayak courses to boost their local economies. In twelve of these communities, construction was followed by community pursuit of a new form of water right—the recreational in‐channel diversion. This case study is relevant to many areas of environmental policy and management where policies are transitioning from traditional consumptive uses of the resource to nonconsumptive uses. This policy change was not a given in Colorado communities, with recreational water rights requiring significant investments of community resources. These research findings conclude that policy entrepreneurs were influential to policy change, but the most important actors were expert entrepreneurs who hold expertise in water resource matters.     

Federalism and suitable housing for the frail elderly: A comparison of policies in Canada and the United States

Abstract

The frail elderly have special multidimensional housing needs beyond affordability, including shelter that is more adaptive to reduced function and offers supportive services. Suitable housing for this population comprises three policy areas—housing, health care, and social services. In a federal system, development and implementation of policies in these areas involves participation of several levels of government and the nongovernmental sector. This paper uses federalism as a conceptual framework to examine and compare these policy areas in Canada and the United States.

In both countries, general national housing policies—relying heavily on the nongovernmental sector and characterized by joint federal‐provincial programs in Canada and by important local government roles and age‐specific programs in the United States‐have benefited the elderly. The effects of such policies on the frail elderly, however, have been less positive because of the general lack of essential human services and, to a lesser degree, health care that enables them to live outside institutions. This is especially true in the United States, where health care policy is fragmented and is dominated by a private insurance system, partial federal financing of health insurance for the elderly, and tense federal‐state relations in financing health care for the poor. Although Canadian policies and programs operate autonomously and more uniformly within a national health plan, neither country has a universal, comprehensive long‐term care system. Geographically diverse patterns of social services, funded by grants to states and provinces and the nonprofit sector, are common to both countries. However, the United States has inadequately funded age‐specific programs and has relied on a growing commercial service provision. Housing outcomes for frail elders are moving in the right direction in both countries; however, Canada seems to be better positioned, largely because of its health care system. As increased decentralization continues to characterize the three policy areas that affect suitable housing for frail elders, the United States can learn from Canada's negotiated federalism approach to more uniform solutions to merging housing and long‐term care.     

Rights,review, and spending: Policy outcomes with judicially enforceable rights

Abstract. This paper posits that countries with a constitutional right to social security that can be enforced by courts via judicial review will show patterns of spending on social security that are distinct from countries with other constitutional and judicial arrangements. Governments in countries with enforceable rights will be constrained to spend more on transfer programs to avoid censure from the courts. The hypotheses are tested using data from 22 OECD countries using time–series cross–section analysis. The results show that enforceable rights are associated with higher growth rates in social security spending and lower fluctuation in expenditures on social programs, although the amount of GDP spent on social transfers is unaffected by rights. These results are consistent with the idea that governments' spending habits are constrained by positive rights, but rebut the argument that rights lead to economic distortions.     

Bremst der Föderalismus den Leviathan? Bundesstaat und Sozialstaat im internationalen Vergleich, 1880–2005

This paper examines the impact of federal state structures on welfare state development in the six classic OECD federations since the 1880s. Starting from the widely acknowledged assumption in comparative public policy research that depicts federalism as an impediment to the expansion of the Leviathan, we demonstrate that federalism has facilitated as well as impeded social policy development. Development is contingent on several time-dependent factors, including the degree of democratization, the type of federalism, the stage of welfare state development and early distribution of social policy responsibility. Federalism also has had an impact on patterns of benefit provision, and we identify a variety of bypass strategies by which the six federations were able to overcome their built-in constitutional rigidities. These institutional changes had a lasting structural impact on the emerging patterns of social security. Overall, federalism has contributed to a status quo bias in social policy, not only because it delayed the early consolidation of national social programs but also, more recently, because it has protected the welfare state against retrenchment.     

Political Partisanship and Welfare State Reform in Advanced Industrial Societies

In this article we evaluate two claims made in recent studies of the welfare states of advanced industrial societies: first, that welfare states have remained quite resilient in the face of demands for retrenchment; and second, that partisan politics have ceased to play a decisive role in their evolution. Addressing the first claim, we present analysis from a new data set on unemployment insurance and sickness benefit replacement rates for 18 countries for the years 1975–99. We find considerably more evidence of welfare retrenchment during the last two decades than do recent cross-national studies. Second, we examine the "end of partisanship" claim by estimating the effects of government partisanship on changes in income replacement rates in sickness and unemployment programs. Our results suggest that, contrary to claims that partisanship has little impact on welfare state commitments, traditional partisanship continues to have a considerable effect on welfare state entitlements in the era of retrenchment .     

The Politics of Occupational Pension Reform in Britain and the Netherlands: The Power of Market Discipline in Liberal and Corporatist Regimes

The politics of occupational pension reform has attracted less attention than state pension retrenchment. Yet, in countries with large occupational welfare sectors changes in company provision can be equally important for welfare system generosity. This paper compares recent occupational pension developments in the Netherlands and Britain, exemplars of coordinated and liberal capitalism. The paper argues that despite regime-typical differences in the nature and process of change, recent developments have also been remarkably similar. In both countries retrenchment and individualisation has left most citizens at risk of being less well off in retirement. Corporatist governance in the Netherlands has not challenged the overall orientation of this process, but has merely distributed the costs of retrenchment more fairly than liberal Britain. Instead, the constraints of the globalised financial market directed change: exposure to market discipline, reinforced by national policy actors and international market regulators, made occupational provision vulnerable to retrenchment regardless of regime type. Thus, the significance for levels of social protection of differences between liberal and corporatist governance models of occupational pensions may have been overrated.     

Aboriginal citizen, discredited medical subject: Paradoxical constructions of Aboriginal women's subjectivity in Canadian health care policies

In this paper, we explore paradoxes and contradictions in Canadian health policy discourses that define Aboriginal women as empowered citizens on the one hand and as discredited medical subjects on the other. Drawing on critical discourse theory, we analyze health policy discourses within the contexts of related political and public discourses about Aboriginal peoples in Canada. We describe a double-speak: a paradox between the constructions of Aboriginal women as citizens in dialogue with government in health policy “reforms,” and their construction as discredited medical subjects who lack legitimacy in health care services. Intertwined with explicit resistance to Aboriginal entitlements, deconstruction of health policy discourses within this political context is central to understanding how Aboriginal women continue to be discredited through processes of marginalization.     

From the Wagner Act to the Human Rights Watch Report: Labor and Freedom of Expression and Association, 1935-2000*

This paper examines the legal restrictions on the labor movement's right to picket and strike since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or Wagner Act in 1935. The NLRA was seen as a statutory equivalent of the First Amendment for the labor movement, guaranteeing workers rights of association and expression they had been denied historically through the use of court injunctions, criminal conspiracy prosecutions, and extra-legal violence. Supreme Court decisions of the late 1930s, often arising out of labor conflicts, also significantly expanded rights of freedom of association and expression. Yet a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 2000 concluded that US workers lacked the basic rights to organize, bargain, and strike required by international human rights standards. It found that US labor laws permitted employers to fire, harass, and intimidate workers with impunity. This paper examines the decline of these rights since the Wagner Act, seeing the roots of the legal decline in the ambivalent legacy of the Act itself. On the one hand, both the Act and the Court legally recognized unions as legitimate political organizations and extended to them many of the associative and expressive freedoms that had been available to other groups. On the other hand, the legal price for this recognition of legitimacy was the restriction of a range of expressive activities. Subsequently, labor's rights came to be treated more under the framework of industrial relations and economic policy than of civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. This gradual legal retrenchment, along with political and economic developments, left the labor movement severely weakened by the end of the century, with significantly less legal protection than its counterparts in other economically advanced countries. I explore these developments by relating them to the literatures on American exceptionalism and industrial relations. Theoretically, I rely on work which examines the relationship between institutional structure and human agency to understand the strategic choices made by corporations, state actors, and the labor movement. The paper concludes with an assessment of recent calls for labor law reform as a strategy for reviving the labor movement.     

Political Science Perspectives on Human Rights

This special issue of Human Rights Review is devoted to an exploration of the current human rights research agendas within the political science discipline. Research on human rights is truly an interdisciplinary quest in which various epistemologies can contribute to each other and form a larger dialogue concerning rights and wrongs. This special issue is devoted to an expansive understanding of the state of research on human rights in the political science discipline. One common theme throughout these contributions is the need for a more nuanced conceptualization of human rights, tools to promote these rights and as social scientists, methodologies employed to study these rights. A second theme is the policy relevance that can be derived from our empirical analysis. This volume demonstrates that the integration of theoretically and normatively rich concepts, empirical social science, and policy relevance do not have to be mutually exclusive when studying human rights.     

Explaining Women's Rights Realignment: Convention Delegates, 1972–1992

Since the early 1970s, the major American parties have moved from general consensus on women's rights issues to sharp polarization. While previous efforts to explain this realignment have identified pieces of the puzzle, these explanations have been generally incomplete and atheoretical. I argue that party positions are determined by the perceived value of specific issue positions for maintaining and expanding the party's coalition of electoral support. Thus, changes in both the composition of the party's coalition and the way the issue is defined and understood can bring about changes in the issue positions adopted by parties. Using the Convention Delegate Studies (1972–1992), this research suggests that both replacement (coalition change) and in the case of Democrats, conversion (caused by issue change) have been important mechanisms for bringing about party realignment on women's rights. This explanation both encompasses causal factors highlighted by previous scholars and points to other important contributing causes.     

The weakness of strong policies and the strength of weak policies: Law,experimentalist governance,and supporting coalitions in European Union health care policy

The experience of European Union (EU) health care services policy shows the importance of supporting coalitions in any effort to effect policy change and the extent to which the presence or absence of such coalitions can qualify generalizations about policymaking. EU health care services law is substantively liberalizing and procedurally driven by the courts, with little legislative input. But the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has been much better at establishing an EU competency in law than in causing policy development in the EU or member states. Literature on courts helps to explain why: courts are most effective when they enjoy supporting coalitions and the ECJ does not have a significant supporting coalition for its liberalizing health care services policy. Based on interview data, this article argues that the hard law of health care services deregulation and the newer forms of health care governance, such as the Open Method of Coordination and the networks on rare diseases, depend on supporting coalitions in member states that are willing to litigate, lobby, budget, decide cases, and otherwise implement EU law and policy. Given the resistance that the Court has met in health care sectors, its overarching deregulatory approach might produce smaller effects than expected, and forms of experimentalist governance that are easy to deride might turn out to have supporting coalitions that make them unexpectedly effective.     

‘Women's rights as human rights’: Feminist practices,global feminism,and human rights regimes in transnationality 1

This paper argues that the recent calls for articulating women's rights as human rights can be successful only by misrecognition of the geopolitical context of human rights internationalism and the nationalisms that are sustained by it. Arguing that it is only on the level of universalized constructions of ‘women’ as a category and the generalized invocations of oppression by ‘global feminism's’ ‘American’ practitioners that such discourses of rights become powerful, this paper argues that policy and action require addressing localized and transnational specificities that created gendered inequalities. Even in national contexts such as in India, generalized invocations of women's human rights have not been useful since hegemonic forms of religion and culture have also been oppressive to women in minority communities. Concepts of economic and social justice rather than rights may work better in many such cases.     

From Safety Net To Trampoline: Labor Market Activation in the Netherlands and Denmark

In recent years Denmark and the Netherlands have made dramatic shifts from passive to active labor market policies. Though often portrayed as a necessary response to high levels of structural unemployment, such changes are more than a mere technical adjustment of welfare programs to a changing economic climate. They represent new ideas about the goals of public policy and the social rights of citizenship. This article surveys the politics of labor market policies in the two countries to demonstrate that the recent activation programs reflect a departure from the ideas and goals of the postwar welfare state.     

Who Governs in God’s City?

After clearing away some misconceptions about the power of the religious right in Colorado Springs, this article will examine three areas, education, medical marijuana, and gay rights, where the city’s religious conservatives have tried to influence public policy. With each area their efforts have only been partially successful. While the reasons for this uneven success are often particular to each policy dispute, taken together these issues point to discernible changes in the political behavior and ambitions of the city’s religious conservatives. Most importantly, religious conservatives have become far less confrontational and have turned away, to a significant degree, from direct political action and are focusing much more on community outreach programs. The paper will conclude by discussing some of the reasons for those changes and how they might have national implications for religious and social conservatives.     

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.     

Agricultural Retrenchment Revisited: Issue Definition and Venue Change in the United States and European Union

The case of agriculture in the United States and the European Union indicates that retrenchment opportunities wax and wane. In the first half of the 1990s, both the U.S. and the EU instituted significant farm policy reforms. But as the 1990s came to an end, subsidies in both countries increased as policymakers became less enthusiastic about reducing benefits for farmers. This variability highlights the shortcomings of current political science explanations of retrenchment: the literature has yet to explain why policy change occurs in some circumstances but not others. In this paper, I employ the concepts of issue definition and venue change in order to explain why the United States and the European Union fluctuate in their capacity to reduce farm subsidies. I argue that, in agriculture, retrenchment advocates must redefine the issue of subsidies in a manner that highlights the negative externalities associated with farm policy. Second, retrenchment advocates must also exploit opportunities for strategic venue change so that policy decisions in agriculture do not rest solely with those who benefit from the status quo. By adding the concepts of issue definition and venue change to studies of retrenchment, we gain a better understanding of the conditions that make policy change possible, as well as an account of the mechanism through which retrenchment takes place.     

Reporting Without Knowledge: the Absence of Human Rights in US Journalism Education

Journalists play an important role in the realization and protection of human rights worldwide, framing and shaping the public’s understanding of issues. In the United States, however, studies show that media coverage of human rights is inadequate and frequently inaccurate, with US journalists typically framing human rights as an exclusively international issue. This study helps to explain why this is the case through an examination of the human rights content of journalism education in the United States. Journalism education is dominated by undergraduate programs in the United States, yet data from this study show that human rights education is not part of journalism training programs at the undergraduate level (at the top 10 schools, ranked according to the number of graduates, there are no human rights courses for journalism majors) and is not a focus of most graduate-level training programs. Those schools that do teach human rights do so largely with a focus on events and violations abroad. The fact that journalists are not educated about international human rights law and standards or taught to view events through a human rights lens means that crucial opportunities are missed to frame topics as human rights issues, to inform the public, and to hold governments and other human rights violators accountable.     

Framing Deservingness to Win Support for Welfare State Retrenchment

Recent studies of welfare state retrenchment have argued that policy makers can win public support for welfare state reform by framing the issue in terms of deservingness of welfare recipients. However, this literature has not tested the argument at the individual level. Using a Scandinavian context, this experimental study investigates how alternative framing of a welfare state retrenchment proposal affects citizens' perception of welfare recipients' deservingness, policy support and whether perceptions of deservingness mediate policy opinion. A news story was manipulated to present welfare recipients as either deserving or undeserving of welfare benefits. This issue framing affected citizens' perception of deservingness as well as support for retrenchment policy. Opinion change was partly explained by differences in perceptions of deservingness. These results provide strong support for the effectiveness of the deservingness frame.