American agriculture and trade policymaking: Two-level bargaining in the North American Free Trade Agreement

This paper has employed Putnam's two-level bargaining framework to analyze the negotiations leading to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The particular focus has been on agricultural aspects of the negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico, identifying the distribution of coalitions and preferences across the U.S. polity that influenced the drafting and ultimate ratification of the agreement. Special emphasis has been given to how the negotiations were influenced by the intersecting of agricultural interests and strategies at both domestic and international levels.     

Financial support of children involved in special needs adoption: A policy evaluation

This article represents one of the first systematic analyses of state subsidy payments to families adopting children with special needs (children with physical and/or mental disabilities and children who are classified as hard-to-place). The analysis focuses on the monetary subsidies provided to adoptive parents of special needs children. It attempts to characterize variation in subsidy levels between counties and the impact of subsidy levels on a child's length of time until adoptive placement. The data set employed in the analysis was collected from primary sources and is one ofthe first available depositories of information on subsidy payments for special needs adoption. Results indicate that child and case characteristics explain a significant proportion of the variation in state adoption subsidy levels, but that a substantial proportion of between-county variation in subsidy levels remains unexplained. Subsidy level was not found to affect the adoption placement rate at the margin, except for children with mental disabilities. The policy implications of these results are discussed.     

Changing Lives and Minds: Progress,Strategy, and Universal Basic Income

This article argues that demands and movements for universal basic income (UBI) are important components of a "transitional program," comprised of transitional demands, suitable for the twenty-first century. Transitional demands do two things: (1) they genuinely improve the lives of working people (and of the poor and otherwise oppressed peoples) in the short-term; and (2) they operate rhetorically and ideologically to convince people that the movements that achieve such a transitional demand can actually accomplish what they set out to do, thus hastening the development of a more comprehensive societal metamorphosis. Furthermore, this article focuses on the relationship between material progress and ideological rupture central to the radical theoretical justification for transitional demands and the transitional program, in the process of exploring the limitations of various contemporary (primarily left) criticisms of UBI."