Courts and health policy: judicial policy making and publicly funded health care in Canada

The 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provided political actors with the opportunity to make rights-based challenges to public policy decisions. Two challenges launched by providers and consumers of health care illuminate the impact of judicial review on health care policy and the institutional capacity of courts to formulate policy in this field. The significant impact of rights-based claims on cross-jurisdictional policy differences in a federal regime is noted.     

Welfare Receipt and Private Charity

In the wake of welfare reform efforts, alliances between governments and charities, and public preoccupation with “social capital,” it is useful to understand how welfare payments interact with charitable giving. Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data from the first quarter of 1999, this article estimates the impacts on charitable giving by individuals from receipt of welfare payments, as well as income, wealth, and a number of demographic variables. The data analysis suggests that charity is negatively associated with welfare receipt, while wealth, income, and age have positive impacts on giving. These findings have significant implications for public policy and nonprofit management.     

Parental Socialization and Rational Party Identification

This article constructs a rational choice model of the intergenerational transmission of party identification. At a given time, identification with a party is the estimate of average future benefits from candidates of that party. Experienced voters constantly update this expectation using political events since the last realignment to predict the future in accordance with Bayes Rule. New voters, however, have no experience of their own. In Bayesian terms, they need prior beliefs. It turns out that under certain specified conditions, these young voters should rationally choose to employ parental experience to help orient themselves to politics. The resulting model predicts several well–known features of political socialization, including the strong correlation between parents' and children's partisanship, the greater partisan independence of young voters, and the tendency of partisan alignments to decay.     

A Defence of Sceptical Authoritarianism

Vittorio Bufacchi argued in this journal that democracy was under threat from two extreme philosophical positions: totalitarianism and nihilism. Sandwiched between these polarities is liberal democracy. Bufacchi believes that one of liberal democracy's distinctive properties is an endorsement of scepticism, which he then attempts to illuminate. In contrast, this article will argue that an authoritarian government bound by a constitution permitting civil liberties might also adopt political scepticism. This removes the aforementioned distinctiveness of liberal democracy in this regard and, in addition, leads us toward a rethinking of the possibility of a more plausible consideration of democracy.     

Church attendance,meaningfulness of religion,and depressive symptomatology among adolescents

Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 451 adolescents at a public high school in Texas during the spring semester 1989. The instrument used contained the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and items to determine participants' gender, frequency of church attendance, and meaningfulness of one's religion. Based on social support research and the writings of Carl Jung and Viktor Frankl, it was predicted that those who attended church frequently and those who viewed their religions as providing meaning for their lives would have lower BDI scores than their classmates. The findings supported these predictions. Implications and a discussion of the results are included.Received Ed.D. in educational psychology from University of Illinois. Main research interests are substance abuse in adolescents, drug use prevention strategies, and suicidal ideation in adolescents.Received Ph.D. in general psychology from Boston University. Main research interest is psychology in interdisciplinary perspective, with a specialization in the psychology of religion.Pursuing a M.Ed, in school psychology at Southwest Texas State University. Main research interests are psychological testing and assessment.