Migration and Healthcare Reforms in Spain: Symbolic Politics,Converging Outputs,Oppositions from the Field

ABSTRACT

Migrants’ healthcare entitlement represents a conflictive issue in the political battlefield, with research pointing towards the determinant role of party politics in determining policy outputs. Addressing the 2012 healthcare reform and 2018 counter-reform adopted in Spain by a right-wing and left-wing government respectively and drawing on qualitative analysis of parties’ discourses and policy measures, we argue that ideological differences along the healthcare-migration nexus were overemphasised to play symbolic politics. Partisan competition had less impact on actual outputs, while clashes between the central and regional governments, path-dependent practices and opposition from multiple venues played a central role in the policymaking process.     

Participatory budgets in Canoas (Brazil) and Cascais (Portugal). A comparative analysis of the drivers of success

ABSTRACT

This article is a comparative analysis of two internationally awarded cases of Participatory Budgets in Canoas (Brazil) and Cascais (Portugal). Our main argument is that the success of these PBs relies on political/administrative, societal, and geographic drivers. This conceptual model has been adopted to analyse and discuss the success of the two case studies. The provision of an original conceptual model for comparative analysis and the empirical knowledge from the two cities are supported by the review of main literature in this field of study, and aim to contribute, with original findings, to the international debate on participatory budgeting.     

Baring it all for Activism: The 1985 Naked Protest in Mexico

This article analyses the 1985 naked protest carried out by silver miners of Pachuca, Mexico. This singular form of resistance, the first in Mexican labour history and organised by a dissident group within the miners' union called Liberación Minera (Miners Liberation), forced management to recognise and temporarily solve some of the miners' grievances. The naked protest unveiled the shady practices of the miners' employer, the state-owned Compañía Real del Monte y Pachuca, which refused to provide work clothes and safety equipment to miners. It also pointed to the miners' union leadership's complicity in the deterioration of labour conditions. Part of the miners' naked protest success had to do with the support that they gained from members of the left-wing press who used the protest to offer an early critique of Mexico's neoliberal policies. The 1985 naked protest occurred during one of Mexico's most severe economic crises and only four years before the company became privatised. This protest is one of the last examples of organised labour resistance before industries closed down and fired thousands of workers.     

Human susceptibility to complex diseases. Genetic analysis in large populations]

Inherited susceptibility underlying the ethiopathogenity of complex diseases is based on the existence of a high number of genetic variants which are cooperating to generate different risk genetic profiles. We try to identify such profiles and construct wide data bases with this genetic information.     

Legal constraints for the protection of privacy and personal data in electronic evidence handling1

This paper describes the application of personal data protection rules in the process of e‐evidence handling. It focuses mainly on the application of Directive 95/46/EC rules to the digital environment. It also makes reference to the legal risks derived from the collection and processing of e‐evidence in violation of privacy and personal data protection law.     

Union Affiliation,Socialization, and Political Identities: The Case of Mexico

The literature on voting behavior has generally accepted that party identification largely determines voter choice. While many studies have found that party identification is largely transmitted through social learning, less studied are the processes of the construction of party identity by way of group membership. This study seeks to understand how group identity influences party identification among Mexican workers through an analysis of the effects of union affiliation on political behavior. It assesses the utility of corporatist legacies in explaining party identity in Mexico and provides a first assessment of party affinities among independent unionists. The evidence draws from original survey data collected during six demonstrations in Mexico City. The study finds that union membership does condition the party identity of corporatist workers but not that of independent unionists.     

Black is Beautiful: cuerpos negros en Triunfo

Spaniards and African-Americans share significant cultural memories forged by the profound impact that various artistic and historical events had on each other during the twentieth century. To contribute to an exploration and understanding of these shared memories – which have received relatively little scholarly attention – this essay focuses on the presence of Black America in the 1960s, that is, the period of Late Francoist Spain. More specifically, it intends to initiate the study of the impact of the Black Civil Rights and Black Power movements on Spain’s progressive press. Focusing on a selection of articles published in the iconic leftist magazine Triunfo, it examines how the traditional European fascination with blackness manifests itself during the 1960s. In Triunfo’s articles we encounter suffering, violent, and degraded bodies, as well as revolutionary, political, and eroticized bodies. This combination reveals the problematic coexistence of solidarity and inspiration with an ethnographic and voyeuristic gaze that perpetuates the spectacularity of black bodies for global consumption. While foregrounding the challenges posed by writing and representing the Other, this study is also an attempt to reconstruct more fully the 1960s cultural and intellectual history of Spain and to approach the black liberation struggle from a transnational perspective.