The effects of state and local antidiscrimination policies on earnings for gays and lesbians

In the last 25 years, many cities and counties, as well as a few states, have adopted policies that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in private or public employment. These policies may increase earnings for gays and lesbians by decreasing discrimination in hiring, firing, promotion, or pay. This study uses data from the 1990 U.S. census to estimate the effects of these policies on individual earnings and household income. The results suggest that the policies have been adopted in places with higher earnings and that same-sex couples are more likely to live in areas that have adopted policies. However, after controlling for individual and location characteristics, the results show no evidence of a direct effect of antidiscrimination policies on average earnings or income for members of same-sex couples. Antidiscrimination policies may be more important both for a small number of individuals and as symbols of full citizenship and legitimacy for gays and lesbians.     

Global networks and global change-induced tipping points

The existence of “tipping points” in human–environmental systems at multiple scales—such as abrupt negative changes in coral reef ecosystems, “runaway” climate change, and interacting nonlinear “planetary boundaries”—is often viewed as a substantial challenge for governance due to their inherent uncertainty, potential for rapid and large system change, and possible cascading effects on human well-being. Despite an increased scholarly and policy interest in the dynamics of these perceived “tipping points,” institutional and governance scholars have yet to make progress on how to analyze in which ways state and non-state actors attempt to anticipate, respond, and prevent the transgression of “tipping points” at large scales. In this article, we use three cases of global network responses to what we denote as global change-induced “tipping points”—ocean acidification, fisheries collapse, and infectious disease outbreaks. Based on the commonalities in several research streams, we develop four working propositions: information processing and early warning, multilevel and multinetwork responses, diversity in response capacity, and the balance between efficiency and legitimacy. We conclude by proposing a simple framework for the analysis of the interplay between perceived global change-induced “tipping points,” global networks, and international institutions.     

The Subjects of Socialism: Politicizing Honneth’s Idea of Socialism

ABSTRACT

This paper criticizes Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism from a post-Marxist but nevertheless Marxian perspective. It focuses on the importance of particular political subjectivities for bringing about emancipatory transformations. Honneth’s decoupling of his revived conception of socialism from any kind of partisan subjectivity is not only overhasty. It also loses sight of the emergence of socialism as an idea in a proper Hegelian sense. Whilst Honneth contradictorily assumes that contemporary ethical life is already infused with a comprehensive normativity of social freedom that points towards its further realization, such a tendency of normative and social universality has been largely eliminated by the regressions of neoliberal hegemony. In this historical situation, the becoming-hegemonic of social freedom depends on the polemical initiative of those kinds of political subjectivities which are theoretically excluded from Honneth’s conception of socialism.