Multilevel policy from the municipal perspective: A pan‐Canadian survey

Building on in‐depth case studies and extensive theory‐building by Canadian multilevel governance scholars, this article identifies and describes multilevel policy involvement by federal, provincial, municipal, private, and NGO actors in three policy phases and eighteen policy domains that specifically involve local governments in Canada. Drawing from an original pan‐Canadian survey of municipal mayors and councillors, we show that municipal politicians see multilevel policy involvement as remarkably prevalent across many policy domains. Using an original measure of multilevel policy involvement, we identify the policy domains in which policy involvement is most concentrated or fragmented and then describe the correlates of this measure. Multilevel policy involvement, we argue, is more clearly associated with policy phase and policy domain than with municipal population or region. We conclude with a discussion of implications for future research.     

Mortal Beings: How Evolution Helps Us Understand Illness and Aging

In these two books, biological anthropologist Richard Bribiescas and developmental psychologist David Geary address sex differences in health and aging from the perspectives of evolutionary biology and psychology. Bribiescas explores the aging process in men and describes why and how men age differently from women, with earlier mortality and greater susceptibility to the diseases of aging. Geary provides a comprehensive survey of the animal and human literature on sex differences in vulnerabilities to the effects of stress on psychological and physical traits. Both authors focus on the role of Darwinian sexual selection as the source of different health outcomes for men and women. These works make valuable contributions to our understanding of why humans get sick and age and argue convincingly for approaching medical research with a greater sensitivity to the role played by biological sex in poor health.     

Disloyal Brokers and Weak Parties

This article shows that the disloyalty of political brokers causes party fragility. Lacking distinctive brands, organization, and activists to mobilize individuals, parties “hire” local notables to broker votes among a local, nonpartisan constituency. However, brokers may be unreliable agents, regularly changing political allegiances in search of better returns for their brokerage among the module of voters they control. This free agency from brokers hinders durable party–voter linkages and results in electorally vulnerable parties. Measuring how brokers influence parties is empirically complex, but taking advantage of the fact that in Brazil these agents are also local candidates, this article demonstrates the negative electoral consequences of brokers' free agency on party performance. Natural experiments and an unexpected, temporary institutional reform that discouraged disloyalty for brokers demonstrate this relationship.     

Narratives of progress: cooking and gender equality among Swedish men

Feminist food studies have repeatedly identified a dichotomy of ‘masculine’ self-oriented cooking as leisure and ‘feminine’ other and care-oriented foodwork (meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up after meals). However, recent research suggests that there is a great deal of variety and contradiction in men’s accounts of their cooking practices. For example, men may find cooking a tedious and stressful responsibility and foodwork a fatherly duty. This article draws on interviews with 31 Swedish men from 22 to 88 years of age, and explores stories about cooking and foodwork as part of their everyday lives and their life transitions and how these relate to broader notions of food and gender equality. The data illuminating the men’s stories can be synthesised into two narratives of progress: a narrative of progress in gender equality in Sweden, where men’s participation in household labour has become taken for granted, and a narrative of culinary progress among Swedish men in general and among some of the interviewed men themselves. We agree with previous scholars who have argued for a reconsideration of the simplistic picture of men’s cooking as only being for the self and for leisure. We further show how the men express foodwork as a self-evident responsibility, regardless of whether the men find it fun or not, and that a desirable masculinity is represented by a man whose cooking skills have progressed beyond the survival level and who is more gender equal than what are perceived to be less-progressive men from previous generations and foreign cultural backgrounds.     

Local governance and the local political career in Canada: A sample dataset

This research note introduces and describes a new dataset of political actors from the city of Kitchener, Ontario. The dataset is comprised of 348 complete political careers, across four local institutions, from 1912 to the present. This research note aims to show that large‐scale databases of local political actors can contribute to our understanding of (a) local political careers, (b) the dynamics of formal and informal local institutions, and (c) the nature and boundaries of local multilevel governance. This note concludes with some practical advice for those who wish to build similar datasets in other Canadian cities.     

Teachers’ strikes in Argentina: Partisan alignments and public-sector labor relations

In a context of increasing teachers’ militancy in Argentina, this article provides the first empirical analysis of teachers’ strikes in all twenty-four Argentine provinces during the 1990s. Using a cross-provincial statistical analysis, it explains the wide variation across provinces and across time of Argentine teachers’ strikes. It demonstrates that political alignments between provincial governors and teachers’ unions explain these patterns better than organizational and institutional variables, which strongly shape public-sector labor relations in other countries. We emphasize the discretion of provincial governors, for both the application of labor regulations and budgetary appropriations in the politicization of provincial public-sector labor relations in Argentina, especially after the decentralization of education resulted in the provincialization of teachers’ protests. Maria Victoria Murillo is associate professor of political science and international affairs at Columbia University. She was previously an assistant professor at Yale University, a Peggy Rockefeller Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and a Fellow at Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She is the author ofLabor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2001) and various articles on the politics of market reforms, labor protest, and privatization of public utilities in Latin America. the authors acknowledge the useful suggestions of the editor and three anonymous reviewers, and the comments of Ernesto Calvo, Javier Corrales, Tulia Faletti, Miriam Golden, Frances Rosenbluth, Andrew Schrank, Kenneth Scheve, J. Samuel Valenzuela, James Vreeland; and the participants in the Seminar on Globalization and Labor Struggle at Columbia University, the Latin American Seminar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, the seventh annual meeting of LACEA, and the Business School seminar at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. M. V. Murillo acknowledges the support of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies and the Carnegie Program for the Study of Globalization, and L. Ronconi acknowledges the support of the CEDI at the Universidad de San Andrés.