Globalization forces and social policy choices: Glass half‐full or half‐empty?

Globalization, Europeanization and the End of Scandinavian Social Democracy?Edited by robert geyer, christine ingebritsen and jonathon w. moses. London: Macmillan. 2000. Changing Politics of Canadian Social Policy. By james j. rice and michael j. prince. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2000. Four Strong Winds: Understanding the Growing Challenges to Health Care. By michael b. decter Toronto: Stoddard. 2000. Now resident on Vancouver Island, the author was until recently a faculty member in the Department of political science at the University of Windsor.     

“Blood Brothers”. Racial Identification and the Right to Rule: the Australian Response to the Spanish‐American War

Historians have paid scant attention to Australia's enthusiastic response to the Spanish‐American war of 1898. Yet these events help us to better understand the centrality of race to Australia's national identity. Even though the Australian colonies were bound by Britain's neutrality, from Sydney to Perth Australians cheered America's decision to declare war. Many gathered outside the US consulate to offer their services as soldiers and nurses. This enthusiasm for the US cause was underpinned by an identification with fellow Anglo‐Saxons and the assumption that Filipinos and Cubans were races not yet fit for self‐government. Australians were intent on establishing their status as equal members of the governing race.     

Urban Enterprise Zones: Do They Work? Evidence From New Jersey

Budgetary pressures have made it necessary to consider the effectiveness of urban enterprise zones. These geographically targeted tax incentives programs are widespread. But whether and to what extent these programs spur economic development is not known. The article presents an evaluation of urban enterprise zones in New Jersey in terms of costs and economic impacts, including industrial output, tax revenue, and job creation.     

Social science research and experimentation in Australian criminal proceedings: prejudicial pre-trial publicity and psychological research

Using the decision of Barr J in Attorney-General (NSW) v John Fairfax Publications [1999] NSWSC 318, the authors analyse the need for external validity and relevance in social science evidence adduced in the courts. They argue in favour of the rigour employed within Barr J's judgment and contend that a constructive legacy of the decision should be a greater sensitisation on the part of researchers to the kinds of factors that can distance experimental scenarios from curial contexts to a point where generalisations from the former become strained and even spurious. A number of these considerations have the potential to be addressed to a significant extent by improved methodologies. However, the authors warn against an excess of purist fervour in demanding complete comparability of scenarios, lest the fruits of social science be denied to the courts and decision-making be adversely affected by the absence of expert insights falling short of complete replication of conditions between experiments and forensic reality.     

Federalism, Political Structure, and Public Policy in the United States and Canada

Two of the three large countries on the North American continent—the United States and Canada—share a number of similarities that often make it difficult for the untrained observer to differentiate between the two nations. On the surface, the two are structured similarly as federal systems that, by definition, exhibit shared power between the national government and provincial or state political entities.Although there are other important social and economic characteristics of the two countries that help explain differences in policy processes and outcomes, it is the contention of this article that one gets the clearest sense of what Elazar has called thinking federal by utilizing an analytical approach that joins questions related to federalism with some conceptual frameworks of the public policy field. Two frameworks undergird the argument in this article—the Lowi typology of different types of policies and Deil Wright's typology of different models that describe the American inter-governmental system.In both countries, policies must be sensitive to the greater interdependencies between units of government as well as to linkages between policy areas. The mechanisms or instrumentalities for dealing with policy issues are intrinsically complex. It is also clear that the intergovernmental networks that exist in both the U.S. and Canada are composed of an array of actors. The differing political structures of the systems do impact the types of intergovernmental policies that have emerged in the two countries. The executive dominance so imbedded in Canadian governments has contributed to their ability to adopt and implement certain controversial redistributive policies, such as a national health insurance program. By contrast, the fragmentation of the U.S. system makes redistributive policies more difficult.