Federalism,Physicians, and Public Policy: A Comparison of Health Care Reform in Canada and Brazil

Abstract

This article uses comparative historical analysis to explore physicians’ involvement in health care reform in Canada and Brazil. Drawing on historical institutionalism, the analysis stresses how, beyond partisanship, physicians build consensus around and promote specific policy ideas, and how federal institutions shape physicians’ mobilization. In both countries, physicians’ mobilization shaped the emergence of universal health care coverage, but in quite different ways, because of the differing federal institutions. Although the Brazilian medical lobby was far more heterogeneous than the Canadian profession, one faction was able to mobilize at the local level to pursue policy ideas favorable to universal health coverage.     

‘Post-NPM’ by force or fiat? A comparison of administrative reform trajectories in Brazil and Mexico1

‘New Public Management’ (NPM) ideas gained widespread acceptance all over the world in the 1980s and 1990s. In developing countries, notable examples of its influence include the Brazilian ‘Master Plan for Reforming Public Administration’, launched in 1995 by president Cardoso, and the Mexican ‘Federal Public Administration Modernisation Programme’ created in the same year by president Zedillo. Both reflected NPM doctrine and advanced changes for the organisation of the Executive. This article explores the evolution of these two countries' managerial reforms and the extent to which they eventually continued converging (or not) around similar principles, such as those often referred to as ‘Post-New Public Management’ (Post-NPM). By applying quantitative textual analysis of official documents and an analysis of self-reported institutional changes, the article concludes that despite their governing parties' strong political differences Mexico and Brazil did converge during the 2000s, improving controls from the centre, and prioritising the adoption of transparency and participation tools. The comparison of the trajectories of the administrative reforms of these countries between 1995 and 2016 contributes to international debates on policy convergence and Post-NPM reforms.     

国际关系理论与实践:研究邓小平外交思想的新视角

本文从几种国际关系主流理论对外交决策的要求出发,分析了邓小平外交决策和外交思想是如何适应国际关系发展规律的。传统现实主义、新现实主义、自由制度主义等理论提出了国际体系中影响国家对外政策中的不同关键因素,反映着国际关系的总体要求。邓小平外交思想就是这样一种理性的、符合中国国情和国际体系要求的思想结晶。     

Designing stakeholder consultations: Reinforcing or alleviating bias in the European Union system of governance?

Consultations with stakeholders are a policy instrument widely used by policy makers to design policies and prepare legislative proposals across national and supranational systems of government. The European Union has recently reviewed its stakeholder consultation regime and asked for stakeholders’ policy input. This offers an opportunity to examine empirically stakeholders’ own evaluation of the regime and to ask a fundamental question about its democratic credentials: Do stakeholders recognise the EU consultation regime as reinforcing bias in interest representation by benefiting policy insiders, or conversely as an instrument that alleviates bias in supranational policy making? Building on rational choice institutionalism, this article outlines the potential distributional outcomes of the regime and argues that they are likely to vary along the lines of a classic divide in policy making that opposes policy insiders to outsiders. Two competing narratives are discussed in relation to the expected direction of this variation by focusing on insiders’ incentives to support or oppose the regime. The observable implications are tested empirically on an original dataset containing information about stakeholders’ positions on the evaluation of the regime status quo, its proposed further institutionalisation and their recommendations for change. The findings describe a consultation regime that seems to have created conditions alleviating bias in stakeholders’ participation in supranational policy making. This is evident in the lack of systematic, significant differences between insiders and outsiders in the evaluation of the consultation regime. Where differences do occur, they are consistent with the image of a consultation regime that has not reinforced bias in favour of policy insiders. These actors are found to be more critical of the regime status quo, its institutionalisation and more inclined to recommend policy improvements. This supports an optimistic view over the democratic credentials and legitimacy of the EU consultation regime and outlines an additional scenario under which policy actors that are traditionally associated with exerting more power and influence find themselves stripped of their privileged position in the context of European supranational governance.     

Turned on,Turned off: On Timely and Untimely Feminist Knowledge Production

Through cacophonic story-telling, emerging from ethnographic observations from academic scenes in Australia and elsewhere, the article seeks to explore the timeliness and untimeliness of feminist knowledge production. Rather than arguing a particular point or making a claim for a particular position, it attempts to sense into the lived experience of being subject to, and of, turns in social theory. As a whole the paper seeks to work with and allow for multiplicity in tone, focus, researcher positioning, reader positioning, and more, to see what knowledge that does not seek confident closure can be.     

Pulses from the multitude: virtuosity and black feminist discourse

Using a dialogic format this conversation between two authors uses political theorist Paolo Virno's conception of the “multitude” to examine and compare two different arenas of black feminist protest that took place on social media in the latter half of 2013. As a performative article, it offers historical and theoretical background to the terms “multitude,” “public intellect,” and “virtuosic labor” in racialized capitalist formations, situating them to provide an alternative to the power of the State – an alternative that unlike the State does not claim to confer rights. The article looks at the Facebook response to a call from the Crunk Feminist Collective to white feminists to speak out on the verdict exonerating Trayvon Martin’s killer and offer counter images to those that describe Martin's killing as justified. It then looks at the public dialogue around the applicability of the term “feminism” to Beyoncé's self-titled “visual album.” Through aesthetic inquiry, the authors look at the form these examples of protest take to situate and propose the active viewing of these aesthetic forms by others on social media, as well as by the authors of this article, as a kind of virtuosic labor. The article concludes with a series of poems created using the “cut-up” technique designed to transmit feeling through subjective action and a task manifesto for white feminists to use as a guide.     

The early modern origins of contemporary European tax outcomes

What explains variation in tax outcomes between European states? Previous studies emphasise the role played by political institutions, but focus mostly on the input side of politics – how access to power and policy making is structured – and the institutions of relatively recent times. It is argued in this article that output‐side institutions related to the implementation of political decisions also matter and have deep institutional origins. As the classic literature has argued, the early modern period from 1450 to 1800 was formative for the development of fiscal capacity, but European states diverged in the stock of capacity they acquired. This article tests whether these differences still affect contemporary tax outcomes using a novel measure of fiscal capacity, based on the age, extent and quality of state‐administered cadastral records. The empirical analysis shows that, on average, countries with higher early modern fiscal capacity have higher tax revenue today, compared to countries with lower early modern fiscal capacity. This association is robust to different model specifications and alternative measurements. The findings have important policy implications as they indicate how deeply the current fiscal problems of the continent are entrenched, but also point to what needs to be prioritised within ongoing tax reforms.     

Do female legislators benefit from incumbency advantage? Incumbent renomination in a flexible-list PR system

This study investigates whether female legislators, just like their male colleagues, also benefit from incumbency advantage in the form of privileged access to candidate selection. This is done by examining whether female and male MPs receive the same reward for equivalent political performance when renomination decisions are made by political parties. Political performance is conceptualised in terms of incumbents’ popularity among voters, readiness to vote along the party line and legislative activity. An original dataset comprising 1032 observations on Czech legislators elected between 1996 and 2017 is used in the analysis. The results suggests that well-performing female MPs are just as likely as their male colleagues to secure a favourable renomination outcome. This result should not, however, be interpreted as evidence of gender-neutral access to re-election and political seniority as past research clearly indicates that female MPs need to work harder than men to produce the same political output.     

Women’s Organizations of Political Parties: Formal Possibilities,Informal Challenges and Discursive Controversies

Feminist research focusing on gender policy successes in the 1990s and 2000s emphasized the strengths of women’s organizations of political parties in advancing key gender equality issues in Finland. However, both the “feminism” and “politics” of political parties’ women’s organizations, hitherto apparent in Finland and elsewhere in Europe, are now deemed outdated, a paradox that is critically explored in this article. The analysis is based on interview data with women and men politicians and party workers and is structured around the key research question: how are the women’s organizations of political parties discursively constructed by the interviewed politicians and party workers and with what effects? These discursive constructions are studied in relation to: (i) the formal institutional position of the women’s organizations of political parties, (ii) informal institutional position vis-à-vis the mother party, and (iii) discursive controversies surrounding their feminism and politics. The discourse analysis reveals the contradictions and challenges faced by women’s political organizations in contemporary politics.