Paying Attention to Politics: Public Responsiveness and Welfare Policy Change

In order for the democratic process to work properly, it is vital that the public pays attention to politics and signals its opinions and preferences back to its representatives; if this is not the case, representatives have less incentive to represent. This article deals with the question of whether and how the public responds to welfare policy change. The thermostatic model departs from the assumption that the public responds to policy change with negative feedback, in relation to its preferred level of policy. The empirical analysis tests this model on public responses following the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care. Did the reform trigger a thermostatic response from the public, and how should this be interpreted? A contribution in relation to previous research is the inclusion of ideological orientation and proximity, variables which, I argue, condition the nature and direction of public responsiveness. The study was designed as a natural experiment in which preferences of privatization of health care were measured before and after the health care reform of 2009/2010. The results provide partial support for the thermostatic model: preferences for further privatization decrease after the reform, but primarily within one subgroup. Additionally, public responses are demonstrated to vary according to ideological orientation, where the right‐oriented react thermostatically and the left‐oriented do not. The article contributes to a further understanding of the relation between policymaking and public opinion and to the expansion of thermostatic theory.     

Governance,the State and the Politics of Development

Current western aid and development policy aims to promote ‘good governance’ in the third world. Few would deny that competent, open and fair administration is both a worthy aim and a self-evident requirement of development. However, the current orthodoxy clearly illustrates the technicist fallacy, which is implicit in the following quotation from Pope, that the effective administration or ‘management’ of development is essentially a technical or practical matter. This article argues that development is fundamentally a political matter and that it is illusory to conceive of good governance as independent of the forms of politics and type of state which alone can generate, sustain and protect it. For Forms of Government, let fools contest; Whate'er is best administered, is best. (Pope, 1734: Bk 3, lines 303-4).     

Theorizing the Submerged State: The Politics of Private Schools in the United States

In this paper, I apply Mettler's concept of the “submerged state” to aid for children at private schools in the United States, including education vouchers, in‐kind aid, and property tax exemptions. All aid policies are “submerged” in that they help private organizations take on state functions but some are more submerged than others. Theoretically, this paper distinguishes between subcategories of submergence. Using policy data from 50 states and an original database of court challenges between 1912 and 2015, I employ probit regression with sample selection to evaluate the effect of submergence on successful court challenge. I find that more submerged policies are less likely to be successfully challenged than less submerged policies. Submerged policy design enables supporters to avoid legal as well as political challenge.     

One Model Does Not Fit All: The Varied Politics of State Immigrant Policies, 2005–16

This article addresses conceptual and measurement challenges that complicate the study of state immigrant policies. First, given the multiple facets of immigrant‐related policy, policy‐specific effects may be obscured by highly aggregated outcomes variables. Second, variables of interest often capture both time‐varying and time‐invariant effects, potentially producing coefficients that are uninterpretable averages of both processes. This article presents a research design that addresses both of these obstacles and applies it to an original dataset of both integrative and punitive policies adopted over the period 2005–16. The findings suggest that the causal roles of growing immigrant populations, partisanship, and wealth vary across different clusters of immigrant policies and that average, cross‐state effects often differ from within‐state effects. Future research would do well to clearly link theoretical expectations to specific types of policy outcomes and test hypotheses over both integrative and restrictive outcomes.     

The Politics of Welfare Exclusion: Immigration and Disparity in Medicaid Coverage

The rapid growth of the immigrant population in the United States, along with changes in the demographics and the political landscape, has often raised questions for understanding trends of inequality. Important issues that have received little scholarly attention thus far are excluding immigrants’ social rights through decisive policy choices and the distributive consequences of such exclusive policies. In this article, we examine how immigration and state policies on immigrants’ access to safety net programs together influence social inequality in the context of health care. We analyze the combined effect of immigration population density and state immigrant Medicaid eligibility rules on the gap of Medicaid coverage rates between native‐ and foreign‐born populations. When tracking inequality in Medicaid coverage and critical policy changes in the post‐PRWORA era, we find that exclusive state policies widen the native‐foreign Medicaid coverage gap. Moreover, the effect of state policies is conditional on the size of the immigrant population in that state. Our findings suggest immigrants’ formal integration into the welfare system is crucial for understanding social inequality in the U.S. states.     

The Whereabouts of Power: Politics, Government and Space

Abstract In a world where it has become almost commonplace to talk about power as centralised or distributed, concentrated or diffuse, deterritorialized or dispersed even, it is all too easy to miss the diverse geographies of power that put us in place. The binary talk that forces us to choose between a centred or a decentred view of power, or to shuffle between them in an effort to blur clearly demarcated scales, leaves little room to move beyond defined distances and settled proximities in relation to the exercise of power. In this paper, a more spatially‐curious dialogue of power is opened up which foregrounds associational as well as instrumental forms of power which can make a difference to how we act politically.     

State,Politics and the Idea of Social Justice in Chile

This article explores the ways in which the idea of social justice has been utilized during this century as an idée-force in Chilean politics. It stresses the Catholic background of the concept and shows how it has been adapted to the political objectives of several doctrinal streams. The idea of social justice has been a powerful ideological instrument for governments in their attempts to deal with the social expectations of the electorate and to create a broad consensus between different political and social sectors. This idea has also been historically related to an active state role in the search for equity through income distribution and the adoption of progressive social legislation. While the recent military government (1973-90) radically reformulated both the social function of the state and the official definition of social justice, the current democratic authorities seem to have readopted the idea of social justice as a key element in their ideological discourse.     

The Henry Tax Review,Cartel Parties and the Reform Capacity of the Australian State

The Henry Tax Review is a work in progress, but it has already advanced sufficiently to constitute an important case study of state capacity in Australia. Using the Henry Tax Review as a case study, this paper sheds light on the question of whether the national political system is capable of devising and implementing long-term reforms. Whilst specific policy failures inevitably have a contingent dimension in the form of poor strategy and leadership or unfavourable economic conditions, the paper discusses the erosion of institutional and relational structures which, arguably, has diminished systemic political capacity. This is tantamount to a structural weakening of state capacity in Australia, a development which has the potential to erode the potential of any government to enact significant strategic policy change.     

唐代崖州治所考

关于唐代崖州治所,《通典》等全国性史志皆明确记载在舍城县,正德《琼台志》等海南旧志则认为在颜城县。孰是孰非?因从来无人进行考证和评断,以至两说长期并存。现经深入考证,所得结论是“舍城说”所言为是,“颜城说”完全错误。至于唐崖州治故址,在今海口市琼山区府城东南三十里龙塘镇的珠崖岭上。     

Today's State of Exception: Abu-Jamal,Agamben, JanMofiamed,and the Democratic State of Emergency

Abstract

This essay engages the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and the literary criticism of Abdul R. JanMohammed in critically exploring the contours of the present arrangement of democratic politics in the United States. Giorgio Agamben's exception theory of sovereignty and bare life are deployed in order to grasp the political meaning of surprisingly unprecedented and exceptional recent court rulings in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has been on Pennsylvania's death row since 1982. Abu-Jamal's experience of exceptional rulings also requires a critical elaboration of the racialized nature of American democracy. Thus, Agamben's theory finds a critical complement with the work of literary theorist Abdul R. JanMohammed, particularly JanMohammed's formulations of "social death" and the "dialectics of death" for "death-bound-subjects." The theories of Agamben and JanMohammed make clear the nature of Abu-Jamal's political struggle and the state of democratic politics that so often transforms the exception into the rule, specifically in the case of the marginal and dispossessed. The significance of Abu-Jamal's case thus becomes one of understanding the production and reproduction of the state of exception and the (im)possibilities of political transformation and liberation from the arrested state of democracy in the modern world.     

对2005年海峡两岸政党交往的回顾与思考

中华民族的血缘历史脐带,两岸对和平的共同诉求,使得2005年两岸政党交往有了现实可能。从国民党、亲民党、新党三党角度而言,两岸政党交往具有缅怀先烈、寻根祭祖、政党之间的政治和解、推动两岸的经贸合作等诉求和特点。两岸政党交往影响深远:增进了彼此的了解与理解,为发展两岸关系奠定了现实基础;建立了政党定期沟通平台,为两岸关系发展提供了新枢纽;促进了两岸的经贸合作,为发展两岸关系添加了润滑剂。     

NGOs,Civil Society,and the State in Bangladesh: The Politics of Representing the Poor

The established rhetoric of opposition between state and NGOs as development agents has shifted to one of complementarity and common interest. Along with this, the ‘comparative advantage’ claimed for NGOs has expanded from economic and welfare benefits to encompass also the political goods of civil society and popular participation. This paper reviews these developments in the context of Bangladesh. It argues that they need to be assessed critically in ways which are both theoretically informed and locally contextualized. While recognizing that there are, indeed, areas of common experience and interest between the state and NGOs in Bangladesh, it questions whether these necessarily coincide with the interests of those they all invoke: the poor.     

The Dynamics of Incrementalism: Subsystems, Politics, and Public Lands

A host of research has been produced in the decade since Baumgartner and Jones' theory of punctuated equilibrium first drew attention to the dynamics of policy change over time. Much of this research follows a topic across time, highlighting the shift from negative to positive feedback as challengers push an issue from subsystem to institutional level. Far less attention has been paid to the periods between major punctuations, neglecting key questions about whether incremental periods reflect an absence of challengers or the successful defense of established subsystem interests.
This research is a comparison of policy change across two segments of environmental policy. The breakup of the timber subsystem was a clear victory for environmentalists, yet these same actors have been largely unsuccessful at dislodging established grazing interests. These findings highlight the strategic value of venue shifting for bypassing entrenched interests and illustrate the potential for successful challenges to occur in judicial venues.     

朝野纠葛:北京政府时期的舆论与外交--以关税特别会议为个案的考察

关于北京政府时期的外交,尽管学术界近来已开始有了较为客观的评价,不过对于其背后因素的考察还有待深入。实际上,在北京政府时期,由于特殊的时代背景,各种社会舆论被全面动员起来,以汹涌澎湃之势冲击着外交这一特殊的政治领域,从而形成了近代史上国民外交的黄金时期。于是,由于中央政府统治的虚弱,在其决策者进行外交运作时,就处处受到来自舆论界的影响,这是一个极为明显的历史特色,通过对当时舆论的考察,就会更深层次地探究北京政府外交的两难境地。笔者在考察时,主要以关税特别会议为个案,以上海舆论为核心,以《申报》、《东方杂志》等报刊为第一手资料。     

古苏国地望及其疆域问题

研究古苏国地理及其疆域,应区别古温国与古苏国。古有苏与古温国没有关系,不能把古温邑说成古苏国始封地苏城。古温国在温邑。但苏、温二国关系密切,渊源流长,西周苏忿生封于温,则将苏国与温国合并为一苏国,其分封地望,应在今河南温县上苑村、古城村一带,为古温邑。     

Renewable Energy Politics: Policy Typologies,Policy Tools,and State Deployment of Renewables

This paper investigates the competing forces driving the development of renewable energy in the American states. We formulate a framework of state renewable energy politics and develop a set of hypotheses regarding the role of politics, policies, and prices in renewable energy development. We test these hypotheses with a fixed effect vector decomposition model using a panel data set for the U.S. states from 1990 to 2008. The results indicate that renewable energy development is influenced by regulatory institutions, the party affiliations of the governor and legislators, and the professionalism of the legislature, accompanied by the effects of various policy instruments.     

舒城九里墩墓年代与国别考

舒城九里墩墓中出土有一批战国早期青铜器物,下葬年代为公元前445年之后。墓中所出的青铜礼器具有典型的楚文化特征,墓主人应为战国早期楚国贵族,今舒城可能为其封地;墓中虽亦出蔡、钟离二国器物,但此二国距舒城甚远、时代亦不符,可能为楚灭蔡、钟离二国后所得战利品。     

Capital, State and Space: Contesting the Borderless World

The globalization of economic activities and transnational corporations (TNCs) has led us to think that we are entering a 'borderless' world. Some prophets of globalization argue that it has led to the end of geography. To them, the state has ceased to be an institution capable of exerting influences on the activities of transnational capital, which has also become increasingly 'placeless'. This paper aims to contest the issue of the alleged end-state discourse of a 'borderless' world. It argues that, despite the accelerated processes of globalization, national boundaries still matter in the decision-making and global reach of capital. The notion of a 'borderless' world is more folklore than reality. Based on theoretical and empirical literature in international political economy and business studies, the paper offers a dialectical perspective that examines the changing relationship between capital and the state, and the embedded relationship between capital and space in the organization of the global space-economy. Together, both arguments point to the importance of understanding dynamic transformations of the global economy, before considering its globalization tendencies.     

Agglomeration and the Local State: The Tobacco Economy of Yunnan, China

This paper explores the interplay of local state action with historical contingency, innovation and external economies in the world's largest tobacco-producing region – Yunnan, China. Formed in a relatively unindustrialized province and promoted by local authorities as their primary revenue base, Yunnan's tobacco economy gained a headstart through concentrated resource support and ad hoc regulatory flexibility. Its further growth has drawn greatly on intraregional spillovers of knowledge of locally based institutional innovation, which foster and enhance conventional forms of external economies. Implications for the study of regional economies are discussed.