The Potential Impact of Disability Studies on Political Science (as well as vice-versa)

The conjunction of two seemingly disparate fields of research such as disability studies and political science creates the potential of yielding results that are either familiar or unexpected. On the one hand, it is probable that the merger of these subjects might contribute insights that could expand the scope of investigations about disability and add one more important element to policy analysis. On the other hand, it is also possible that the reciprocal impact of these areas of research could expose significant anomalies in the dominant paradigms of either or both fields that might have a lasting effect. The first portion of this paper examines the impact of political science on disability studies; the second part assesses the potential effect of disability studies on political science; and the final segment explores the prospects for a new paradigm in political science that would permit an increased analysis of social movements and political identity, theories of social change, the phenomenon of paternalism, and the implications of differences in physical appearance.     

President Obama at mid‐term

This article provides an analysis of President Obama at mid‐term. It looks at the mid‐term elections from the perspective of the political issues that informed the debate, the implications of Republican control of the House of Representatives for both legislation and relations between the administration and Congress, and the policy areas where cooperation and possible progress is possible. The article looks at the Tea Party movement as a collection of single issue and multi‐issue political groups ranging from ‘nativists’ to Christian fundamentalists to the eclectic and unprecedented combination of fiscal and social conservatives seen at Glen Beck's ‘honoring America’ event at the Washington Monument. This broad movement may be seen as a classical revitalization movement, not unlike those described by Anthony F. C. Wallace. It is opposed by another ‘revitalization movement’ namely the ‘American renewal’ promised by Obama as he ran for office in 2008. These countervailing narratives—in effect two different versions of America, one reflecting the Tea Party broadly conceived and the other reflecting Obama's ‘promise’—are seeking political traction among independents. The implications of this struggle are momentous. The prevailing narrative will frame policy going forward on a range of domestic issues and on selected foreign policy questions, which will include the present debate on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia and the upcoming debate on China, which will have even further reaching effects. Finally, this article describes Obama's struggle to frame his policy successes and the ensuing debate in a favourable light. His opponents have sought to limit his progress by presenting him as ‘the other”, an effective but destructive technique that could have longer term effects on the domestic political discourse. However, the author remains an optimist; he believes, together with 50 per cent of Americans, the president is likable, logical and gives a good speech, and that he will be re‐elected in 2012.     

The legacy of fascism in the present: ‘third millennium fascists’ in Italy

New political groups directly or indirectly related to the European fascist past are gaining strength and significance in the political arena of the new millennium. Starting from an analysis of CasaPound in Italy, a movement and party whose activists define themselves as ‘third millennium fascists’, this article explores the legacy of fascism in current Italian politics. Analysing CasaPound’s history, political programme and some of the main features of its organization as a community, the article examines the prominent role the fascist legacy plays in structuring this movement, for which history constitutes a source of legitimization and identity formation. Fascism is not traced as something isolated in history, but instead its history is presented as a legitimate legacy with a significant place in Italy’s political landscape.     

In what sense ‘spaces of neoliberalism’? The new localism,the new politics of scale,and town twinning

This paper draws on a study of town twinning in Britain since 1945 to engage with narratives of ‘the new localism’ and ‘the new politics of scale’. It argues that town twinning is often used in technical assistance programmes such as the UK Government's Know How Fund and various schemes of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum. ‘Fast policy’ is a concept that can be usefully applied to these programmes and the broader field of interurban networking, urban policy mobility, and policy transfer. Town twinning plays an active yet overlooked role in fast policy. The paper also argues that town twinning is part of a longer history of bottom-up localism that includes the political arguments of John Stuart Mill, at least two moments of twentieth-century municipal internationalism, the municipal foreign policy movement of the 1980s, and the community development movement of the last three decades. This longer history suggests sources of localism other than statecraft, and problematises the conceptualisation of power and periodisation of history found in regulation theories of devolution.     

Relating Disability Policy to Broader Public Policy: Understanding the Concept of "Handicap"

While it is recognized that disability policy is a subset of broader public policy, the relationship between disability issues and other public policy issues is not well understood. Insight into this relationship can be gained through a greater understanding of the concept of "handicap," as distinguished from the concepts of "impairment" and "disability." In everyday conversation, these terms typically are used interchangeably and erroneously. However, when applied correctly, their important differences help us to focus on the appropriate level for analyzing disability and other policy issues. When ignored for reasons concerning the "political unacceptability" of handicap as a term or concept, we risk focusing on the wrong level and possibly holding individuals with disabilities responsible for circumstances beyond their control.     

Disability activism and the politics of scale

In this paper, we examine the role of spatial scale in mediating and shaping political struggles between disabled people and the state. Specifically, we draw on recent theoretical developments concerning the social construction of spatial scale to interpret two case studies of disability activism within Canada and Ireland. In particular, we provide an analysis of how successful the disability movement in each locale has been at 'jumping scale' and enacting change, as well as examining what the consequences of such scaling‐up have been for the movement itself. We demonstrate that the political structures operating in each country markedly affect the scaled nature of disability issues and the effectiveness of political mobilization at different scales .     

Holistic Policymaking: "Neo-Liberalism" as Illustrated by the Women's and Disability Rights Movements

The past several decades have seen the rise of two movements, the disability rights movement and the women's movement, with parallel concerns, histories, organizational issues, and other attributes. This article examines the philosophies of the two movements and their significance for the policymaking process. For example, both have struggled with the issues of difference versus equality in determining public policy; both stress the importance of considering problems to reside not in personal characteristics but in interactions with the environment. The article traces these and other similarities in ways of looking at policy problems between the women's movement and the disability movement, examines how these similarities reveal a fundamentally different view of policymaking, compares this philosophy with basic tenets of the Clinton administration, as expressed by key policymakers, and discusses what policy would look like if these changes occurred.     

The Politics of European Union Immigration Policy: Institutions, Salience, and Harmonization

This article examines recent attempts to create a common European Union (EU) immigration policy. This "harmonized" policy has faced political blockages, despite being seen by most observers as necessary if the EU is to meet its goal of free movement of labor. Because of this resistance, immigration harmonization has lagged behind other EU policy areas. To explain national resistance to harmonizing immigration policy, our article develops a theoretical and conceptual model of how immigration policy is potentially harmonized at the EU level, but how this harmonization can be blocked or restricted. We explain these political blockages with a model of intergovernmental bargaining that focuses on political salience, political partisanship, and institutions that protect immigrant rights. We argue that these national-level factors have determined the success and the nature of various harmonization proposals, by determining the positions of member states when negotiating in the European Council. Our primary hypothesis is that when the political salience of a given immigration issue is high, any harmonization that results is more likely to be restrictive toward immigrant rights. We also hypothesize that the impact of institutions that protect immigrant rights, and of political partisanship, is variable depending on the issue area and the national context. We use literature on European integration, immigration politics, agenda-setting, venue-shopping, and two-level games to theorize, operationalize, and test these hypotheses. The article helps to advance scholarly work on immigration politics, but our model could also conceivably be applied to other high-salience policy areas in the EU.     

Peace Protest and Policy

The tremendous fluctuations in public mobilization against United States nuclear weapons policy, a relatively stable policy over four decades, present a difficult riddle to social scientists. Since the dawn of the nuclear age small groups of activists have consistently protested both the content of United States national security policy and the process by which it is made. Only occasionally, however, has this protest spread beyond a handful of relatively marginal groups, generated substantial public support, and reached mainstream political institutions. This article examines the political cycles of peace movement engagement and quiescence, and their relation to external political context, particularly public policy. I begin with a brief review of the relevant literature on the origins of the movements, noting parallels in the study of interest groups. Building on recent literature on political opportunity structure. I suggest a theoretical framework which emphasizes the interaction between activists choices and political context. I then describe the cycles of peace movement activism and quiescence on nuclear weapons issues in the United States using mass media sources to delineate periods of mobilization. I outline a number of policy variables which may help explain protest mobilization. My conclusions address the importance of policy and political context in explaining movement cycles and the potential influence of protest movements on policy.     

Judging,in Times of Panic

Summary

In his practice of intellectual history Ian Hunter has highlighted the productivity of a contextual approach to the institutions and discourses of philosophy, religion, law, and government. Deploying such an approach, his essay for this journal on the humanities in post-1960s Australia invites us to reconsider the terms in which the contemporary humanities have accounted for the world around us and in us. In drawing attention to some other examples of the way in which Hunter has applied this method, this paper explores the implications of a contextualisation of legal judgements that express ethical preferences which efface their historical conditioning. The paper suggests that such an approach might be productively applied in the work of understanding other kinds of legal judgements and policy settings that are commonly marked by a high degree of political agitation, such as contemporary immigration policy and border controls.     

Organizing From Diversity in the Name of Community: Lessons From the Disability Civil Rights Movement

The recent passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other pieces of legislation affecting the disability community and other civil rights communities suggests a level of cohesion within the disability movement that blurs the reality and the power of the tensions which did and do exist. Examining the struggles to maintain an effective, cohesive entity provides an opportunity to explore the complexity of the disability movement as well as lessons for policy and program planning and for community organizing.     

Promoting productivity in the National Health Service, 1950 to 1966

In the 1950s, the Ministry of Health, supported by interested groups outside government, recognised the political importance of productive efficiency. For leadership, organisational models and techniques the Ministry looked to the movement for industrial productivity. The NHS was receptive, but private-sector approaches were modified and dampened as they were imported. NHS management was to be the provider of technical expertise, but the deployment of this expertise was limited by clinical autonomy and de-coupling from financial incentives. This article casts new light on the history of productivity policy, NHS management and the moving frontier between state and civil society.     

The right to life movement: sources,development, and strategies

This article considers the history of the anti-abortion movement by first reviewing and assessing current images and interpretations of the movement, including the negative images used by the mass media as well as the interpretation which categorizes the movement as one of moral and political conservatism and that set out by Kristin Luker which sees the conflict between anti-abortion and pro-choice women as being between women who have lived radically different lives. The second section of the essay sets forth an explanation of the social sources and context of the pro-life movement, which is diverse and complex because it is embraced by those who see abortion as a civil rights question, as a family values issues, as a class/cultural issue, as a Church-related issue, as a gender issue, as a right-to-life issue embracing euthanasia, or as a movement of political conservatives. The institutional origins and development of the movement are explored in the next section. The next two section are devoted to two phases of the movement's search for a strategy. The first phase involved an attempt to use educational materials designed to reveal the reality rather than the abstract aspects of abortion. After Roe vs. Wade, attaching a "Human Life Amendment" to the constitution became a strategic goal. The second phase involved attempting to reverse the Roe decision by gaining the appointment of pro-life jurists to the Supreme Court. The pro-life movement entered national politics through the efforts of Catholic Bishops, the emergence of the New Right, and its own increasing political sophistication. The final section of the essay considers the situation after the Supreme Court's decision in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, which allowed states to restrict abortion. This decision precipitated a decline in support for the anti-abortion forces because the American public would rather have completely free access to abortion than a complete ban. The movement continues to have strength, however, and will likely neither ultimately succeed nor completely disappear from the political landscape.     

Polyvocal articulations of climate justice and the commonality of loss

The political-intellectual project of climate justice (CJ) is diverse in its analyses and proposals. Recently, some sympathetic critics have worried that, together with its often-contentious tenor, this polyvocality renders CJ incoherent and/or ill-suited to legal and policy application. Divergent choices of framing and means do matter, since they entail implications for the development of constituencies, alliances, and political, legal, and/or policy action. This paper argues, however, that rather than incoherence, the variation, fluidity, and complexity of CJ evidence logical adaptations to differing positionalities and circumstances, made necessary by the multiple, geographically varying dimensions of climate injustice. Critical political geographic perspectives (which happen to complement those of many movement adherents) help to expose this adaptive logic. Correspondingly, diverse articulations of CJ and their implications help show how political spaces and ecologies matter in contesting the multiple inequalities and power moves with which climate injustice is intertwined. Moreover, recent public health analyses and testimonies from affected groups suggest that shared experiences of rising, disproportionate climate-related death and other forms of individual and collective loss increasingly underpin and motivate CJ's multiple forms. The trajectories of compounding loss, still-rising greenhouse gas emissions, and the growing hegemony of CJ in a variety of settings underscore the need for continuing development of extensive solidarities among dispersed and differently positioned affected groups and potential allies. Though other approaches – including those which address climate injustices without naming them as such – may bear fruit, such extensive articulations of CJ are crucial needs that intellectual labor can help to meet.     

Waves,Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

The task of conceptualising social movements draws on a wealth of watery images, from protest waves and political currents, to imagining mobilisations as tides, ripples, cascades or high-pressure hydraulics. Called upon to analyse complex processes, these waters have a life of their own, carrying analytical implications while extending a relationship to water that is never only symbolic and is material, embodied and historical. This article explores the ways water is “enrolled” to understand movements, to advance three arguments: first, these use familiar water morphologies to naturalise particular, located understandings of political change and social form; second, they imply normative claims and ideological affinities regarding political struggle; third, this has implications for our relationship to water, echoing the abstract and alienating “modern water” of capitalist world-ecology. The article considers how critical water knowledges and subjectivities, often sustained by social movement spaces, indicate possibilities of a being-otherwise with water and its meanings.     

Political Alignments,Political Economy and Political Change in Australia 1890-1940

This paper explores the applicability of class-coalitional explanations to broad patterns of public policy in Australia at the turn of the century and during the Great Depression. It argues that this approach, with its strong comparative emphasis, does shed light on the 'historic compromise' between capital and labour established after Federation and provides some useful hypotheses about Australia's failure to 'break with orthodoxy' in the 1930s. In particular, it provides an important comparative framework for understanding the nature and role of the labour movement in Australian history, and a corrective to prevailing interpretations. The paper also argues, though, that evidence from the Australian case calls into question simple factor-endowment models of political change.     

Dutch Involvement in Asian Underwater Cultural Heritage Management: Building Upon Old Connections

Europe and Asia have a long-term maritime relationship with each other, not always to the benefit of both. However, this intensive connection has led to an outstanding heritage that is still present in many of the former colonies. These relics from the past are parts of both European and Asian history. But what we usually share is the object and not the view: the past has many different faces. The Netherlands tries to be involved in the protection and management of her heritage overseas. Being aware of the political implications this can have, it focuses on a shared responsibility, on capacity building and on sharing data and information between the partner countries. Among other tools being developed is the creation of a platform for data and information exchange, that on a political level has established a common cultural heritage policy framework.     

Tracking ethno-cultural differences: the Lagos steam tramway, 1902–1933

The Lagos steam tramway project (1902–1933) is examined against the background of British colonial town-planning policy in early twentieth-century Nigeria, with reference to the effects of its layout and services on Lagos's street morphology and ethnic tapestry. Drawing on contemporary evidence regarding colonial plans as well as local physical and social circumstances, the article shows that the tramline was used by the British colonial authorities to reinforce a pre-existent informal residential segregation in Lagos between the indigenous and the expatriate populations. By examining both social and morphological structures in order to understand the political and ethno-cultural implications of the tram, this article contributes to the recently growing literature on the history of European modes of planning outside Europe. In this literature, interdisciplinary in its character, sub-Saharan Africa has relatively limited representation.     

The Arab Uprisings and the United States: The Dichotomy Between Balancing Stability and Upholding Commitment to Democracy

The Arab Spring, a revolutionary movement for democracy that swept across the Arab Middle East in 2010, has contributed to the downfall of several oppressive authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. The movement represented several uprisings that placed the United States in a precarious position. While the uprisings have shaken U.S. policy to the core, they also presented a historic opportunity for American policymakers to craft a new and comprehensive policy that is compatible with the much‐coveted principles of democracy, freedom, and justice in a region that has historically been unable to grasp such principles. This article argues that the American administration under President Barak Obama squandered this opportunity by pursuing an incoherent and inconsistent policy. This policy revealed Obama's support of the uprisings calls for political reforms that aligned with American liberal values. However, the policy also reflected a commitment to ensure security and stability by maintaining autocratic regimes the protesters hoped to overthrow. This article demonstrates that the policy lacked consistency and clarity as it shifted from one uprising to another.     

Transnational Advocacy Networks and Affirmative Action for Dalits in India

In India, movements and parties representing the lowest ranking dalit caste groups have followed different strategies in their struggle against social, economic and cultural discrimination. In this article, a new dalit movement making use of a ‘transnational advocacy network strategy’ will be compared to a more ‘classical’dalit political party. The main policy target for the new movement is an extension of existing affirmative action policies, while the dalit BSP party focuses more on emancipatory issues. Based on an analysis of the impacts of the BSP and of the new movement at the grassroots level, it is argued that the achievements of the new movement are tempered by the fact that in order to make use of international discourses and political pressure, the movement has had to develop a strategy and policy proposals compatible with existing mainstream neoliberal discourses. This depoliticizes the policies, and hence makes them of less importance strategically. It is argued that this is likely to be a difficulty for transnational advocacy networks in general.