Countries that now contemplate constitutional reform often grapple with the question of whether to constitutionalise social rights. This book presents an argument for why, under the right conditions, ...doing so can be a good way to advance social justice. In making such a case, the author considers the nature of the social minimum, the role of courts among other institutions, the empirical record of judicial impact, and the role of constitutional text. He argues, however, that when enforcing such rights, judges ought to adopt a theory of judicial restraint structured around four principles: democratic legitimacy, polycentricity, expertise and flexibility. These four principles, when taken collectively, commend an incrementalist approach to adjudication. The book combines theoretical, doctrinal, empirical and comparative analysis, and is written to be accessible to lawyers, social scientists, political theorists and human rights advocates.
This book is a five-country empirical study of the causes and consequences of social and economic rights litigation. Detailed studies of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and South Africa present ...systematic and nuanced accounts of court activity on social and economic rights in each country. The book develops new methodologies for analyzing the sources of and variation in social and economic rights litigation, explains why actors are now turning to the courts to enforce social and economic rights, measures the aggregate impact of litigation in each country, and assesses the relevance of the empirical findings for legal theory. This book argues that courts can advance social and economic rights under the right conditions precisely because they are never fully independent of political pressures.
Human rights activists frequently claim that human rights are indivisible, and the United Nations has declared the indivisibility, interdependency, and interrelatedness of these rights to be beyond ...dispute. Yet in practice a significant divide remains between the two grand categories of human rights: civil and political rights, on the one hand, and economic, social, and cultural rights on the other. To date, few scholars have critically examined how the notion of indivisibility has shaped the complex relationship between these two sets of rights. InIndivisible Human Rights, Daniel J. Whelan offers a carefully crafted account of the rhetoric of indivisibility. Whelan traces the political and historical development of the concept, which originated in the contentious debates surrounding the translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into binding treaty law as two separate Covenants on Human Rights. In the 1960s and 1970s, Whelan demonstrates, postcolonial states employed a revisionist rhetoric of indivisibility to elevate economic and social rights over civil and political rights, eventually resulting in the declaration of a right to development. By the 1990s, the rhetoric of indivisibility had shifted to emphasize restoration of the fundamental unity of human rights and reaffirm the obligation of states to uphold both major human rights categories-thus opening the door to charges of violations resulting from underdevelopment and poverty. AsIndivisible Human Rightsillustrates, the rhetoric of indivisibility has frequently been used to further political ends that have little to do with promoting the rights of the individual. Drawing on scores of original documents, many of them long forgotten, Whelan lets the players in this drama speak for themselves, revealing the conflicts and compromises behind a half century of human rights discourse.Indivisible Human Rightswill be welcomed by scholars and practitioners seeking a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding the realization of human rights.
"Tushnet puts flesh on the bones of the claim that constitutionally guaranteed social rights, judicially enforced, are already a part of the jurisprudence of the United States and other countries of ...interest. He takes this argument some distance beyond where any other scholar has taken it, so far as I know, and he does so with considerable refinement. This book gives a full and strong manifestation of the style, intelligence, and learning that have earned Tushnet his eminence as a scholar of American constitutional law and comparative constitutionalism."?Frank I. Michelman, Harvard Law School"This is an important contribution to an important debate in the United States about the possibility and prospects for the courts to play a more modest role in politics and policy. Tushnet demonstrates that, by a nice twist, a more modest judicial role could lead to a more robust set of social rights. And his comparative cases show that this is not purely theoretical, but that it has worked out to some degree in other systems."?
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. The online open access to the book The Revised European ...Social Charter. An article-by-article commentary has been made possible with the financial assistance of the Council of Europe. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the Council of Europe. This detailed Commentary explores the boundaries of social rights at a European level through analysis of the Revised European Social Charter (RESC), the most comprehensive regional document on social rights. The Commentary considers the treaty as the counterpart of the European Convention on Human Rights, examining how it sets out fundamental rights in the social field. It focuses primarily on the rich jurisprudence developed by the Charter’s monitoring body, the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR).
This introductory article to the Special Issue Marshall in Brussels? A new perspective on social citizenship and the European Union first argues that there is a need for a novel systematic framework ...that captures the increasingly complex web of relationships between the European level and the national and local levels in the creation and implementation of social rights. It then summarizes the contributions of the articles included in the Special Issue, starting with the first article that provides such a novel framework, a power resource-based and multi-layered conception of social rights which looks at social rights as bundles of three key power resources: normative, enforcement and instrumental resources. It then shows how the other articles apply this framework when analysing a variety of issues related to European social citizenship. Finally, it sums up the main contributions of the Special Issue: its contribution to the further development of power resource theory; to the theory of social citizenship; and to capturing how social rights in the EU increasingly result from the creative assemblage of different resources provided by different actors and levels of government, resulting in a ‘marble cake’ pattern akin to that existing in historical federations like the US or Switzerland.
Shocking Mother Russia Chandler, Andrea
Shocking Mother Russia,
2004, 20041019, 2014, 2004-01-01, 20040101
eBook
Examining the reform process of the old age pension system in Russia, from its Soviet origins to the Putin era,Shocking Mother Russiaadds significantly to the growing body of literature on ...comparative social policy and the political challenges of pension reform. Andrea Chandler explains why Russia's old-age pension system went into decline after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, even though it was a prominent issue in the political arena at the outset of the post-communist transition.
While tracing the roots of the system's difficulties to the Soviet Union's first efforts to establish a national social welfare system after 1917, Chandler nonetheless devotes the bulk of her study to the period from 1990 to 2001. While political factors impeded reform for much of this eleven-year period, ultimately Russia's striking policy reversals provide a case study for developing nations. In 1990, a new Russian pension law was adopted during the Soviet reform process ofperestroika. The system was again significantly altered in 2001 when a market-reform-oriented package of pension legislation was passed.Shocking Mother Russiaplaces the Russian experience in comparative perspective, and suggests lessons for pension reform derived from analysis of the Russian case.
Immigration is one of the most contested issues in contemporary political life because of its possible implications for state welfare provisions of receiving countries. There is a fear that rising ...immigration will erode public support for social policies that benefit immigrants, particularly in contexts of economic crisis. However, some believe that social trust is a determining factor that may mitigate such anti-immigrant attitudes. We test both arguments for the case of Spain through multiple regression analyses of surveys on attitudes towards immigrants, carried out by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) from 2007 to 2017. While the results are consistent with expectations according to group threat theory, we also found that trusting individuals are more likely to support immigrants' social rights. Moreover, social trust lessens the negative effects of the perception of threat posed by outgroups -perceived economic threat and perceived size of their population- on support for immigrants' social rights.
I processi di transnazionalizzazione e di flessibilizzazione/precarizzazione del lavoro contribuiscono a riconfigurare gli attributi di cittadinanza formale e le pratiche di cittadinanza materiale ...delle nuove generazioni, trasformando in modo radicale il rapporto tra individui, lavoro, territorio e diritti. Le implicazioni sul piano della cittadinanza di precarietà e mobilità sono state indagate raramente nella loro interazione. Obiettivo del contributo è individuare in che modo la “flessimobilità” incide nel riconfigurare il rapporto tra giovani e cittadinanza e comprendere come contribuisca ad alimentare l’incertezza nella progettazione dei percorsi di vita. Il contributo si basa sull’analisi di documenti UE e interviste in profondità a ricercatrici mobili nello Spazio Europeo della Ricerca. La ricerca indica che vi sono delle fratture e delle contraddizioni nel modo in cui la mobilità è soggettivamente e oggettivamente vissuta. La tensione tra la promozione istituzionale alla mobilità e la debole costruzione di un sistema di diritti coerente con questa, spinge i ricercatori flessi-precari ad assumere in larga parte su di sé i rischi e le incertezze connessi a questo tipo di percorso. In questa tensione è ravvisabile l’influenza di un approccio neoliberista, che spinge gli individui a responsabilizzarsi e le istituzioni a deresponsabilizzarsi.
