How do citizens’ preferences over social policy shape their vote choice? In this article, I argue that the relationship between individuals’ values and voting behavior is powerfully conditioned by ...the informational structure of the welfare state. More visible welfare states provide citizens with greater information on social policy, allowing them to more easily connect these preferences to the political process. Where visibility is low, voters place less importance on social-policy issues in voting. I test this claim against data from 55 elections from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the 1996 and 2006 International Social Survey Program. I find compelling evidence that where welfare-state visibility is high, voters attach more weight to spatial distance from parties in voting, are more likely to see welfare related issues as important, are better able to place parties on a left-right spectrum, and have more consistent policy preferences.
An ecological public welfare forest is an important basis for the construction of national ecological security. This study took public welfare forests at the provincial level or above in Hunan ...Province as the research object. Based on the in situ monitoring data and remote sensing data, we constructed a random forest (RF) model for inversing the biomass of public welfare forests with different types. Then, based on the inversion results, we investigated the biomass spatial pattern. Combined with topographical and socio-economic factors, we constructed a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model to analyze the biomass driving factors of different vegetation types in public forests. The results showed the following: (1) The biomass of public welfare forests in Hunan Province presented a strip distribution pattern that gradually increases from the central to the southwest and northeast. The total biomass of public welfare forests in Hunan Province was 338.13 million tons, with an average biomass of 68.31 t·hm−2. In the different types of public welfare forests, the mean biomass of the types were as follows: shrub (4.65 t·hm−2) < broadleaf forest (59.27 t·hm−2) < conifer–broadleaf mixed forest (62.44 t·hm−2) < bamboo forest (71.33 t·hm−2) < coniferous forest (100.33 t·hm−2). (2) Topographic and socio-economic factors have a significant impact on the spatial pattern of biomass in public welfare forests. Slope had the greatest effect on coniferous forest, conifer–broadleaf mixed forest, and shrub forest, while POP had the greatest effect on broadleaf forest and bamboo forest. This study investigates the spatial patterns and driving factors of biomass in public welfare forests at the provincial level, filling the gap in forest biomass monitoring in public welfare forests in Hunan Province. It provides a new method to improve the accuracy of forest biomass estimation and data support for the sustainable management of public welfare forests.
The amount of social security assistance a person can receive in Aotearoa New Zealand depends on their relationship status. Single persons are entitled to substantially higher rates of financial ...assistance than those in a relationship. Determinations of benefit recipients' relationship status therefore have significant implications. In 1996, the Court of Appeal in 'Ruka v Department of Social Welfare' held that a de facto relationship for the purpose of social security entitlement comprised two essential elements: financial interdependence and emotional commitment. On these terms, a relationship marred by extreme levels of physical, psychological and financial violence is not a relationship in the nature of marriage. The majority judgment was initially hailed as "radical" and a positive shift in how the Ministry of Social Development was required to determine benefit recipients' relationship status. This article argues, however, that the potentially transformative effects of 'Ruka' were never realised and the judgment has had minimal impact on how the Ministry conducts investigations and determines benefit recipients' relationship status. This article further contends that the current approach leads to unjust and punitive outcomes for benefit recipients, particularly mothers and their children, and results in breaches of fundamental human rights.
The Limits of Quantification Sunstein, Cass R.
California law review,
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Journal Article
Recenzirano
The difficulty of quantifying benefits and costs is a recurrent one in both public policy and ordinary life. Much of the time, we cannot quantify the benefits of potential courses of action, or the ...costs, or both, and we must nonetheless decide whether and how to proceed. Under existing executive orders, agencies are generally required to quantify both benefits and costs, and (to the extent permitted by law) to show that the former justify the latter. But agencies are also permitted to consider factors that are difficult or impossible to quantify, such as human dignity and fairness, and also to consider factors that are not quantifiable because of the limits of existing knowledge. When quantification is impossible, agencies should engage in "breakeven analysis," by which they explore how high the nonquantifiable benefits would have to be in order for the benefits to justify the costs. Breakeven analysis can be used and potentially disciplined in three different ways. (1) Sometimes agencies are able to identify lower or upper bounds, either through point estimates or through an assessment of expected value. (2) Agencies can often make progress by exploring comparison cases in which relevant values have already been assigned (such as for a statistical life). (3) When agencies cannot identify lower or upper bounds, and when helpful comparisons are unavailable, breakeven analysis requires agencies to identify what information is missing and to specify the conditions under which benefits would justify costs ("conditional justification"). In admittedly rare cases, regulators, no less than individuals, might have to "pick" or instead to "opt."
The primary sources of Qawaid-e-Fighiyyah (legal maxims) are the Quran, Hadith, sayings of the companions of Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W), sayings of jurists' Ijmaa and Qayas. In western countries, most ...of the Latin maxims have been introduced and organized during medieval ages when these countries used Latin language in their courts. A renowned western scholar/jurist, Herbert Broom's book "Legal Maxim" which was published in 1845 earned great fame. Broom's Latin maxims have great resemblance with Qawaid -e- Ficihiyyah. This article throws light upon the comparative analysis of Islamic and Latin legal maxims with special reference to the jurisdiction of Hakim/Head of state about Maslahat-e- Aama (Public welfare).
How can we all work together to eliminate the avoidable injustices that plague our health care system and society?Health is determined by far more than a person's choices and behaviors. Social and ...political conditions, economic forces, physical environments, institutional policies, health care system features, social relationships, risk behaviors, and genetic predispositions all contribute to physical and mental well-being. In America and around the world, many of these factors are derived from a lingering history of unequal opportunities and unjust treatment for people of color and other vulnerable communities. But they aren't the only ones who suffer because of these disparities—everyone is impacted by the factors that degrade health for the least advantaged among us.In Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's Problem? Dr. Lisa Cooper shows how we can work together to eliminate the injustices that plague our health care system and society. The book follows Cooper's journey from her childhood in Liberia, West Africa, to her thirty-year career working first as a clinician and then as a health equity researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Drawing on her experiences, it explores how differences in communication and the quality of relationships affect health outcomes. Through her work as the founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, it details the actions and policies needed to reduce and eliminate the conditions that are harming us all. Cooper reveals with compelling detail how health disparities are crippling our health care system and society, driving up health care costs, leading to adverse health outcomes and ultimately an enormous burden of human suffering. Why Are Health Disparities Everyone's Problem? demonstrates the ways in which everyone's health is interconnected, both within communities and across the globe. Cooper calls for a new kind of herd immunity, when a sufficiently high proportion of people, across race and social class, become immune to harmful social conditions through "vaccination" with solidarity among groups and opportunities created by institutional and societal practices and policies. By acknowledging and acting upon that interconnectedness, she believes everyone can help to create a healthier world.Features• Raises readers' health care inequities literacy through an approachable narrative with specific examples• Introduces the concept of "herd immunity" as it applies to building communal awareness of systemic injustices• Features sections that underscore key takeaways• Includes contributions from the world's leading minds through their research findings and quotations• Guides readers on what can be done at an individual level as a patient, public health professional, and community member • Includes inspiring stories of effective health equity studies and practices around the world, from Ghana's ADHINCRA Project addressing hypertension control to Baltimore's BRIDGE Study for depression in African Americans and the Maryland and Pennsylvania–based RICH LIFE Project for hypertension, diabetes, and other medical conditionsJohns Hopkins WavelengthsIn classrooms, field stations, and laboratories in Baltimore and around the world, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professors of Johns Hopkins University are opening the boundaries of our understanding of many of the world's most complex challenges. The Johns Hopkins Wavelengths book series brings readers inside their stories, illustrating how their pioneering discoveries benefit people in their neighborhoods and across the globe in artificial intelligence, cancer research, food systems' environmental impacts, health equity, science diplomacy, and other critical arenas of study. Through these compelling narratives, their insights will spark conversations from dorm rooms to dining rooms to boardrooms.
This volume, a companion to Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition , is a collection of papers on data collection issues for welfare and low-income populations. The papers on survey issues ...cover methods for designing surveys taking into account nonresponse in advance, obtaining high response rates in telephone surveys, obtaining high response rates in in-person surveys, the effects of incentive payments, methods for adjusting for missing data in surveys of low-income populations, and measurement error issues in surveys, with a special focus on recall error. The papers on administrative data cover the issues of matching and cleaning, access and confidentiality, problems in measuring employment and income, and the availability of data on children. The papers on welfare leavers and welfare dynamics cover a comparison of existing welfare leaver studies, data from the state of Wisconsin on welfare leavers, and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth used to construct measures of heterogeneity in the welfare population based on the recipient's own welfare experience. A final paper discusses qualitative data.
How is policy implementation affected by increased polarisation and extreme shifts in politics? In order to address this question, the paper focuses on frontline workers’ (street-level bureaucrats’) ...interpretations of political shifts and how these are then translated into practice. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among social workers in Northeast Brazil, the paper proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the influence of political landscapes on policy implementation by foregrounding the political processes in which these agents play a critical role. Drawing on empirical data, the paper proposes ideal types of possible outcomes of translation practices – counterbalance, collaboration, resistance – that function as a guiding framework for future research.
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Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter of a century ago, Russia has undergone a dizzying and complex transition that has seen it transform from a communist state into a democracy ...before regressing back to the more authoritarian regime that exists today. Through a compelling and insightful analysis of the Russian case, this book explores the role that social welfare plays in regime transitions, specifically it examines the role that gender and social welfare has played in Russia's often chaotic post-communist political evolution, from Boris Yeltsin's assumption of the presidency in 1991 to Vladimir Putin's return for a third term as president in 2012. From 2001 to 2011, social welfare (especially pronatalist policies) was a key part of the political leadership's governance strategy. A shift from pluralism to regulation accompanied a discourse in which strong government would rein-in a wayward society. But can a hierarchical political system satisfy the aspirations of a changing citizenry? This study demonstrates that gender is at the very centre of debates over the authenticity of democracy in Russia.
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Andrea Chandler is Professor in the Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She authored two previous books: Institutions of Isolation: Border Controls in the Soviet Union and its Successor States, 1917-1993 and Shocking Mother Russia: Democratization, Social Rights, and Pension Reform in Russia, 1990-2001.
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Andrea Chandler's fine new book provides an innovative analysis of the competing discourses – liberal, nationalist, feminist, human rights - that political elites and citizens used to debate social policy in Russia from 1990-2011. Chandler assigns discourse a key role in explaining policy outcomes, and argues that social policy has been a major cause of both democratizing and de-democratizing regime changes. Linda Cook, Department of Political Science, Brown University, USA
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Through compelling and insightful analysis of the Russian case, this book explores the role that social welfare plays in regime transitions. It examines the role that gender and social welfare has played in Russia's post-communist political evolution from Yeltsin's assumption of the presidency to Putin's return for a third term as president in 2012
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Introduction: Democracy, Gender and Citizenship in Postcommunist Russia
PART I. DISCOURSES OF THE EARLY TRANSITION; LIBERALISM, FEMINISM AND THE MARKETS IN THE 1990S 1. Welfare and Social Justice in the USSR's Final Years 2. Liberalism and Social Reform in the Early Transition 3. Gender Equality, Individual Empowerment and Pluralism
PART II. OPPOSITION POLITICS, NATIONALISM AND THE SEARCH FOR AUTHENTICIT, 1995-2004
4. Social Welfare in the Mid-Transition, 1995-2000 5. The Debate on Public Morality 6. The Rediscovery of the Child
PART III. STATISM AND DEMOCRATIC REVERSAL UNDER PUTIN; POLICIES FOR A WAYWARD SOCIETY (2000-2008)
Chapter 7. Pronatalism and Family Politics under Putin's Presidency Chapter 8. Gender and the State in Debates on Conscription
PART IV. STEPS TOWARDS A POST-PUTIN SOCIAL CONTRACT
Chapter 9. Social Justice and Social Inclusion, 2005-2011 Conclusion
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Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000
Amy G. Mazur, Theorizing Feminist Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002
Linda Cook, Postcommunist Welfare States: Reform Politics in Russia and Eastern Europe, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Mitchell A. Orenstein, Privatizing Pensions: The Transnational Campaign for Social Security Reform. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005
How Russia Really Works: the Informal Practices that Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006
