Abortion as a Policy Issue:

Most literature dealing with the attitudes of the mass public toward abortion addresses the question in terms of the individual woman seeking termination. This study attempts to explain attitudes when abortion is framed as a public policy question. Three dependent variables are investigated. These are the issues of public funding, when human life begins, and the Human Life Amendment. This study suggests that while religion and religiosity are still sources of division on abortion, significant political divisions also are present contributing to the difficulty the government has in resolving abortion policy issues.     

Family leave legislation in the American states: Toward a model of state policy adoption

The issue of mandated family leave has drawn substantial attention in recent years. This article develops and tests empirically a model of adoption of family leave policies in the American states during the late 1980s. State family leave policies are seen as a function of three sets of variables: (a) institutional-elite variables such as partisan control of state government and the proportion of women in the state legislatures; (b) constituency disposition variables such as mass partisanship, mass ideology, and the likelihood of general support for “women's” issues; and (c) contextual-demand variables such as birth rates and women's participation in the workforce. The model provides impressive fit to the data, accurately predicting the family leave policies of 92% of the state cases. The results suggest the importance of partisan control of state government, proportion of women in the state legislature, urbanization, and feminism as a state policy as factors that affect the probability that states will adopt mandated family leave policies. His research interests include American politics, public policy, and domestic political economy. He is editor of theAmerican Politics Quarterly, and is former President of the State Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include family policy and women's labor force participation. She received her Ph.D. in Family Science from the University of Georgia.     

What Drives the Voting on Abortion Policy? Investigating Partisanship and Religion in the State Legislative Arena

Abstract

Much of the public policy debate on abortion now centers in the nation's state capitals. This research assesses the impact of partisanship and religiosity on the voting behavior of state legislators. Recent research indicates that a legislator's religious affiliation and the religiosity of their home districts can be a powerful predictor of votes on abortion bills, but this research uses a unique data set developed to analyze voting in the Florida House of Representatives to re-test those ideas and test several new ones. This work challenges the notion that member religion or district religiosity is more influential than partisanship in predicting votes on abortion. Ordered probit techniques show partisanship, gender and legislator religion (for Catholic and Jewish members only), to be the most significant predictors of abortion voting behavior. A number of district characteristics are found to be less significant. Theoretically, this suggests that legislators fulfill their party obligations as trustee on the floor of the House, more so than following constituent interests in the classic delegate role, as originally noted by Burke.     

Abortion Counselling in Britain: Understanding the Controversy

This article reviews literature from a number of disciplines in order to provide an explanation of the political controversy attached to the provision of abortion counselling. It will show how this is an area of health policy debate in which women's reproductive bodies have become a setting for political struggle. The issue of abortion counselling in Britain has undergone a number of discursive shifts in response to political manoeuvring and changing socio‐legal framing of abortion. In particular, the article shows how much of the controversial reframing of abortion counselling was a tactical shift by political actors opposed to abortion per se, and this work is critiqued for not contextualising abortion. The article then focuses on women's abortion experiences and discusses research that shows how women's decision‐making processes, and responses to an abortion, are related to gendered socio‐cultural contexts: the extent to which women having an abortion feel they have transgressed societal norms and values, for example, is likely to affect their abortion experiences. Finally, it is suggested that providing a non‐judgemental context, and challenging negative discourses on abortion, may be the most effective way of minimising the possibility of negative emotions.     

The impact of legislator and constituency ideology on voting on the assault weapons ban

Using variables that represent a legislator's entire legal constituency, previous research by social scientists has concluded that views of the legislator's constituency have little effect on how legislators vote. This question is reexamined by defining constituency as those voters most likely to vote for the legislator (i.e., members of the legislator's own political party and independents). Furthermore, instead of measuring constituency by either a demographic or vote-based measure, a survey measure of the ideological identification of voters (i.e., the voter's self-identification as liberal, moderate, or conservative) is introduced. It is found that the ideology of a senator's electoral constituency was an important factor on the recent U.S. Senate vote to ban 19 semi-automatic assault weapons. The findings have important implications for how social scientists conceptualize and measure constituency.     

Constituency Building: Determining Employees' Willingness to Participate in Corporate Political Activities

Employing a sample drawn from employees of Fortune 500 companies, this study helps define which employees are likely to participate in corporate constituency building efforts and the relation between the variables leading to participation. Supporting and expanding findings by J. E. Grunig (1989) and Baysinger, Keim, and Zeithaml (1985), the present study revealed that employee political activity can be predicted by a model that features employee organizational commitment (based on each employee's position in the corporate organizational hierarchy, amount of company stock owned, and tenure with the company), prior record of noncompany political activism, amount of information seeking to become informed on public policy matters, degree of cognitive involvement, and willingness to support corporate public policy efforts. These findings can assist public relations practitioners who seek to create employee constituency efforts in the most feasible and efficient manner.     

Abortion Perspectives and Pollsters' Questions

Abstract

In measuring public opinion about controversial issues, pollsters strive for balanced and comprehensive coverage of the subject. This type of coverage may be undermined, however, when one perspective of the issue tends to predominate in society. This point is illustrated by a review of questions major pollsters asked about the abortion issue over an eight-year period. The data suggest that in querying the public about abortion rights, in describing the legal and empirical realities of the abortion situation and in seeking the public's reaction to abortion politics and policy, pollsters tended to reflect the dominant pro-choice perspective.     

Are You Sitting Comfortably Then We'll Begin: Three Gripping Policy Stories About Pension Reform

Throughout the 1990s, the issue of how to secure pension systems in the face of demographic change has been high on policy agendas in many countries. Yet, reforming pension systems has, more often than not, proved to be a particularly difficult and awkward political undertaking. The following article explores one of the many possible reasons why pension reform in Europe has been so arduous for the would-be reformers. After briefly reviewing some basic concepts and issues involved in reforming social security systems, the paper concentrates on how policy actors at international level have constructed the pension policy issue. Specifically, the paper reviews three pension reform policy stories. Each of the stories starts from differing assumptions, produces contradictory prognoses of the pension problem, and prescribes diverging policy solutions. Significantly, each policy story provides a normative vision of a 'good' pension reform. Thus, policy stories provide templates for producing plausible policy arguments in politiucal debates: yet, thay do so by weaving scientific knowledge, 'objective' fact and normative convictions about social welfare systems into a seamless rhetorical fabric. The final section, then, looks at the seams by analysing the more contentious assumptions of the different policy arguments.     

State homophobia? India’s shifting UN positions on LGBTQ issues

Why has India adopted contradictory policies with regard to LGBTQ rights at the UN? From 2004 to 2010, India consistently supported draft language for a UN resolution to allow a Special Rapporteur to investigate extra-judicial executions that would include the term ‘sexual orientation’. More recently, however, India has opposed or abstained from UN votes on LGBTQ rights. While India's conservative posture on LGBTQ issues was catalyzed by the Supreme Court's re-criminalization of homosexual activities in 2013 and the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP, we argue that the state's posture is not a reflection of deep ideological commitments or a new strategic realignment. Instead, India's policy reflects a generally uncoordinated foreign policy apparatus that has been unprepared to respond to the rapid ascendancy of LGBTQ issues on the human rights agenda. It is not currently possible to predict India's future posture due to its lack of a clear policy commitments.     

Linking Federally Assisted Housing with Services for Frail Older Persons

Advocates of policies designed to link federally assisted housing with social services for the frail elderly have encountered barriers such as the historical separation of housing and services, political and bureaucratic fragmentation, and budget constraints. Over a 20-year period, they have attempted to address these issues by identifying the nature and extent of the problem, creating workable models, and developing a political constituency. Major reform, however, occurred only in 1990 when Congress passed the landmark National Affordable Housing Act (NAHA) which provided an "open policy window" for supportive housing legislation. NAHA's passage, however, still left many issues unresolved (e.g., targeting and funding for services). The future challenge is to develop new models of supportive housing and provide a range of residential settings and portable services to increase the choices for frail older persons.     

Metaphoric Therapy: Exploring the Pervasiveness of Metaphor and Its Use in Therapy

Although often taken as just a literary device or an aid in communicating ideas, metaphor can be seen to play a central and inescapable role in how we constitute reality. While metaphor pervades our meanings and interactions, we often lose sight of the metaphoric nature of our constructs. This paper focuses particularly on some of the practical therapeutic options which are opened by a greater awareness of metaphor. These options include not only using metaphors in therapy with our clients, but also providing therapy for our clients' metaphors.     

Academic Civic Mindedness and Model Citizenship in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme

This study uses interview and survey methods to describe the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme's (DP) development of students' “academic civic mindedness” and “model citizenship” at four public schools in California. Results indicate that the DP pedagogy enables students to develop many of the skills that are necessary for civic advocacy and that the DP places a strong emphasis on students' knowledge of issues related to public policy. The DP develops students' citizenship through promoting their awareness of political and social issues and required active engagement with a local or global issue. Most IB students and teachers feel that the DP develops students' academic civic mindedness and model citizenship to a considerably greater extent than other curricular alternatives. Finally, teachers feel that the strongest limitation to their prioritization of students' citizenship development is their lack of clarity on how to frame the civic implications of what they teach.     

Up Versus Down: The Role of Intersensory Redundancy in the Development of Infants' Sensitivity to the Orientation of Moving Objects

According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), during early development, perception of nonredundantly specified properties is facilitated in unimodal stimulation as compared with bimodal stimulation. Later in development, attention becomes more flexible and infants can detect nonredundantly specified properties in both unimodal and bimodal stimulation. This study tested these predictions by assessing the development of infants' sensitivity to the orientation of an object striking a surface, information that is nonredundantly specified in visual and in audiovisual stimulation. Infants of 3, 5, and 8 months were habituated to unimodal visual or bimodal, synchronous, audiovisual films of a hammer tapping a rhythm in 1 of 2 orientations (upward vs. downward). Results demonstrated an Age × Condition interaction, where younger infants (3 and 5 months) detected the orientation change in unimodal but not bimodal stimulation, whereas older infants (8 months) detected the change in both types of stimulation. Further, in a control study, 3‐month‐olds detected the orientation change when bimodal stimulation was asynchronous, demonstrating that temporal synchrony impaired performance in the bimodal condition. These findings converge with those of prior studies and support predictions of the IRH.     

What Social Workers Need to Know About the Right to Vote

Abstract

Policy advocates and social workers who provide services to low-income and other marginalized populations must be involved in helping members of these groups develop political power. Lobbying for progressive policy reforms is difficult unless members of historically oppressed groups can actually cast votes that will be counted. This paper examines barriers to full participation in the voting process and describes strategies that can be used to link disenfranchised groups to the electoral process. These strategies include involvement in voter registration, voter education, the mobilization of prospective voters, and support for legislation that improves access to the voting booth.     

Voters and Values in the 2004 Election

A poorly devised exit poll question undermined meaningful analysisof voters’ concerns in the 2004 presidential election.Twenty-two percent of voters picked "moral values" from a listof "issues" describing what mattered most in their vote, morethan selected any other item. Various commentators have misinterpretedthis single data point to conclude that moral values are anascendant political issue and to credit conservative Christiangroups with turning George W. Bush’s popular vote defeatin 2000 into his three million–vote margin of victoryin 2004. We suggest, rather, that while morals and values arecritical in informing political judgments, they represent personalcharacteristics and ill-defined policy preferences far morethan any discrete political issue. First by conflating moralsand values and then by further conflating characteristics andissues, the exit poll’s "issues" list distorted our understandingof the 2004 election. In this article, we examine the flawsin the 2004 National Election Pool exit poll’s "most importantissue" question and explore the presumed rising electoral importanceof moral values and the conservative Christians who overwhelminglyselected this item. Using national exit poll data from 1980through 2004 and other national surveys, we find that the moralvalues item on the issues list cannot properly be viewed asa discrete issue or set of closely related issues; that itsimportance to voters has not grown over time; and that whencontrolled for other variables, it ranks low on the issues listin predicting 2004 vote choices. The aggregated exit poll dataalso show that the voting behavior of conservative Christiansis relatively stable over time, and these voters were not primarilyresponsible for Bush’s improvement in 2004 over 2000.     

Global production and local jobs: can global enterprise networks be used as levers for local development?

This article is developed out of a research project on ‘Global Production and Local Jobs’ launched by the International Institute for Labour Studies of the International Labour Organization (ILO). It identifies salient features of global production networks in the automobile, electronics and apparel industries, and discusses their implications for local industrial upgrading, jobs and development policy. The approach combines in novel forms complementary analytical frameworks such as the global value chain and industrial district perspectives, in order to highlight interactions between global and local forces in the operation of transnational production networks. Central issues revealed by this approach include: the rise of entry barriers into the most profitable, service‐intensive activities of global value chains, that reduce small firms' prospects for industrial upgrading; the uneven benefits derived from participation in global production networks at the local level; and the need for local institutions to devise policy responses through a flexible, network‐oriented approach involving a broad local constituency.     

Approaches and challenges in evaluating measures taken against right-wing extremism

Right-wing extremism has reemerged on the political agenda in Switzerland over the last decade, much as in other European states. Most of the time, right-wing extremism remains latent. However, as soon as a constituency is confronted with manifest right-wing incidents (right-wing extremist group meetings, racist assaults or violence against individuals and groups), the issue reappears in the political sphere. The countermeasures available to governments frequently remain unclear: empirically based evidence on the effectiveness of specific measures is often simply lacking. In this article we argue that this inadequacy is mostly due to the specific characteristics of the particular conditions of conflict and violence that are associated with the phenomenon of ‘right-wing extremism’. These conditions include an often only insufficiently clarified understanding of the phenomenon of ‘right-wing extremism’ as well as a highly sensitive political, social and legal context for countermeasures. Furthermore, the effectiveness of countermeasures is typically strongly dependent on the actors involved as well as their actions and interactions. Implementation is therefore often unique and, as a consequence, difficult to replicate. We will address these specific challenges for evaluation under such conditions in seven case studies. Each case study includes an evaluation of a measure that has been taken against phenomena of right-wing extremism in Switzerland on the federal, state or community level. The case studies show that certain challenges for evaluation can be met by adopting an adequate evaluation design. Other aspects require further investigation and may not be adequately addressed through the evaluation of countermeasures.     

The impact of legislator and constituency ideology on voting on the assault weapons ban

Using variables that represent a legislator's entire legal constituency, previous research by social scientists has concluded that views of the legislator's constituency have little effect on how legislators vote. This question is reexamined by defining constituency as those voters most likely to vote for the legislator (i.e., members of the legislator's own political party and independents). Furthermore, instead of measuring constituency by either a demographic or vote-based measure, a survey measure of the ideological identification of voters (i.e., the voter's self-identification as liberal, moderate, or conservative) is introduced. It is found that the ideology of a senator's electoral constituency was an important factor on the recent U.S. Senate vote to ban 19 semi-automatic assault weapons. The findings have important implications for how social scientists conceptualize and measure constituency.     

Policy choice as an electoral investment

Traditional approaches to policy choice typically simplify their analysis by ignoring the question of internal constituency politics: constituencies are modelled simply as a single “generic” voter. We explicitly take into account how differential rates of participation and support by various groups in a legislator's constituency will influence the legislator's choice of policy. Viewing the choice of policy as essentially a question of redistribution of welfare, we argue that riskaverse politicians will attempt, not to be evenhanded toward all groups in their constituency, as some scholars have suggested, nor to direct benefits chiefly to swing groups, as has also been hypothesized, but rather, first and foremost, to maintain their current electoral coalition, and in particular, their “primary constituency”.     

In Search of a Constituency for the "New Religious Right"

The paper evaluates claims by the "New Religious Right" to havecreated a mass constituency or a new "moral majority." The paperexamines evidence for the development over the l970s of newconsciousness which reflected politicization of a growing moralopposition to three feminist issues: abortion, sexual preference,and women's liberation. Comparisons are drawn with attitudestoward 11 national spending priorities. All the findings runcontrary to claims for a newly politicized "moral majority."The basic findings are these: (1) there is no conservative trendon the three feminist issues for 1972–80; (2) factor analytictechniques reveal simple factor structure within the three issuesbut not between the three issues over the decade; (3) politicizationof the issues is greater in 1974 than in 1977; and (4) the differencesbetween the religiously involved and others have existed sincethe beginning of the decade and show no evidence of increasingpoliticization during the 1970s. Data are from the NORC GeneralSocial Surveys, 1972–80.