The Cultural Politics of Childhood: Public Policies in Post‐authoritarian Chile

This article offers an interpretation of the cultural politics of childhood during the second decade of post‐authoritarian democracy in Chile (2001–2010), as sustained by the discourse of public policies in this area. I understand cultural politics as the combination of cultural contexts, social practices and political processes through which childhood is constructed in different societies and different times James and James (2008b). I develop a ‘textual’ analysis focusing on the discourse of the most recent official governmental policy document on childhood, which is still in force, as well as a ‘contextual’ analysis that examines the historical relationship between the state, public policies and childhood in different periods of Chile's history as a republic.     

The Salience of Post‐materialism in Canadian Politics*

Dans une série d'écrits influents, Ronald Inglehart présente des arguments pour montrer que la politique des démocraties occidentales en est venue à tourner davantage autour de conflits de valeurs que de la distribution de la richesse et du pouvoir. À la suite des études sur les élections canadiennes de 1988, 1993 et 1997, l'auteur reconnaît peu de signes que des questions postmatérialistes délogent des questions matérialistes en politique canadienne. Selon les sondages électoraux, les problèmes matérialistes comme le chômage, le déficit et les impôts sont les préoccupations premières des électeurs au moment des élections. Il a aussi trouvé que les Canadiens, au cours des quelque 15 dernières années, sont devenus moins que plus positifs envers les problèmes postmatérialistes. Il conclut qu'Inglehart, plutôt que de lever le voile sur un virage général en politique occidentale, a découvert un phénomène localisé. In a series of influential writings, Ronald Inglehart makes the case that politics in Western democracies has come to revolve around value conflicts more than the distribution of wealth and power. However, after analysing the 1988, 1993 and 1997 Canadian Election Studies, I find little evidence that post‐materialist issues are replacing materialist ones at the core of Canadian politics. According to election surveys, materialist issues like unemployment, the deficit and taxes are the primary focus of voters during elections. I also find that Canadians have become less rather than more positive toward post‐materialist issues over the past 15 years or so. I conclude that rather than uncovering a global shift in Western politics, Inglehart identified a localized phenomenon.     

Monitoring Partnership‐based Aid Relationships: A Note

Based on the premise that moves towards partnership‐based aid relationships require that the monitoring and evaluation of such relationships should be jointly conducted or sponsored, this note draws attention to an experiment conducted in Tanzania for monitoring by an independent group, drawn from the recipient country and from outside. It seeks to identify the key ingredients of successful use of such a model and urges its wider adoption.     

Paris in Bogotá: The Aid Effectiveness Agenda and Aid Relations in Colombia

This article uses an aid‐relationships perspective to explore the application of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in Colombia. It argues that aid donors were subjected to an attempt to push them (back) into a technocratic corner, and that social actors' advocacy outcomes were put under threat. Both are worrying developments in a politically complex context marked by internal armed conflict and human‐rights abuses. Analysis of the Colombia case offers some useful insights into applying the Paris Declaration, and other global aid‐policy frameworks, to diverse settings.     

Political‐Economy Analysis,Aid Effectiveness and the Art of Development Management

Recognising that aid effectiveness critically depends upon the quality of host‐country institutions and policies, international aid agencies have sought to inform their activities through more systematic political‐economy analysis (PEA). In this article, three analytical frameworks for PEA are compared, contrasted and critically appraised in the light of reflections by PEA practitioners and recent theoretical debate about development management. The article finds that the potential of PEA to improve development effectiveness depends on how far it addresses the micro as well as macro politics of aid and permits a finer‐grained engagement between analysis and action. This requires more reflexivity on the part of those who commission and produce PEA, and further movement from intervention to interaction modalities for aid delivery.     

Heavy Metal Carnival and Dis‐alienation: The Politics of Grotesque Realism

Based on four years of concert fieldwork and extensive music media analysis (including bands such as Cradle of Filth, GWAR, Insane Clown Posse, Marilyn Manson, and Slipknot), this article shows how heavy metal music and its carnival culture express a dis‐alienating politics of resistance. Applying Bakhtin's multifaceted conceptualization of the carnival‐grotesque, the author explains how grotesque realism in metal music and performances constitutes a proto‐utopian liminal alternative to the impersonal, conformist, superficial, unequal, and numbing realities of commercialism and, more abstractly, a resistance to a society of spectacle and nothingness.     

The Race and Class Privilege of Motherhood: TheNew York Times Presentations of Pregnant Drug‐Using Women1

Prior research has examined race and class bias embedded in media presentations of pregnant drug users; however, this past research is limited in identifying biases because it focuses on single substances—primarily crack cocaine. I build on this work by conducting a comparative analysis of more than 15 years worth of New York Times articles on three drugs (crack cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco) used during pregnancy. These three drugs have varying levels of deleterious effects on fetal development and infant health, as well as varying levels of use by poor and minority women. Because of this variation, I am able to assess whether media coverage of pregnant drug‐using women is proportional to the documented adverse consequences of specific drugs or, rather, whether media coverage is higher and more negative for poor and minority pregnant women regardless of the degree of adverse health consequences associated with the specific drug used. Through this analysis, I demonstrate that the prevalence and framing of news stories about pregnant drug‐using women has little to do with protecting the health of children. Rather, concern for children is a rhetorical tool used to define poor and minority women as bad mothers and blame them for contemporary changes in families.     

Battling the Tiger Mother: Pre‐School Reform and Conflicting Norms of Parenthood in Singapore

This article explores pre‐school reform and shifting norms of parenthood in Singapore. Whereas current education reforms in many Western countries focus on improving academic performance, pre‐school reform in Singapore de‐emphasises academic learning and urges parents to adopt ‘relaxed’ parenting practices. Analysing the position of parents in this process, we show, however, that the outcomes of this reform project are highly ambivalent. Reform makers view parents’ mindset as the main obstacle to reform, while parents experience pre‐school reform itself as prompting inconsistent messages. To account for the disorientation that this creates among parents, we draw on Bateson's concept of double bind.     

Newcomers to Like‐Minded Aid and Donor Darlings: The Strange Case of Spain in Vietnam

This article analyses the motives behind the relations between Spain as a donor and Vietnam as a recipient of international aid. The main hypothesis is that this relationship does not respond to the traditional causes for international aid, as identified by the academic literature. On the basis of qualitative data collected in interviews with elites, the article suggests instead that a ‘learning factor’ and an ‘image factor’ might be at play in the Spanish presence, as well as herd behaviour on the part of the donor community.     

Targeting Disaster Aid in Post‐Tsunami Sri Lanka

In this article we examine the allocation of boats and houses, the two major types of aid made available to tsunami‐affected fishery households in Sri Lanka. We investigate the effectiveness of targeting by looking at the distributional impacts and the determinants of allocation of these transfers at the household level. We find that houses were much better targeted than boats in terms of compensating for the losses due to the tsunami. We also find that the ex post distribution of boats is much more unequal than the distribution that prevailed before the tsunami. The reverse is true for the distribution of houses, for which the government took a much more active role.     

Just One Click Away: The Politics of E‐Commerce Sales Tax Policy

E‐commerce has altered the relationship between consumers, businesses, and U.S. states. E‐retailers are not required to collect sales tax from their customers, thus depriving fiscally insecure states of tax revenue, and providing a competitive advantage for e‐retailers, like Amazon Inc., in their struggle for market share with brick‐and‐mortar stores, like Walmart. Attempts at e‐commerce sales tax policy by state legislators and brick‐and‐mortar lobbyists failed until 2008 when New York successfully passed legislation. A subsequent wave of legislation ensued, and between 2008 and 2012, e‐commerce sales tax legislation left committee in fourteen states, each experiencing various levels of success. Existing explanatory efforts have not fully accounted for the combinatorial effect of political–institutional structure and market contestation in U.S. state‐level policy creation, as well as the likelihood of multiple pathways to passage. Embracing this framework, I use fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to uncover three sufficient pathways for successful passage of e‐commerce sales tax policy. Two paths highlight the confluence of large retailer pressure and a conductive political–institutional structure facing fiscal stress, while the third path reflects political–institutional forces. These findings corroborate, as well as build upon, our knowledge of fiscal sociology, policy domains, and corporate power in American politics.     

The Gender Politics of Human Waste and Human‐as‐Waste: Indonesian Migrant Workers and Elderly Care in Japan

Significant decline in mortality and fertility rates has led to a rapid aging population in many parts of the globe. Coupled with a decrease in caring for one's senior parents at home, this condition creates a crisis in elderly care. Most studies on elderly care in Japan, the country with the highest percentage of senior people in the world, employ theoretical approaches rooted in the fields of aging and migration studies. This article offers a new perspective by not only focusing on the voices of the Indonesian women migrant care workers in Japan by way of in‐depth interviews, but also intersecting feminist and waste studies in its analysis. This different theoretical approach allows this article to argue that the politics of disposability in the ‘global care chains’ is a gendered and ‘affective’ phenomenon. Drawing from Jaggar's ‘emotional hegemony’ and Saraswati's ‘affective structure’, this article shows that emotions matter in constructing the disposability of these migrant workers and elderly people, particularly within the capitalist currents that drive the gendered supply chains.     

The Impact of Anti‐Gay Politics on the LGBTQ Movement

Since the late 1970s, the Religious Right has mobilized to oppose the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) movement in the United States. Sociologists have studied the relationship between these two movements as a classic movement‐countermovement dynamic, in which the strategies, actions, and framing of one movement impact the other. I analyze the way Religious Right reactive and proactive opposition to gay rights has affected the LGBTQ movement. First, I provide an overview of the literature on the negative impacts of the Religious Right, including the diversion of movement goals, transformation of frames, and marginalization of queer politics. Second, I examine the way Religious Right activism may increase mobilization.     

全球援助治理的机制与模式

国际金融危机对全球发展事业造成严重冲击,国际发展援助议题再次成为全球经济治理的重要内容与核心议题之一。本文在全球经济治理框架下考察发展援助议题,以全球发展援助机制为中心,分析了发达国家为维护现有发展援助机制所做出的承诺和行动,以及新兴国家对外援助发展的新模式及其对全球发展援助机制可能产生的挑战与影响。实现联合国"千年发展目标"是目前发达国家与新兴国家在发展援助议题上弥合分歧的主要渠道,制定"后千年发展目标"则是双方进一步争夺国际发展话语权和议程设定的主要内容,新兴国家只有通过金砖峰会等形式形成合力才能发挥更大作用。     

Institutional Environments,Sociopolitical Processes,and Health Movement Organizations: The Growth of Self‐Help/Mutual‐Aid1

This study examines the relationship between sociopolitical processes and health social movement organization formation. Two central research questions are posed: How do self‐help/mutual‐aid institutional environments characterized by professional actors, the state, and social movements influence organizational formation, and do these influences grow stronger or weaker as the self‐help/mutual‐aid movement matures? Analyses comparing the impact of institutional factors such as physician hegemony and autonomy, professional affiliation, state spending, and political ties on self‐help/mutual‐aid founding rates reveal negative effects of professionals but positive effects of the state. These relationships tend to grow stronger as the movement matures. For example, declining professional authority increasingly eases organizational foundings during movement maturity as does the beneficial impact on formation of state expansion in health markets and political ties. Implications are discussed.