Re-authorization of the Rehabilitation Act: Comprehensive solutions or political satisficing?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is widely hailed as a sweeping piece of civil rights legislation that will dramatically affect the lives of individuals with disabilities in the US for generations. In contrast, the re-authorisation of the Rehabilitation Act in 1992, and attempts to consolidate the rehabilitation programme for people with disabilities into a generic, consolidated employment system for the general public in 1995 brought only modest reforms. How does comprehensive reform get on the US political agenda? What factors were present during passage of the ADA that were not present during reauthorisation of the Rehabilitation Act? The author will use dominant political theories about policy making and agenda setting to answer these questions, and draw conclusions that will assist advocates in other countries in passing comprehensive civil rights legislation.     

Contact Reduces Transprejudice: A Study on Attitudes towards Transgenderism and Transgender Civil Rights in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relationship between Hong Kong Chinese people's contact with transgender/transsexual (TG/TS) people and attitudes toward transgenderism and transgender civil rights, based on Allport's Contact Hypothesis. The term transprejudice is introduced to refer to the negative valuing, stereotyping and discriminatory treatment of TG/TS people. Data are presented from a population-based survey with a random sample of 856 Hong Kong Chinese persons aged between 15 and 64, using the Chinese Attitudes towards Transgenderism and Transgender Civil Rights Scale (CATTCRS). Attitudes, assessed on both personal and institutional dimensions, are examined in relation to participants’ gender, age, educational level, religiosity, and previous contact with transpeople. Results suggest that previous contact with transpeople was significantly associated with attitudes reflected in the scale; decreased social distance, decreased social discrimination, and decreased transprejudice, increased awareness of discrimination against transpeople, increased support for equal opportunities, increased support for post-operative transsexual civil rights, and increased support for anti-discrimination legislation. Our findings support the contact hypothesis, that contact has a positive effect on attitudes towards TG/TS persons. We discuss the implications of these findings for public education interventions and public policy, as well as for research.     

What Disability Civil Rights Cannot Do: employment and political economy

The Americans with Disabilities Act is both a liberal civil rights bill and a labour economics bill meant to increase the employment of disabled persons. It identifies the source of unemployment in discriminatory attitudes of employers and physical barriers in the work environment, and promotes inclusion through the establishment of regulations that are intended to create 'equal opportunity' in the labour market. Such liberal reforms primarily focus on 'irrational' discriminatory attitudes. Operating within an individualist framework, civil rights have not given sufficient attention to structural barriers, which 'rational' business practices, the economic system and class power relationships erect. This paper will both micro- and macro-economic realities of US capitalism, which directly impede disabled peoples' employment and perpetuate a disabling society. The failure of rights legislation to increase disabled people's employment exposes the contradictions of promoting equal opportunity in a class-based (unequal) society.     

Disability rights in practice: the relationship between human rights and social rights in contemporary social care

Using the contemporary arena of social care as an example, this article challenges the either/or dichotomy set up by some disability writers and activists between the favoured civil and human rights on the one hand and discredited social rights on the other. Rather, the article concludes, claims to these differing types of right are mutually reinforcing and can be mobilised strategically in disabled people's struggles for greater social justice. In particular, there is the potential for expanding disabled people's social rights to both direct services and direct payments by enforcing the positive obligations on public authorities conferred by human rights legislation and challenging rationing regimes.     

When Mobilization is Not Enough: Political Mediation,Framing, and the Use of Direct Democracy Devices by the Labor Movement in Response to Anti-Union Legislation

ABSTRACT

The political context of the United States has become increasingly anti-union, and legislation that threatens the ability of unions to collect dues and collectively bargain has been introduced and passed in many states. In an increasingly hostile political climate, mobilization is not sufficient for the labor movement to achieve success in the policy arena. Labor movement campaigns that arose in 2011 in Ohio and Wisconsin in response to legislation curtailing collective bargaining rights of public employees provide two important examples of responses to anti-union legislation. Neither campaign was able to prevent the passage of the legislation through mobilization, but the labor movement campaign in Ohio still achieved a successful outcome by repealing the legislation through a binding referendum. This paper discusses how social movement theories—political mediation and framing—can help us to understand what led to the success of the movement in Ohio but not Wisconsin. I argue that the movement in Ohio was successful because in an unfavorable political context they were able to take advantage of a key opening in the political opportunity structure – the referendum – and were also able to exploit a framing opportunity provided by the scope of the legislation.     

PROSTITUTES' RIGHTS IN THE UNITED STATES:

The prostitutes' rights campaign emerged in the early 1970s with the formation of COYOTE in San Francisco and affiliated movement organizations. This study examines the movement's major claims and goals, resource problems, and impact on public opinion, legislation, and law enforcement. The failure to attain key movement goals is explained in terms of chronic deficiencies of material and human resources that might compensate for the campaign's lack of moral capital and enhance its prospects for success.     

'We Won't Go Back': the ADA on the grass roots level

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a civil rights statute protecting people from discrimination based on a disability in both the private and the public sectors. Using interviews with grass roots persons with disabilities across the USA-many of whom are experienced activists-and using other sources this article describes the reaction of the disability community in the United States to the passage of the ADA and its impact. Largely people with disabilities feel empowered by the ADA. However, a strong amount of cynicism is also found at the grass roots level regarding it. A revealing example of the empowerment felt by people with disabilities is the conflict in New York City over a proposal for non-accessible public toilets. Other reactions and developments are discussed including the possibility of the repeal or weakening of the ADA. A fundamental change occurred in the US with the passage of the ADA and the disability community will not allow that change to be undone.     

Creating Enforceable Civil Rights for Disabled Students in Higher Education: an institutional theory perspective

The Titles II and III of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, building on the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, have been relatively effective in securing enforceable civil rights for disabled students in higher education in the United States. In contrast, the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 and any related previous pieces of legislation have persistently excluded these students in the United Kingdom, making, by default, any discrimination against them legal. However, the Government has started the legislative rule making process to include higher education under the new legislation, based on the final report of the Select Committee on Education and Employment of House of Commons and the final report of the Disability Rights Task Force. The paper argues that close examination of these reports as well as the Government's most recent consultation paper, 'Rights for Disabled People in Education', reveals a path which is unlike the path that followed during the rulemaking process leading to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In other words, it is likely that disabled students would continue to be subjected to potential discrimination despite the inclusion of higher education under the new proposed legislation and despite special disability funding provided to universities for disabled students. Disability civil rights advocates have an important role to play in the current rule-making process to create enforceable civil rights for disabled students in higher education.     

A simultaneous-equations model of the relationship between public sector bargaining legislation and unionization

This paper estimates a simultaneous-equations model with public sector bargaining laws and union membership treated as jointly-determined variables. The extent of public sector unionization has a significant positive influence on the passage of prolabor bargaining legislation and bargaining legislation has strong, independent effects on the extent of public sector unionization. We gratefully acknowledge the research support provided by Minbo Kim and Parisun Chantonahom.     

The civility of social capital: Public relations in the public sphere,civil society,and democracy

Scholars have analyzed public relations’ role in democracy via proxy concepts like the public sphere and civil society. However, some have critiqued the public sphere on grounds of equal access and portrayed civil society as a guise for first-world imperialism. These critiques have implications for the role of public relations in the public sphere and civil society. This article suggests the normative role of public relations in democracy is best perceived as creating the social capital that facilitates access to spheres of public discussion and in maintaining relationships among those organizations that check state power. To that end, the paper argues that social capital does much to advance public relations theory and prescribe the role of public relations in democracy. Several implications for public relations from a social capital perspective are offered, including the creation of generalized societal trust, the building of cross-cutting or “weak” ties, the engagement of media on behalf of subaltern counterpublics, and the (re)creation of community or a fully functioning society.     

Restraining Orders for Battered Women:

Since the passage of the Pennsylvania Protection from Abuse Act in 1976, many states have enacted legislation to provide civil restraining orders for battered women. These orders, which offer a civil court alternative to criminal sanctions, are court-issued temporary or permanent orders which direct an assailant to refrain from further abusive conduct. Interviews with recipients of restraining orders suggest that the orders are generally ineffective in reducing the rate of abuse of violence. However, they were effective in reducing abuse for women with less serious histories of family violence or where the assailant was less violent in general. They were ineffective in stopping physical violence. Measures to improve restraining order mechanisms should: more clearly codify abuse and violence, improve access for those not married or cohabitating, streamline procedures and shorten waiting periods, address a full range of child-related concerns, strengthen sanctions, and mandate official responses to violations. Additionally, comprehensive legislation is needed to coordinate civil and criminal remedies.     

Police Unions and the Politics of Democratic Security and Order in Postcolonial India

State attempts to ensure a secure liberal democratic order through legal regulation and enforcement may work to prevent harm, provide public resources, or realize civic and human rights. Such attempts may also increase generalized risk of harm, reinscribe social inequality, circumscribe citizenship or instigate mass protest. These contradictory forces and relations, and their conditions of possibility—what we may call broadly the “politics of democratic security and order”—tend to be analyzed through the lens of government impositions on, and opposition to, the general public, for example focusing on how anti-terrorism legislation violates peoples’ civil liberties. This article addresses the politics of democratic security and order from a different and under-theorized angle that troubles the assumed opposition between a powerful state apparatus and subjugated citizens’ rights: namely, special restrictions placed on the rights of security enforcement agents themselves. Through ethnographic and archival research in India on attempts to form police unions—which are legally banned by a parliamentary act, yet politically active in many states of the country routinely touted as “the world’s largest democracy”—I demonstrate how conflicts related to these organizations may create new possibilities for mass politics, state-society alignments, and legal advocacy for civic and human rights, even as extant laws, regulations and, perhaps most importantly, public discourses around security and police discipline place extraordinary constraints on the political subjectivity of state security actors.     

DISPARATE IMPACT AND THE QUOTA DEBATES: Law, Labor Market Sociology, and Equal Employment Policies

Bringing sociological theory and research to bear on the "quota debates' dogging discussion of federal civil rights legislation in the early 1990s, this article highlights sociology's role in shaping employment law and shows how apparently technical legal arguments about allocating burdens of proof affect labor market resource allocation among the classes, races, and genders. Contrasting institutional-sociological with liberal-legal concepts of discrimination, the article shows why disparate impact theory has been the most sociological approach to Title VII enforcement. It also shows how disparate impact—a theory and method for establishing legally cognizable employment discrimination injurious to women and minorities—is, and is not, related to affirmative action—a policy encompassing a broad range of procedures intended to provide positive consideration to members of groups discriminated against in the past. Finally, a competing incentive framework is used to show that, although disparate impact creates some incentives for employers to adopt quota hiring, such incentives are counter-balanced by major incentives working against race- and gender-based quotas. Major counterincentives stem from disparate impact itself, from other aspects of equal employment law, and from organizational goals shaping business response to the legal environment.     

DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND THE LONG MARCH ON GLOBAL WARMING: Comments on McCright and Dunlap

The political impasse over global warming legislation stems from obstacles in the mass media arena, public awareness, electoral politics as well as governmental policy. Advocates of global warming policy have to be simultaneously successful in all four major public arenas to prevail. This article provides an overview of the obstacles in each public arena in the United States highlighting the broader context in which McCright and Dunlap's analysis of polarized public opinion operates. Global warming advocates have had their greatest success in the media arena but are checked by the rise of a conservative counter‐campaign as well as media reporting norms, which have contributed to polarized public opinion and limited salience of the issue. Global warming never ranks in the top issue list to which electoral candidates attend, giving it little priority in national electoral contests. Although the House of Representatives passed the Waxman‐Markey Bill in 2009, the bill died in the Senate and will not resurface until the Democratic margin is again large enough to overcome opposition vetoes. At the same time, major legislation has often incubated on the margins of these public arenas for significant time until a political crisis removes the normal obstacles to such major “watershed” legislation. For global warming, the long march through American public arenas appears to have begun.     

Des formes de la protestation politique (France,XVIIe – XIXe siècles)

The forms of protest that women occasionally adopted express a social and political assertion. Generally, they borrowed forms in circulation: civil procedures for the grievances under the ancient regime, declarations of human rights during the French revolution. After the Revolution, the adoption by women of the right of petition to the constituted powers is a massive phenomenon remaining practically unknown and little studied. The petitions of women are ancient demonstrations which are not only related to modern history; they are comparable with the ‘voices’ described by Hirschman and Boltanski. By marking out the political history of the modern period, they have an explanatory significance for political events and also contribute to the formation of public opinion.     

Social Mobilization and Political Representation: The Women’s Movement’s Struggle for Legal Abortion in Uruguay

This article analyzes the political process leading to the recent legalization of abortion in Uruguay, underlying the multiple strategies resorted to by the women’s movement to create a social consensus around women’s rights—and, more generally, around sexual and reproductive rights—as belonging to the realm of human rights. It seeks to identify the main reasons accounting for the movement’s success, which appear to be connected to the breadth of its repertoire of actions, progressively expanded to include various (and sometimes innovative) strategies operating in both the realm of civil society and public opinion and the sphere of political institutions and political representation. Focusing on the dyad speech action, the article examines the movement’s broadened repertoire of actions as well as its discourse setting human rights as a horizon of legitimacy in the context of a cultural war against a countermovement organized in defense of the status quo. Last but not least, it analyzes the issues pertaining to political representation brought to the forefront by the clashes, discrepancies, and disconnections between social movement and political institutions.     

Verfassungen als Spiegel globaler Normen?

The founding of the United Nations permitted to define the discrimination of women as a problem concerning world society at large. Today, equal rights are considered as a global norm by which states and organisations are measured. The article focuses on the questions of how far global norms of equal rights govern national constitutions and on which kind of factors their national designs depend. For answering these questions we use a quantitative content analysis of family rights and equal rights in national constitutions (n = 164). In contrast to neo-institutionalist assumptions we found three clearly distinguished models of equal rights. They serve as dependent variables in a regression analysis which shows that equal rights evolve independently of the national degree of development. To the contrary, the cultural and religious tradition of a country, its inclusion into world society and the power of its civil society are far more decisive for their evolution.     

What,to the law,is the former slave?

This essay examines a subset of Reconstruction-era cases decided in Southern appellate courts that dealt with the legacies of slavery. Drawing on suits that either described emancipation as legal death or considered black civil rights, it argues that judges placed freedpeople into a distinct legal category – the former slave – in order to preserve the antebellum legal status quo. Opinions differentiated free-born citizens from those who acquired rights after emancipation, and marked freedpeople with stains of their previous servitude, which limited their potential for the equal enjoyment of newly acquired civil rights.     

Symposium sur Inventing Equal Opportunity de Frank Dobbin

Frank Dobbin's Inventing equal opportunities, published by Princeton University Press in 2009, has arrived at just the right time in a France where the theme of “diversity” has permeated big firms and where equal opportunity policies are being debated in the educational system, which, from kindergarten to university, is being accused of fostering inequality. This book provides a stimulating, innovative contribution to our understanding not only of these questions in the United States but also of the French case. We thought it was time to organize a symposium on a book that recounts and dissects nearly fifty years of development in equal opportunity policies in the United States. To fully describe the wealth of information in this book, we asked authors with different disciplinary perspectives to take part. By analyzing social movements, public actions, the legal system and occupational forms of mobilization, Frank Dobbin has revitalized and challenged accepted ideas about the role of public players in regulating behavior. He has also shown that legal uncertainty in civil rights cases has led to the formation of corporate standards that, though private, have the value of public ones.     

Women’s activism as public relations in a patriarchal society: The case of Kuwait

This paper addresses an important era of women’s activism in Kuwait. In the 1950s, when the government recognized women’s rights for education, the wave to obtain other civil rights clashed with culture, tradition and religion which became serious obstacles facing women in their struggle for basic rights. This historical study focuses on the establishment of two women’s organizations -- the Arab Women’s Development Society in December 1962 and the Kuwait Women's Cultural and Social Society in February 1963. To sway the negative image of women in a patriarchal society, women used activism as a public relations tool to achieve their social, civil and political rights. The study uses cultural-economic model (CEM) to illustrate how activism and public relations were articulated as synonymous to foster women’s rights in Kuwait. Archived documents and content analysis of media content published in the 1960s reveal that activism played a vital role as a public relations strategy and that social activism was more effective than political activism. The study highlights the implications of culture within the context of both public relations and activism.