The Politics of Dance in Pakistan

This article does not have an abstract     

The Politics of Aging

Committed "to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphans," the federal government through its veterans' programs has long been a pacesetter in meeting some of the income-security and health-care needs of older Americans. But the Department of Veterans Affairs is short of funds. Key policymakers are genuinely divided over how much more they want to invest in the care of aging veterans. This paper assesses four options and concludes that it makes sense to strengthen DVA's internal capacity to meet its geriatric imperative.     

The Politics of Randomness

Recent analysis of public policy is based on elaborate political-economic models. A major advantage of these useful models is that they have micro-foundations. Their main shortcomings are that they are usually based on drastic simplifications regarding the institutional setting and, more importantly, that the results they yield are not robust to the assumptions regarding the institutional setting, the policy space or the agents’ preferences. An alternative reduced-form modeling is the public-policy lobbying contest. This model can be applied to public-policy determination in representative democracies. However, its main drawback is that the notion of contest success function (CSF), a crucial component of the contest model, does not have micro-foundations and, therefore, the random behavior of the government seems ad-hoc. In the present paper we propose a partial micro-foundation for the public-policy contest. The possible rationalization of random government behavior is illustrated in the case of the most commonly studied CSFs: the function associated with the all-pay auction and Tullock’s lottery logit functions. We also clarify how stake asymmetry, lobbying-skill asymmetry and return to lobbying effort determine the relative desirability, from the government’s point of view, of these CSFs.     

The Parable of Matthew: Identity Politics, Politics of Desire, and the Politics of Performance

Matthew Shepard's murder in October 1998 provides an opportunity to examine and reconsider identity politics as they play out around Matthew's body. After a sustained critique of identity politics, the author proposes, in their stead, a politics of performance, which offers a constructive alternative to current political agendas by allowing the simultaneous preservation and erasure of difference.     

The Politics of Equal Opportunity

This paper reviews changes in the concept of ‘equal opportunities’ over the last twenty years and discusses the implications for women’s experiences in the workplace. The shift to notions of diversity and difference as the motif for equality initiatives reflects the right-wing critique of bureaucratic control and regulation of labour markets, embodied in 1970s' EO policies. ‘Diversity’ symbolizes the employer’s freedom from constraint in selecting and deploying the best ‘talent’ regardless of sex, ethnicity or disability. Ironically the radical feminist agenda, which asserts women’s differences from men and their potential for creating a better world, had been adapted to the concerns of liberal feminism with providing a rationale for the promotion of women into management, on the grounds that women’s nurturing capacities contribute to the diversity needed by post-modern organizations. A case study of a transnational computer and measurement systems manufacturer is used to illustrate the limited capacity of a market-driven version of diversity to dismantle the hierarchical gender order and its tendency to reinforce the ideology of competitive individualism with its white, male norms. In conclusion it is argued that we need to move beyond the ultimately limiting debate about whether women are the same as or different from men to a renewed concern with the material conditions of women’s lives and with the construction of equality initiatives which address the continuing exclusion of many women from adequate standards of living.     

The Politics of Civic Combinations

In this article, we explore the ways in which partnerships with the state within state-led developmental programs might effect the autonomy of civic organizations (COs) and their readiness to enter in political action. To identify the relationship between collaboration with the state and civic autonomy we draw on data from a survey of 740 Hungarian regional civic associations. We did not find support for the theses that mixing with the state might undermine the autonomy of COs and lead to their political neutralization. Also, we did not find support for the hypotheses that political action is solely about money or it is the property of non-autonomous NGOs. We have identified several mechanisms that allow COs to combine participation in partnership projects with maintained autonomy and political activism.

The Politics of School Busing

Although rejecting school busing has the objective consequenceof perpetuating racial segregation and educational inequality,data from a large national sample indicate that the subjectivemotivations involved are not merely racism. In contrast to theposition among the mass public, opposition is closely linkedto racial prejudice among college graduates.     

Presidential Address: The Faculty Time Divide

The time demands of academic life are examined, drawing on data from a large national sample of faculty. I outline the divide between full-time faculty, who work long hours irrespective of rank or institution type, and part-time faculty, who work at low pay with little job security, status, recognition, or fringe benefits. The expectations of academic life in dual-career couples are hard to reconcile with the demands of parenting. This is a common problem because assistant professors are generally too old to wait until they have tenure to have children. The segmentation of academic life into an overworked core and a marginalized periphery tends to perpetuate gender inequality.     

The Politics of Women's Economic Independence

We identify the political conditions that shape the economicposition of married/cohabiting women and of the economicallymost vulnerable group of women—single mothers. Specifically,we examine the determinants of reductions in single mothers'poverty rate due to taxes and transfers, and women's wages relativeto spouses'/ partners' wages. The Luxembourg Income Study archiveyields an unbalanced panel with 71 observations on 15 countries.The principal determinants of poverty reduction due to taxesand transfers are left government, constitutional veto points,and welfare generosity. The relative wage of women in couplesis a function mainly of female labor force participation, parttime work among women, and women's mobilization. In explainingthe causal pathways to these outcomes, we highlight the interrelationshipsof welfare state, care, and labor market policies.