The fear of public relations in foreign affairs: an examination of the 1963 Fulbright Hearings into foreign agents

Public relations has long been looked at with suspicion given its use of persuasion to influence public opinion. That suspicion turns to fear when public relations is linked to propaganda. The 1963 Senate Foreign Relations Committee's investigation into the Foreign Agents Registration Act provides an opportunity to explore the fear of the public's susceptibility to propaganda and the perceived role of public relations in shaping public opinion. Public relations practitioners working for foreign clients were portrayed in the hearings as mercenaries who worked behind the scenes to influence American foreign policy.     

The justifications for terminating parental rights and adoption in the United States

This article examines the normative basis for prioritizing adoption in the “Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997” (ASFA) as expressed by legislators and public witnesses in congressional hearings. By examining six congressional hearings in the period that led to the ASFA, the article provides new insights to understand how adoption is justified in the U.S. not only as an acceptable form of public intervention but also as an actively promoted and preferred approach when reunification is not possible. The article uses a discourse theoretical framework based on Habermas that distinguishes pragmatic, ethical–political, moral, and legal arguments. It reveals that U.S. federal adoption policy is based on three pillars. Pragmatic risk-oriented thinking forms the central knowledge base to inform policy. Parent responsibility ethics stresses individual responsibility for rehabilitation, with secondary support from the welfare system. Child refamilialization ethics emphasizes decisive and authoritative action to protect the child's needs for safety and permanence.     

Energy Policy and Environmental Possibilities: Biofuels and Key Protagonists of Ecological Change*

While a growing body of research indicates the severe ecological and social costs of biofuel production worldwide, the U.S. government continues to promote the expansion of this fuel sector. Recent congressional testimony regarding the promotion of biofuels via the renewable fuel standard (RFS) offers a strategic research site for sociological investigation into the practices of key political actors and their roles in promoting and discouraging ecologically oriented change. Congressional hearings provide a window into the political process of energy policy formation, thus informing environmental sociological theory and debates. The ecological modernization perspective and its assumptions provide the analytical frame of this empirical analysis of congressional hearings during the peak legislative period concerning biofuels. This research is intended to contribute to alternative energy debates, add to our understanding of the role of various actors in energy policy formation, and further theoretical developments within sociology.     

Developments in National Policies for Food and Nutrition Security in Brazil

Brazil is on track to achieve many of the Millennium Development Goals, and this is widely credited to bold and innovative government policies backed by new forms of popular participation in social policy. This article examines evaluation evidence on two of the most important recent initiatives in Brazil's policies for food and nutrition security (conditional cash transfers through Bolsa Família and support for family agriculture through the Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos). It also considers advances in older policies (such as the School Meals programme) and the work of the National Council for Food and Nutrition Security, which has culminated in national legislation establishing food and nutrition security as a right.     

Historical Analysis of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997

Congress enacted the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) in 1997 in an attempt to provide safety, stability, and permanency for maltreated children. To help provide a historical context, child welfare legislation preceding ASFA is reviewed. In this historical analysis, the precipitating events that led to the creation of ASFA are assessed. In addition, a detailed review of congressional hearings related to this Act is given. The key components and goals of this policy are outlined. Finally, revisions made to ASFA are discussed, and its influence on proceeding legislation is presented.     

Aging,Health, and Social Policy:

Seven major turning points in the evolution of U.S. aging policy are identified and reviewed: (1) the Social Security Act (2) the Great Society (3) the federalization of Old Age Assistance (4) the enactment of comprehensive social services (5) Social Security improvements (6) New Federalism, and (7) medical cost-containment policies under Medicare and Medicaid. In the 1980s, significant and growing problems of uninsurance and underinsurance for health care have re-emerged. Simultaneously, state Medicaid programs are characterized by their increasing variation and inequities, while there has been a decline in access for the poor. The future of aging policy will be decided in the context of four socio-demographic realities: (1) population aging (2) trends in mortality and morbidity (3) the relationship between income and health, and (4) aging as a woman's issue. The article concludes with a call for a recommitment to the public interest and to public solutions which affirm that health care is an inalienable right.     

LAC: How to mitigate against loss of confidentiality in CARES Act

When the demise of the federal law and regulation protecting substance use disorder (SUD) treatment record confidentiality was quickly sealed with the passages of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act March 27 (see “CARES Act eliminates most of 42 CFR Part 2,” ADAW, April 6, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adaw.32678 ), the Legal Action Center (LAC) was right there with patients, as it still is, decrying the loss of this important safeguard. Now, however, it's time for the law firm to do what it does best — work to get the language as good as it can be in what will be the new regulation. In an overview of the CARES Act amendments regarding confidentiality released by LAC last week, this important point was made: Those amendments don't take effect until March 27, 2021.     

Projections and Policies for Volunteer Programs: The Implications of the Serve America Act for Volunteer Diversity and Management

This article explores the limits of public policy as it affects volunteerism in the United States. Our analysis focuses on the potential of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act (2009), the most sweeping volunteer legislation in U.S. history, to raise the level of volunteering and national service in the United States, particularly among young people, older people, and minorities—the primary target populations of the act. The Serve America Act aims to increase service‐learning opportunities and national service placements substantially. However, the long‐term impact of these changes on the rate of volunteering and the composition and character of the volunteering population remains unclear. Using data from the Current Population Survey's annual Supplement on Volunteering, we examine a variety of reasonable policy scenarios to see how the Serve America Act might affect future volunteering through the year 2050. The findings suggest that even if the Serve America Act is fully funded and implemented, it is unlikely to have a long‐term impact on the overall volunteering rate and, consequently, that altering the national volunteering rate might be an unrealistic public policy goal. Nevertheless, the analysis shows that because of naturally occurring changes in the population, the composition of the volunteer pool is likely to change as we move toward 2050—a demographic shift that will present increased challenges for volunteer managers. We discuss these challenges and how managers might deal with them effectively.     

Redefining the Moral Responsibilities for Food Safety: The Case of Red Meat in New Zealand*

Abstract Food safety governance is shaped by social relationships among the state, the industry, and the public in the food system in a given country. This paper examines the contestation among actors in New Zealand's red meat chain over the implementation of the Animal Product Act of 1999 (APA), which became a cornerstone in the reform of food safety governance. The discussion focuses on the APA's impact on three types of social relations in the red meat chain, those between: (a) the state and the industry; (b) consumers and citizens; and (c) New Zealand and “offshore.” This paper argues that food safety governance is an important element of the moral economy in a given country and poses both policy and ethical challenges in balancing conflicting needs between the global and local agrofood systems.     

Invoking Public Opinion: Policy Elites and Social Security

Do policy elites invoke public opinion? When they do, are theirclaims based on evidence from public opinion surveys? To learnabout the claims that policy elites make, we examined statementsthe president and members of Congress, experts, and interestgroup leaders in congressional hearings made about Social Security.To learn about opinion data on Social Security, we conducteda Lexis-Nexis search of the archives of the Roper Center forPublic Opinion Research. Our analyses show that policy elitesdiscussing Social Security did invoke public opinion. Contraryto our expectations, however, few of the elite invocations ofpublic opinion cited specific surveys or concrete facts aboutthe distribution of opinion. Although claims directly contradictingsurvey evidence were relatively rare, only with the rather fewspecific claims by congressional elites did we find much clear-cutsupport in the available polling data. Relatively seldom couldwe find clear-cut support for the elites' general claims. Moreover,some of the most frequent claims about public opinion—couldhave been contested but seldom were. The highly visible andwell-polled case of Social Security suggests that specific,data-based elite invocations of public opinion may be even lesscommon on other, lower-visibility and less-polled issues. Italso suggests that survey research professionals might do wellto intensify their scrutiny of public discourse about publicopinion and to increase their efforts to bring scientific expertiseto bear upon such discourse.     

Rule of law: Sharia panic and the US Constitution in the House of Representatives

In spring of 2011, Peter King (R-NY) convened a hearing titled ‘The Extent of Radicalization among American Muslims’ in the US House of Representatives. Democratic participants critiqued the hearings and contextualized the proceedings within the long history of institutionalized racism in the USA. They argued that the hearings were a threat to the Constitution itself, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause and the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion. Republican participants shared concerns about threats to the Constitution but suggested that the hearings were part of a strategy to combat this threat. Numerous Republican participants identified forms of Islamic law, or sharia law, as the primary threat to the integrity of the rule of law (ROL). Despite opposing positions, all actors agreed that the ‘ROL’ is that which will save the nation from threats posed from both outside and inside the nation and, as such, it is the ROL itself that must be protected. In this sense, the ‘ROL’ ensured by the Constitution inadvertently became the primary object of the hearings. In this essay, we bring analytical approaches from performance studies and anthropology to argue that the hearings impel a re-examination of the concept of ‘ROL’ itself. Rather than simply addressing the legislative effects of the hearings, we are interested in what they reveal about the performative and cultural dimensions of the law and the lawmaking process. While critics of the hearings derisively referred to them as ‘political theater’, we suggest that it is the nature of the King Hearings as staged public spectacle that imbue them with a politically performative power. We also identify the specific effects of sharia panic in contemporary US American political and legal discourse.     

You Are What You Eat: Slow Food USA's Constitutive Public Relations

This article employs a constitutive, or meaning-generating, approach to investigate how the Slow Food USA social movement employs public relations to counter commercial food industry messages. It argues that Slow Food successfully employs the rhetorical public relations techniques of definition, identification through narrative building, and enactment to build relationships and attract broader support of the sustainable food movement, to translate its somewhat lofty messages to mainstream audiences, and to encourage supporters to live the Slow Food lifestyle. Examining Slow Food's public relations through a rhetorical approach expands theory and practice by answering the call to explore how noncorporate entities successfully use public relations techniques.     

The Administrative Hearing Experience:

Differential treatment of men and women by employers has recieved much attention in recent years. At the extreme, disparity in the treatment of women in the military, federal employment, institutions of higher learning and private employment has been identified, and remedial actions initiated through legal means instituted under various federal laws. Researchers have also investigated disparity in the treatment of men and women within the legal system, although most attention has been focused on criminal judicial processes. Non-criminal legal proceedings constitute an institution in which possible disparity in both the treatment and attitudes of women and men participants has not been fully analyzed. Administrative hearings comprise a large number of legal proceedings in which women claimants face primarily men hearing officers. Hearings involving unemployment insurance and welfare claims, and Social Security, provide the most likely confrontation women will have with the largely male dominated judicial system. This study compares both objective aspects of administrative hearings and claimants' perceptions of the hearings for men and women involved in unemployment insurance claim appeals. Interview data and quantitative analyses of apporximately 350 hearings conducted in a field experiment in New Mexico during 1980 provide the information for the analyses. The findings reported show that women claiments are more prone to lose in appeals than men claimants even when other confounding factors such as issues involved are controlled. Women claimants also tend to talk more than their male counterparts in the hearings. While patterns in questioning did not differ for women and men, women definitely talked more than men, although it did not appear to improve their chances of winning. In contrast to the striking differences in hearing outcome and the length of testimony provided by men and women claimants evaluations of the hearing experience were quite similar for the men and women. This exploratory research suggests that more work should investigate success rates of men and women in other non-criminal legal proceedings, and continue to test explanations for any observed differences in such rates.     

An Analysis of Labor Union Participation in U.S. Congressional Hearings

Using both a new data set of labor union appearances in congressional hearings and archival data on union organizational resources, this article analyzes factors that determine whether a labor union will be represented in congressional hearing testimony in a given year. Consistent with the expectations of resource mobilization theory, organizational resources are important predictors of participation in congressional hearings. For example, membership is an important predictor of testimony in hearings, as is the number of lobbyists on staff and the character of a union's primary industry. However, membership in the AFL‐CIO federation is negatively related to hearing participation, and some of the benefits of having a large membership base may be diminishing over time. Implications for the study of interest group politics and organizational political strategies are discussed.     

Health Affairs blog downplays importance of privacy loss in CARES Act changes

The quiet and rapid end of the federal law protecting substance use disorder (SUD) treatment record confidentiality came on March 27 with the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act (see “CARES Act eliminates most of 42 CFR Part 2,” ADAW, April 6, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adaw.32678 ). Bear in mind that the regulation is still in effect until next March. But once the law was passed, it didn't take long for history to be rewritten.     

Mandatory agency shop laws as an explanation of Canada-U.S. union density divergence

X. Conclusion During a period of strength the Canadian labor movement was able to secure enduring legislation providing for their institutional protection. In the 1940s Justice Rand justified his decision by invoking the spirit underlying the operationalization of a collective bargaining regime. In the 1990s the Canadian Supreme Court continued this tradition by refusing to hollow out unions’ rights to a secure financial base and autonomy in decision making. Between the 1940s and the 1990s, the unions' voice was heard in legislatures throughout the country through the NDP. Canadian unions now benefit from, among other things, first-contract arbitration, job protection for striking workers, and a card process of union certification. Thus, although current Canadian attitudes towards unions show considerable detachment, the embeddedness of legal protections helps hold such challenges as RTW in Alberta at bay. During the same years, American labor was unable to translate its strength of numbers into gains in public policy: in fact, as union density peaked, legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act and Landrum-Griffin Act eroded union institutional protections. An earlier version of this article appears as “Union Security in Canada,” in The Internal Governance and Organizational Effectiveness of Labor Unions, edited by S. Estreicher, H. C. Katz, and B. E. Kaufman, Kluwer Press. We are grateful for their permission to reproduce portions of the chapter. Comments from Dennis Nolan (University of South Carolina) and John Godard (University of Manitoba) are greatly appre-ciated. The article benefited from their excellent suggestions. Research assistance from Fred Jacques is acknowledged. We follow the Canadian spelling of “labour” for accuracy when it is used in citations, quotes, and titles.     

Accounting for success and failure in policy implementation: The role of commitment in India's MGNREGA

Commitment or political will is often notable by its absence. While lack of commitment is a key factor in policy failure, it has been challenging to identify and operationalize how commitment can shape successful implementation. This article applies Brinkerhoff's (2000) framework of expressions of commitment to explain how commitment of policy elites shape policy implementation processes. Evidence for five characteristics of commitment traces these expressions from two types of policy elites — politicians and bureaucrats. Primary data from four Indian states were used—Chhatisgarh, Assam, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh—to examine the case of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act (MGNREGA). The data were collected through interviews with state‐level elites, supplemented by secondary data on the political economy of these states. In explaining how successes and failures of the MGNREGA are attributable to the commitment of these actors, the article considers the politics of policy implementation. It argues that commitment is critical at the sub‐national level in India, and explains the different outcomes of MGNREGA in the four states. The article considers how to strengthen policy implementation, and demonstrates that this can be done through capitalizing on positive feedback loops between different strands of commitment, as well as between commitment of administrative elites and political party leaders. The paper concludes that commitment and capacity feed off each other, improving implementation of social policies.     

From parity to subsidiarity? children's policy in Northern Ireland under New Labour: the case of child welfare

The central challenge in evaluating any aspect of children's policy in Northern Ireland is finding a way to combine acknowledgement of the political violence and instability that marks it out from other UK jurisdictions with recognising its experience as a variation on shared themes. In this paper the devolution agenda of New Labour is related to the progress being made in the peace process and its implications for children's policy considered through focusing on child welfare. With illustrations from policy, legislation and practice, the traditional social policy commitment to ‘parity’ is shown to have always involved negotiation and accommodation between the realities of the region and Westminster's objectives. It is suggested that under New Labour that is continuing and that the term ‘subsidiarity’ may prove helpful in describing and engaging in this process. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of parental and attorney involvement on reunification in Juvenile dependency cases

Individuals in the dependency system believe that it is important to have parties present at early decision-making hearings without much empirical support. This paper examines how involvement of mothers, fathers, and their respective legal representatives at early decision-making hearings (i.e., preliminary protective, adjudication, disposition, and first review) influences reunification in juvenile dependency cases. Cox proportional-hazard models indicate the likelihood over time of returning children to the parents they were removed from was significantly higher when the mother and the mother's attorney was present at early decision-making hearings. Results also indicate that the presence of the father significantly increased the likelihood of returning children to the parents they were removed from at only two specific case events. The presence of the father's legal representative was a significant predictor of reunification at the disposition hearing only. Implications for theory and policy are discussed.     

The Politics of Childhood and Asylum in the UK

This article considers the general treatment of asylum‐seeking families with children in the UK, focusing on the government's practices and public reactions to these measures. It first describes both the exclusive asylum framework, based on institutionalised suspicion, welfare restrictions and detention, and the inclusive child policy framework, based on recognising children's rights and protecting all children. The article then investigates the implications for policy‐making that these radically opposed regimes have for those who fall between the two categories, i.e. asylum‐seeking children. To this end, we examine more closely three asylum practices — Section 9 of the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004, detention of accompanied asylum‐seeking children in immigration removal centres and removals. Our analysis indicates that the government's attempt to fully include families within the restrictive asylum framework has been somewhat frustrated by the mobilisation of a wide range of public actors. As such, despite its supposedly ‘legally unconstrained’ room for action, the government has recently agreed to partly review its policy standards for asylum‐seeking families, apparently aware of the potentially damaging effects of being seen as disregarding children's rights and needs. On the other hand, the government does not seem inclined to question the current asylum framework and the assumptions on which it is based. Consequently, the asylum system for families is likely to remain based on ad hocarrangements conditioned by the scale of the protests.