Breaking down ideas and institutions: the politics of tax policy in the USA and the UK

As the existing comparative policy literature suggests, both ideational and institutional analyses have clear analytical value in their own terms but, under many circumstances, it is the combination of the two perspectives that allows for a full understanding of policy trajectories. In this article we suggest that, to improve our understanding of how ideas and institutions interact to produce change, it is important to break down these two overly broad concepts. This is because beyond general arguments about how ‘ideas’ and ‘institutions’ interact, students of public policy should itemize ‘ideas’ and ‘institutions’ into more focused, and empirically traceable, subcategories while recognizing the changing and contingent nature of their interaction, over time. To illustrate this, we turn to the politics of tax policy in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, tracking developments from the rise of the New Right and an aggressive income tax cutting agenda, personified by President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, through to the revived debate about the legitimacy of increasing taxes on those earning the highest incomes that emerged in the era of austerity that followed the Great Recession of 2008.     

美国与《联合国海洋法公约》

《联合国海洋法公约》是迄今为止最广泛、最全面、最有影响的管理和规范海洋活动的国际公约,已经并将继续对国际政治、经济和社会产生重大影响。美国虽然积极参与了《公约》的谈判和制订,但时至今日仍未批准《公约》,令人费解。本文回顾了美国与《联合国海洋法公约》的渊源,通过《公约》对于美国国家利益关联性的论述,探究美国未批准加入《公约》的缘由。本文认为,随着国际海洋形势和美国自身实力等因素的不断变化,美国出于自身利益考虑,批准《公约》是大势所趋。美国一旦批准《公约》,必将附加对其更加有利的额外声明、条件等,对此,我们应予以关注。     

Aging in Poverty: Making the Case for Comprehensive Care Management

A model for holistic care management that would enhance outcomes for economically vulnerable older adults who receive an array of disjointed services administered through the older Americans Act (OAA) and local Area Agencies on Aging (AAA) is proposed. Fragmented service delivery is typically wasteful and ineffectual, but comprehensive care management that includes an autonomous care manager, a single interagency plan of care and ongoing monitoring that is client-centered may protect those aging in poverty from negative health outcomes.     

Labour Market Policy in the United States, Canada and Sweden: Addressing the Issue of Convergence

'Convergence theorists' suggest that domestic and/or global challenges and pressures are rendering welfare states broadly similar across national boundaries. 'Resilience theorists', in contrast, argue that a range of socio-political factors have allowed states to respond differentially to these pressures and maintain their distinct national social policy approaches. However, both research streams have addressed the 'welfare state' writ large in a multitude of nations and typically relied upon narrow, quantitative budgetary indicators. This study examines qualitative changes to key income security and social service programmes in one central social policy domain – labour market policy – in three nations, the United States, Canada and Sweden. It suggests that there is evidence of some degree of 'convergence' in the broadest sense of the term across these three nations. However, while both the USA and Canada have readily embraced genuinely neo-liberal restructuring, and become increasingly similar over the past two decades in this policy area, Sweden has managed to retain its distinctive social policy approach so far, despite notable changes, developments and trends. It also suggests that the character and direction of change may vary across and within policy domains in a single nation. The conclusion provides a discussion of universality, equality and solidarity, concepts that are commonly employed in accounts of welfare state change.     

美国族群问题及其破解对策

美国是一个多族群的国家,族群之间的矛盾和斗争充斥着整个美国历史发展过程。"二战"之后,特别是20世纪80年代以来,由于白人至上主义和极右思潮的抬头,美国族群关系更趋于紧张。然而,在前苏联、南斯拉夫这些多族群国家解体的后冷战时代,美国却能够保持相对稳定的族群关系。这主要得益于其不断完善的法律制度、多元与一体的相对平衡,以及不断改进的社会保障制度等因素。由于美国族群政策是建立在资本主义私有制基础之上的,具有不可避免的局限性,因而对美国的族群政策应重于研究、分析,慎于借鉴。     

The Workfare Illusion: Re-examining the Concept and the British Case

This article contends that workfare programmes pursued by various OECD countries since the mid‐1990s do not amount to a fundamental change in policy. The limited potential of workfare is due to the fact that it fails to transcend the constraints of earlier forms of ‘active’ responses to unemployment. Furthermore, it suffers from specific policy‐making disadvantages not shared by these responses. The article opens with a survey of relevant academic debates on the subject. It then places workfare in a broader context by identifying its functional reach, as compared to other active policy responses to unemployment such as active labour market policy (ALMP). The third section analyses workfare policies in the United Kingdom, as developed since 1997, by re‐examining the British New Deal employment programme. That review demonstrates that workfare policies either depend on their ‘fit’ with the existing policy‐making heritage, or that they remain merely symbolic. The article concludes by suggesting that the potential of workfare to effect change in responses to unemployment continues to be of limited significance. In other words, capitalist employment and welfare systems continue to be characterized by incremental adaptation rather than by fundamental regime change as suggested by the critics of workfare.     

How to Design a "Liberal" Welfare State: A Comparison of Canada and the United States

My aim in this paper is to show how differences in the programmatic design of two otherwise "liberal" welfare regimes have generated substantially different patterns of welfare state retrenchment and distributive outcomes since the 1970s. Welfare regimes are distinguished by the principles and rules that regulate transactions between the three institutional nuclei from which individuals derive their "welfare" in modern capitalist societies—the state, the market, and the family. Liberal regimes are characterized by a preference for market solutions to welfare problems. While Canada and the United States both represent paradigmatic instances of the liberal regime type, there are long-standing differences in methods both of financing and distributing benefits. Differences in programme design led to substantially different retrenchment strategies from the end of the 1970s, which in turn produced dramatically different distributive outcomes: rising inequality and poverty rates in the United States compared to relative stability in the distribution of income among Canadian families.     

讨论、辩论与协商民主：国际气候政策制定中的工具选择

从逻辑理性和协商民主的双重角度看,讨论与辩论具有不同的政策工具意义,在特定的情形下,政策辩论往往成为更自然、更方便的选择。20年来,国际气候政策制定过程具有突出的政策辩论特征,从民主理论、逻辑与现实性角度来看,政策辩论应该成为国际气候政策制定的重要工具选择,改善国际气候政策辩论制度势在必行。从当前实践需要看,政策讨论与政策辩论在促进公正而有效的国际气候政策制定,构建全球政治文明的经典样本与范例,提供政策制定过程辩论工具选择的例证与经验等方面具有重要的意义。     

美国文官"政治中立"问题的历史考察

本文运用历史学与政治学相结合的研究方法,讨论与研究美国文官"政治中立"的问题。通过对这一问题的讨论与研究,不仅有助于从政治学的角度来认识政府的政治与行政功能及它们的相互联系与区别,而且有助于从历史学的角度来梳理这一问题的历史线索及其未来走势,进而对我国的政府体制建设提供理论借鉴。     

I'm OK, You're (Not) OK: The Private Welfare State in the United States

The American welfare state has been premised on the mixture of substantial private, tax‐subsidized benefits rather than on more universalistic public benefits. That pattern is in some ways being undermined as private pension plans are increasingly going bankrupt and firms reduce the benefits they provide employees. On the other hand, however, the current Bush administration is attempting to enhance the private sector role by allowing individuals to invest at least a part of their social insurance contributions into private savings plans. These changes may in the end increase the role of the public sector as a regulator and underwriter at the same time that attempts are made to minimize public sector involvement.     

Seeking Safety and Humanity in the Harshest Immigration Climate in a Generation: A Review of the Literature on the Effects of Separation and Detention on Migrant and Asylum-Seeking Children and Families in the United States during the Trump Administration

In recent years, families with children from the Northern Triangle countries of Central America constitute a large and growing proportion of migrants and overall filed asylum claims. In an effort to deter overall immigration through the U.S.–Mexico border, the executive branch under the Trump administration has made substantial changes to federal immigration and asylum policy in recent years. Given the sensitive nature of early development and the hardship and trauma that many migrant children have experienced, immigration policies that do not prioritize child wellbeing, and in fact, neglect or harm it, can have lifelong negative consequences on physical and psychological wellbeing. In light of the scope of children and families affected by these policies and potential magnitude of their effects, the present review aimed to: 1) outline federal immigration policies under the Trump administration that primarily impacted migrant children and families; 2) review the research base regarding the effects of these policies on physical safety and health, development, mental health, family wellbeing, and education; and 3) provide policy recommendations to prevent further harm, mitigate the great harm already done, and prioritize child wellness moving forward. Findings from the review indicate that even short experiences of detention, particularly when children are separated from parents and caregivers, are associated with serious, lasting negative effects across every domain of functioning. The practices of separation, detention, and removal to temporary encampments compound traumatic experiences that migrant families are often fleeing, which in turn may set up already vulnerable children for a trajectory of continued marginalization. Future directions for research and implications for policy and practice are discussed.     

The United States Agency for International Development and forest loss: A cross-national analysis of environmental aid

Among scholars of international development, there is a debate regarding the effectiveness of bilateral aid to improve the natural environment. Here we focus on evaluating whether United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) aid in the environmental sector reduces forest loss. Little empirical evidence exists on this question, partly because of the challenge of modeling such a relationship, given the problem of endogeneity whereby the same social, political, or economic processes that affect forest loss may also be correlated with a nation receiving aid from international donors. We contribute to this debate by utilizing a two-stage instrumental variable regression model to analyze cross-national data for a sample of 74 low and middle income nations. After controlling for potential endogeneity, we find that higher levels of USAID’s aid for environmental protection correspond with lower rates of forest loss. We also find that a forest’s proximity to infrastructure, agricultural and forestry exports, agricultural land area, and tropical climate are related to increased forest loss.     

Exploring the endogenous governance model for alleviating food insecurity: Comparative analysis of food bank systems in Korea and the USA

Food security is one of the dimensions in reducing poverty. Food bank governance is a key system for increasing food security. Even if thousands of food banks operate around the world by importing the standard US model, a universal standard of governance cannot always be applied to all countries, because actors, networks, and institutions embedded in unique social, economic, cultural, and political contexts retain endogenous properties. Hence, the governance model must reflect the endogeneity each society has. This article aims to theoretically suggest the endogenous governance model and to empirically demonstrate the validity of this model by comparing the governance of food banks in the USA and Korea. Although Korea introduced the US food bank model, the Korean model has been adapted and changed, evolving its own system. To find the difference in endogenous food bank governance between the two countries, we compared the variety of governance models, the institutional context, mode of network, actors' attributes, and time perspective.     

The Organization of Health Policy Functions in the German Federal Government

This article gives an account of the organizational history of the German federal ministry of health (and its predecessors) since the beginnings of public policy intervention in health care. In doing so it analyses the role of ministerial organization and examines the functional and political rationale underlying acts of reorganizing the tasks and resources of federal ministries. This analysis has two sides: the first concerns the expressive function of organizational form, as revealing something about the scope and perceived importance of the policy field, while the second interrogates the policy‐shaping role of organization and the political influence of the federal health ministry in health policy‐making. The article thus considers the organizational location of health issues in the central executive from the perspective of what it reveals about government goals and priorities. Then it examines possible policy implications. It looks at resources and the size of the ministry as a first attempt to learn something about the ministry's political weight. The question of policy implications draws our attention away from organization and resource allocation and back to a focus on policy‐making and policy outcomes. The final section therefore examines substantive policy implications that might have emanated from the organizational consolidation of the federal health ministry. It concludes that one such policy implication might be the erosion of the social insurance model as a regulatory idea in health‐care services and financing.     

Social Policy in a Fast-growing Economy: The Case of Chile

Chile has adopted a package of free-market, neo-liberal social policies. This follows a pattern established by the country's largely successful economic policies. Neo-liberal social policy consists of a series of two-tier systems, which are not in contradiction with the economic model. On the contrary, a key function of the social policies is to supplement a dynamic style of capitalist economic development through a number of mechanisms. These include: improving the skills, education and health standards of the labour force; increasing savings in a privately-run pension system; reducing labour costs to firms; and providing a safety net to those whom the "trickle down" does not reach. The paper examines social policy in three sectors: pensions, health and education. It explores historical roots, present characteristics, and the degree of success or othewise of policy in these sectors. The discussion refers to the role played by the legacy of the Pinochet military dictatorship (1973–90), the interface between public and private spheres, the whole question of social policy in the context of fast economic growth under free-market conditions (and the possible presence of causality links), the changing balance of power between suppliers and users of social sector services in favour of the latter, the threat of market failure, and questions such as whether these policies have been successful and whether (or why) Chileans are prepared to accept this unequal two-tier system.     

Ideas, private institutions and American welfare state 'exceptionalism': the case of health and old-age insurance, 1915–1965

Traditional theories of welfare state development divide into two camps: societal accounts and institutional accounts. The aim of the present article is to amend and enrich the institutional approach to US social policy by reconsidering key aspects of the genesis of the American welfare state: 1) showing that concepts such as 'policy feedback' and 'path dependence' need to be extended to encompass the effect of private social policies; and 2) taking policy paradigms and agenda setting more seriously than is the norm in institutional scholarship. The empirical analysis is divided into two parts. The first part explores the activities of the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) in the decade beginning in 1910 and the genesis of Social Security in the 1930s, while the second part examines the effect of the private benefit developments on policy choices between 1935 and 1965.     

从地缘政治视角看美国的海上崛起及其对当代中国的启示

本文从地缘政治视角分析美国崛起的原因,比照当代中国与19世纪末美国在地缘政治环境上的异同,提出当代中国和平发展应研究借鉴美国的经验,按照统一国家——增强国力——发展海权的步骤,把握中国自身地缘政治环境特点,顺应当代世界发展潮流,统筹好国内国际两个大局,为实现中华民族的伟大复兴奠定坚实基础、创造良好环境。     

The Dynamics of Welfare Policy‐Making in South Korea: Social Movements as Policy Entrepreneurs*

This paper analyzes the role of social movements in the creation and evolution of a welfare state in South Korea. We begin with a theoretical overview of the existing works on policy change, highlighting concepts such as ideas, policy paradigms, and windows of opportunity. We then examine state institutions, hegemonic policy paradigms, and the specific dynamics of welfare policy‐making during South Korea’s authoritarian period (1961–1987). Next, characterizing the democratic transition in 1987 and the economic crisis of 1997–1998 as “windows of opportunity,” we probe how social movements emerged as “policy entrepreneurs” and played crucial roles in building welfare institutions and promoting welfare policies. In particular, we focus on the role of social movements in legislating the National Basic Livelihood Security Act in 1999 and consolidating fragmented health insurance systems in 2000. We conclude that social movements in democratized South Korea have assumed the role of policy entrepreneurs, filling the vacuum left by the central government and elite bureaucrats in the field of social welfare policy‐making.