State and local government wage differentials: An intrastate analysis

Previous estimates of state and local government wage differentials have been typically based on data aggregated across all states, and such aggregation may produce seriously misleading differential estimates. We estimate intrastate earnings differentials for the state and local sectors in Wisconsin, four other midwestern states, and two states outside the midwest. There is substantial variation in the differentials: aggregated differentials can be misleading. Our work also confirms that state and local government labor markets have reduced earnings dispersion and investigates the possibility that higher public sector earnings may attract an “over-qualified” work force. The authors thank the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute for financial support and members of the UWM economics seminar and Sammis White for detailed comments on earlier drafts.     

Interacting with the State: Feminist Strategies and Political Opportunities

In recent years feminists have been engaged in new debates about gender and the state. Instead of adopting either a purely structural or agential approach, the emphasis in these debates is on the interactive relationship between the two. Feminists in political science have not been immune to this trend. Work is emerging in this field which dissaggregates the state to consider the way different political institutions shape and are shaped by engagement with feminist actors. This article contributes to these efforts by providing a detailed comparative analysis of feminist strategies and political opportunities in two similar political systems - Australia and Canada. A number of key points emerge from this study. First, similar institutions in different countries provide varying opportunities for feminists. As a result, it is not possible to make emphatic claims about certain institutions being more or less beneficial for feminists. Second, feminists respond to these opportunities by adopting certain strategies over others. Through these strategies, feminists can have a direct bearing on the opportunity structure open to them. What the experiences of Canadian and Australian feminists tell us is that the relationship between feminists and political institutions changes over both time and place; that it is interactive and dynamic, rather than predictable and permanent.     

Marriage Migration Policy in South Korea: Social Investment beyond the Nation State

This article seeks to contribute to understandings of South Korea's approach to marriage migration. Situating our analysis of marriage migration policy specifically within the recent emergence of a social investment approach to welfare, we bring together two bodies of literature that due to the methodological nationalism of much welfare state scholarship are usually treated separately. Through an examination of the policy framework governing marriage migration ‐ so‐called ‘multicultural family policies’ ‐ we find that successive Korean governments have actively sought female marriage migrants to perform various social reproductive roles as a means to secure the reproductive capacity of the nation, just as feminist scholars have argued the care work of citizen‐mothers can be understood. Our analysis also suggests that marriage migration policy in Korea constitutes a distinctly transnational dimension to its overall social investment approach, which is strongly motivated by concerns to reproduce the next generation of human capital.     

The Social Life of the State: Relational Ethnography and Political Sociology

Qualitative Sociology - Political sociologists have typically studied the state as a self-enclosed institution hovering above civil society. In this formulation, the state is rendered as...     

Negative to the extreme: the problematics of the RNIB’s See the Need campaign

This article reports the findings of research about the RNIB’s recent advertising campaign. Under the methodological rubric of Critical Discourse Analysis, two paradigms were applied as research instruments: an advertising aesthetic was used in the primary analysis; and the tripartite model of disability was used in the secondary analysis. This analysis of various texts culminated in the conclusion that the RNIB’s campaign is fundamentally contradictory, in danger of contributing to problematic social attitudes and thus hindering the very people it sets out to help – an issue greatly complicated by the organisational involvement of people registered as blind and partially sighted.     

Political geography and interest-group power

The relationship between the distribution of an interest group's members (i.e., voters) across legislative districts and the group's ability to influence government policy is not well understood. We propose a simple model of interest groups and legislative decisionmaking to characterize this relationship formally, and analyze the model for the case of three competing interest groups. We find that an interest group's expected power is maximized when its members are evently divided across (m+1)/2 of the m districts, except when the group is somewhat small, in which case its expected power is maximized when it is evenly divided across all m districts. Expected power decreases sharply as a group's members become concentrated in fewer than (m+1)/2 districts.The author would like to thank the participants of the Workshop in Applications of Economics at the University of chicago fpr their helpful comments, and the Center for the Study of the Economy and the State for its financial support.     

The Constraints on Civil Society beyond the State: Gender-based Insecurity in Meghalaya,India

The role of civil society is vital for politicizing, contesting, and addressing human insecurity, yet there is very little analysis of the ability of civil society actors to do so. Recent critical approaches to the concept have questioned the tendency to view civil society as an unequivocal good, yet the majority of these critiques still focus on civil society at a global level or on the enabling and disabling capacity of the state at the national level. This paper argues that civil society is constrained not only by the state but by local government and other actors from within civil society. Identity politics, power relations, and existing inequalities between and within communities affect the ability of formal and informal organizations to contest the causes of insecurity. This paper examines the role of civil society in addressing gender-based insecurity in the Indian state of Meghalaya to demonstrate the influence of these factors on civil society and concludes by arguing that civil society is a much more dynamic and contradictory sphere than is often recognized by both advocates and critics. These dynamics must be understood if the constraints on civil society are to be transcended.

An Analysis of the Political Activities of NASW State Chapters

Abstract

NASW state chapters provide a mechanism through which members can become involved in formal political and community advocacy practice. However, there is little understanding of the strategies and processes undertaken by NASW to affect legislative and electoral outcomes. Through a mailed survey to state NASW chapters, this paper describes the scope of chapters' political practices, their policy goals and priorities, and their perceived effectiveness in advocacy work.     

Exploring the Impact of Political Context on State–Civil Society Relations: Actors’ Strategies in a Developmental State

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - How does a state govern civil society organizations (CSOs) under the framework of a developmental state? This article...     

Texts and the institutions of municipal government: The power of texts in the public process of land development 1

This article explores the textual practices organizing participation in municipal planning and its public discourse. The process in which the assessment and public approval of private land development takes place is a complex sphere of actions involving local government professional staff, clerks, lawyers, private developers and consultants, provincial government staff in several ministries, publicly elected officials and, often, local residents. It is part of the institutions of municipal government. What takes place publicly co-ordinates and characterizes individual actions as part of the institution of local government and its ‘politics'.     

Gaining Access to the State: Political Opportunities and Agency in Forest Activism in Indonesia

This paper investigates the complex nature of access to the state for environmental movement organisations (EMOs) and adopts an interactionist approach to explore inter-organisational networking between EMOs and state actors. The paper supports existing evidence that proximate political opportunities are in part contingent on the interests, claims and frames of policy actors. The main theoretical contribution of this paper is to illustrate that EMOs strategically adapt to existing opportunity environments and actively seek to engage state actors that are most receptive to their demands, as opposed to those that have most influence in the domain, and that new modes of governance facilitate such access. Using evidence from forest activism in Indonesia shows that lobbying less powerful but more receptive actors is a strategy that EMOs use to overcome limited political opportunities and that semi-independent multi-actor forums expand access of EMOs to potential state actor allies. The paper also shows that within the Indonesian context, these multi-stakeholders forums are actively supported by international organisations which therefore directly contribute to expanding opportunities for EMOs.