Theorizing notions of the participation of people in poverty in social policymaking: Policing,politics and subjectification

Since the 1990s, a paradigm of participation has gained prominence and become a dominant policy rhetoric in anti-poverty policymaking in Europe, embracing the key idea that people in poverty should participate as equal citizens in political decision-making processes. Based on a historical case study of the production process of a Belgian white paper, the General Report on Poverty (1994), we investigate who participated in the GRP production process, and whether the underlying participatory and democratic mechanisms produced a shift in power and might have led to a more socially just and equal society. We rely on a central set of ideas of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière to theorize different notions of participation, and tease out whether the processing of equality had the capacity to move from policing towards politics through subjectification. Our research study demonstrates how social change and a reconfiguration of the democratic order can appear as a moment of democracy, yet inevitably leads to a new police.     

AN ESTIMATED DYNAMIC STOCHASTIC GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODEL OF THE EURO AREA

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with sticky prices and wages for the euro area. The model incorporates various other features such as habit formation, costs of adjustment in capital accumulation and variable capacity utilization. It is estimated with Bayesian techniques using seven key macroeconomic variables: GDP, consumption, investment, prices, real wages, employment, and the nominal interest rate. The introduction of ten orthogonal structural shocks (including productivity, labor supply, investment, preference, cost‐push, and monetary policy shocks) allows for an empirical investigation of the effects of such shocks and of their contribution to business cycle fluctuations in the euro area. Using the estimated model, we also analyze the output (real interest rate) gap, defined as the difference between the actual and model‐based potential output (real interest rate). (JEL: E4, E5)     

State‐istics and statistics: exclusion categories in the population census (Belgium, 1846–1930)

During most of the nineteenth century, the etymology of the term ‘statistics’ was still much alive: statistics was state‐istics, the empirical study of the state. It has been argued that the nineteenth‐century avalanche of printed numbers gave rise to a new discourse about society. Not only was society conceived of as a population; the corps social (Quetelet) was also conceptualized as a subject of statistics. An important contribution of this state‐istics was to conceive a new sort of object, which could be both the target of research and of policy interventions. On the basis of a case‐study of all the Belgian population censuses taken before the Second World War, we attempt to articulate the complex interactions between science, government, and society in the modern era. We thereby direct our attention to the range of exclusions and exclusion places that appeared in these censuses. Our analysis highlights the intimate relationship between population and territory in the ‘search engines’ of the statisticians. The discursive constitution of territorial exclusions allows us to analyse the articulation of inclusion ideals – in the period before such ideals became firmly institutionalized in the so‐called welfare state of the postwar period.