Dividing Citizens

Dividing Citizens PDF Author: Suzanne Mettler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728822
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The New Deal was not the same deal for men and women—a finding strikingly demonstrated in Dividing Citizens. Rich with implications for current debates over citizenship and welfare policy, this book provides a detailed historical account of how governing institutions and public policies shape social status and civic life. In her examination of the impact of New Deal social and labor policies on the organization and character of American citizenship, Suzanne Mettler offers an incisive analysis of the formation and implementation of the pillars of the modern welfare state: the Social Security Act, including Old Age and Survivors' Insurance, Old Age Assistance, Unemployment Insurance, and Aid to Dependent Children (later known simply as "welfare"), as well as the Fair Labor Standards Act, which guaranteed the minimum wage. Mettler draws on the methods of historical-institutionalists to develop a "structured governance" approach to her analysis of the New Deal. She shows how the new welfare state institutionalized gender politically, most clearly by incorporating men, particularly white men, into nationally administered policies and consigning women to more variable state-run programs. Differential incorporation of citizens, in turn, prompted different types of participation in politics. These gender-specific consequences were the outcome of a complex interplay of institutional dynamics, political imperatives, and the unintended consequences of policy implementation actions. By tracing the subtle and complicated political dynamics that emerged with New Deal policies, Mettler sounds a cautionary note as we once again negotiate the bounds of American federalism and public policy.

Dividing Citizens

Dividing Citizens PDF Author: Suzanne Mettler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728822
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The New Deal was not the same deal for men and women—a finding strikingly demonstrated in Dividing Citizens. Rich with implications for current debates over citizenship and welfare policy, this book provides a detailed historical account of how governing institutions and public policies shape social status and civic life. In her examination of the impact of New Deal social and labor policies on the organization and character of American citizenship, Suzanne Mettler offers an incisive analysis of the formation and implementation of the pillars of the modern welfare state: the Social Security Act, including Old Age and Survivors' Insurance, Old Age Assistance, Unemployment Insurance, and Aid to Dependent Children (later known simply as "welfare"), as well as the Fair Labor Standards Act, which guaranteed the minimum wage. Mettler draws on the methods of historical-institutionalists to develop a "structured governance" approach to her analysis of the New Deal. She shows how the new welfare state institutionalized gender politically, most clearly by incorporating men, particularly white men, into nationally administered policies and consigning women to more variable state-run programs. Differential incorporation of citizens, in turn, prompted different types of participation in politics. These gender-specific consequences were the outcome of a complex interplay of institutional dynamics, political imperatives, and the unintended consequences of policy implementation actions. By tracing the subtle and complicated political dynamics that emerged with New Deal policies, Mettler sounds a cautionary note as we once again negotiate the bounds of American federalism and public policy.

How Policies Make Citizens

How Policies Make Citizens PDF Author: Andrea Louise Campbell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400841313
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Some groups participate in politics more than others. Why? And does it matter for policy outcomes? In this richly detailed and fluidly written book, Andrea Campbell argues that democratic participation and public policy powerfully reinforce each other. Through a case study of senior citizens in the United States and their political activity around Social Security, she shows how highly participatory groups get their policy preferences fulfilled, and how public policy itself helps create political inequality. Using a wealth of unique survey and historical data, Campbell shows how the development of Social Security helped transform seniors from the most beleaguered to the most politically active age group. Thus empowered, seniors actively defend their programs from proposed threats, shaping policy outcomes. The participatory effects are strongest for low-income seniors, who are most dependent on Social Security. The program thus reduces political inequality within the senior population--a laudable effect--while increasing inequality between seniors and younger citizens. A brief look across policies shows that program effects are not always positive. Welfare recipients are even less participatory than their modest socioeconomic backgrounds would imply, because of the demeaning and disenfranchising process of proving eligibility. Campbell concludes that program design profoundly shapes the nature of democratic citizenship. And proposed policies--such as Social Security privatization--must be evaluated for both their economic and political effects, because the very quality of democratic government is influenced by the kinds of policies it chooses.

Red Sea Citizens

Red Sea Citizens PDF Author: Jonathan Miran
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253220793
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
In the late 19th century, the port of Massawa, in Eritrea on the Red Sea, was a thriving, vibrant, multiethnic commercial hub. Red Sea Citizens tells the story of how Massawa rose to prominence as one of Northeast Africa's most important shipping centers. Jonathan Miran reconstructs the social, material, religious, and cultural history of this mercantile community in a period of sweeping change. He shows how Massawa and its citizens benefited from migrations across the Indian Ocean, the Arabian peninsula, Egypt, and the African interior. Miran also notes the changes that took place in Massawa as traders did business and eventually settled. By revealing the dynamic processes at play, this book provides insight into the development of the Horn of Africa that extends beyond borders and boundaries, nations and nationalism.

Democracies Divided

Democracies Divided PDF Author: Thomas Carothers
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 081573722X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
“A must-read for anyone concerned about the fate of contemporary democracies.”—Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Why divisions have deepened and what can be done to heal them As one part of the global democratic recession, severe political polarization is increasingly afflicting old and new democracies alike, producing the erosion of democratic norms and rising societal anger. This volume is the first book-length comparative analysis of this troubling global phenomenon, offering in-depth case studies of countries as wide-ranging and important as Brazil, India, Kenya, Poland, Turkey, and the United States. The case study authors are a diverse group of country and regional experts, each with deep local knowledge and experience. Democracies Divided identifies and examines the fissures that are dividing societies and the factors bringing polarization to a boil. In nearly every case under study, political entrepreneurs have exploited and exacerbated long-simmering divisions for their own purposes—in the process undermining the prospects for democratic consensus and productive governance. But this book is not simply a diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Each case study discusses actions that concerned citizens and organizations are taking to counter polarizing forces, whether through reforms to political parties, institutions, or the media. The book’s editors distill from the case studies a range of possible ways for restoring consensus and defeating polarization in the world’s democracies. Timely, rigorous, and accessible, this book is of compelling interest to civic activists, political actors, scholars, and ordinary citizens in societies beset by increasingly rancorous partisanship.

Gendered Citizenship

Gendered Citizenship PDF Author: Rebecca DeWolf
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496228294
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
By engaging deeply with American legal and political history as well as the increasingly rich material on gender history, Gendered Citizenship illuminates the ideological contours of the original struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from 1920 to 1963. As the first comprehensive, full-length history of that struggle, this study grapples not only with the battle over women’s constitutional status but also with the more than forty-year mission to articulate the boundaries of what it means to be an American citizen. Through an examination of an array of primary source materials, Gendered Citizenship contends that the original ERA conflict is best understood as the terrain that allowed Americans to reconceptualize citizenship to correspond with women’s changing status after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Finally, Rebecca DeWolf considers the struggle over the ERA in a new light: focusing not on the familiar theme of why the ERA failed to gain enactment, but on how the debates transcended traditional liberal versus conservative disputes in early to mid-twentieth-century America. The conflict, DeWolf reveals, ultimately became the defining narrative for the changing nature of American citizenship in the era.

The Democratic Constitution

The Democratic Constitution PDF Author: Brian E. Butler
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022647450X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The Supreme Court is seen today as the ultimate arbiter of the Constitution. Once the Court has spoken, it is the duty of the citizens and their elected officials to abide by its decisions. But the conception of the Supreme Court as the final interpreter of constitutional law took hold only relatively recently. Drawing on the pragmatic ideals characterized by Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, Charles Sabel, and Richard Posner. Brian E. Butler shows how this conception is inherently problematic for a healthy democracy. Butler offers an alternative democratic conception of constitutional law, “democratic experimentalism,” and applies it in a thorough reconstruction of Supreme Court cases across the centuries, such as Brown v. Board of Education, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, and Lochner v. New York. In contrast to the traditional tools and conceptions of legal analysis that see the law as a formally unique and separate type of practice, democratic experimentalism combines democratic aims and experimental practice. Butler also suggests other directions jurisprudential roles could take: for example, adjudication could be performed by primary stakeholders with better information. Ultimately, Butler argues persuasively for a move away from the current absolute centrality of courts toward a system of justice that emphasizes local rule and democratic choice.

Rethinking Sexual Citizenship

Rethinking Sexual Citizenship PDF Author: Jyl J. Josephson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143846049X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Public policy often assumes there is one correct way to be a family. Rethinking Sexual Citizenship argues that policies that enforce this idea hurt all of us and harm our democracy. Jyl J. Josephson uses the concept of "sexual citizenship" (a criticism of the assumption that all families have a heterosexual at their center) to show how government policies are made to punish or reward particular groups of people. This analysis applies sexual citizenship not only to policies that impact LGBTQ families, but also to other groups, including young people affected by abstinence-only public policies and single-parent families affected by welfare policy. The book also addresses the idea that the "normal" family in the United States is white. It concludes with a discussion of how scholars and activists can help create a more inclusive democracy by challenging this narrow view of public life.

Sweatshop USA

Sweatshop USA PDF Author: Daniel E. Bender
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136064028
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
For over a century, the sweatshop has evoked outrage and moral repugnance. Once cast as a type of dangerous and immoral garment factory brought to American shores by European immigrants, today the sweatshop is reviled as emblematic of the abuses of an unregulated global economy. This collection unites some of the best recent work in the interdisciplinary field of sweatshop studies. It examines changing understandings of the roots and problems of the sweatshop, and explores how the history of the American sweatshop is inexorably intertwined with global migration of capital, labor, ideas and goods. The American sweatshop may be located abroad but remains bound to the United States through ties of fashion, politics, labor and economics. The global character of the American sweatshop has presented a barrier to unionization and regulation. Anti-sweatshop campaigns have often focused on local organizing and national regulation while the sweatshop remains global. Thus, the epitaph for the sweatshop has frequently been written and re-written by unionists, reformers, activists and politicians. So, too, have they mourned its return.

Citizenship After Orientalism

Citizenship After Orientalism PDF Author: Engin Isin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317681371
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This collection offers a postcolonial critique of the ostensible superiority or originality of ‘Western’ political theory and one of its fundamental concepts, ‘citizenship’. The chapters analyse the undoing, uncovering, and reinventing of citizenship as a way of investigating citizenship as political subjectivity. If it has now become very difficult to imagine citizenship merely as nationality or membership in the nation-state, this is at least in part because of the anticolonial struggles and the project of reimagining citizenship after orientalism that they precipitated. If it has become difficult to sustain the orientalist assumption, the question arises; how do we investigate citizenship as political subjectivity after orientalism? This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Citizenship Reimagined

Citizenship Reimagined PDF Author: Allan Colbern
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108897711
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
The United States is entering a new era of progressive state citizenship, with California leading the way. A growing number of states are providing expanded rights to undocumented immigrants that challenge conventional understandings of citizenship as binary, unidimensional, and exclusively national. In Citizenship Reimagined, Allan Colbern and S. Karthick Ramakrishnan develop a precise framework for understanding and measuring citizenship as expansive, multi-dimensional, and federated - broader than legal status and firmly grounded in the provision of rights. Placing today's immigration battles in historical context, they show that today's progressive state citizenship is not unprecedented: US states have been leaders in rights expansion since America's founding, including over the fight for black citizenship and women's suffrage. The book invites readers to rethink how American federalism relates to minority rights and how state laws regulating undocumented residents can coexist with federal exclusivity over immigration law.