The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in India and the United States.John Echeverri-Gent

1994 ◽  
Vol 100 (2) ◽  
pp. 547-549
Author(s):  
Patrick Heller
2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel DeCanio

In the 1980s, many scholars of both comparative and American politics argued that states often act autonomously from social demands. Rejecting reductionist assumptions regarding the primacy of social groups for public policy, both groups of scholars examine how government actors and preexisting institutional constraints influenced policy implementation. Since then, however, while the state has been retained as the primary unit of analysis for most studies of American political development, interest in the autonomy of the state has dwindled, and scholars have increasingly focused on how social groups and electoral outcomes explain state formation and public policy, especially in the nineteenth century. In some instances, scholars have even denied that state autonomy is a relevant concept for the study of American political development.


Commonwealth ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Borick

“An Introduction to the Special to the Special Issue on Energy and the Environment” provides an overview of the state of the literature relating to Pennsylvania in these areas of public policy. It then introduces each of the articles in this issue of the journal. 


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hunold

In this essay I examine the dispute between the German GreenParty and some of the country’s environmental nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs) over the March 2001 renewal of rail shipmentsof highly radioactive wastes to Gorleben. My purpose indoing so is to test John Dryzek’s 1996 claim that environmentalistsought to beware of what they wish for concerning inclusion in theliberal democratic state. Inclusion on the wrong terms, arguesDryzek, may prove detrimental to the goals of greening and democratizingpublic policy because such inclusion may compromise thesurvival of a green public sphere that is vital to both. Prospects forecological democracy, understood in terms of strong ecologicalmodernization here, depend on historically conditioned relationshipsbetween the state and the environmental movement that fosterthe emergence and persistence over time of such a public sphere.


Author(s):  
Jordanna Bailkin

This chapter asks how refugee camps transformed people as well as spaces, altering the identities of the individuals and communities who lived in and near them. It considers how camps forged and fractured economic, religious, and ethnic identities, constructing different kinds of unity and disunity. Camps had unpredictable effects on how refugees and Britons thought of themselves, and how they saw their relationship to upward and downward mobility. As the impoverished Briton emerged more clearly in the imagination of the welfare state, the refugee was his constant companion and critic. The state struggled to determine whether refugees required the same care as the poor, or if they warranted their own structures of aid.


Author(s):  
Florian Matthey-Prakash

What does it mean for education to be a fundamental right, and how may children benefit from it? Surprisingly, even when the right to education was added to the Indian Constitution as Article 21A, this question received barely any attention. This book identifies justiciability (or, more broadly, enforceability) as the most important feature of Article 21A, meaning that children and their parents must be provided with means to effectively claim their right from the state. Otherwise, it would remain a ‘right’ only on paper. The book highlights how lack of access to the Indian judiciary means that the constitutional promise of justiciability is unfulfilled, particularly so because the poor, who cannot afford quality private education for their children, must be the main beneficiaries of the right. It then deals with possible alternative means the state may provide for the poor to claim the benefits under Article 21A, and identifies the grievance redress mechanism created by the Right to Education Act as a potential system of enforcement. Even though this system is found to be deficient, the book concludes with an optimistic outlook, hoping that rights advocates may, in the future, focus on improving such mechanisms for legal empowerment.


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