Citizenship

Author(s):  
Suzanne Mettler ◽  
Alexis Walker

Besides its impact on poverty, inequality, and economic security, social policy also bears crucial significance for the meaning and quality of citizenship in a political community. Historical research on American political development has revealed that ideas about citizenship played a central role in the development of social policy. Throughout U.S. history, policy makers have often justified social policies on the basis that they would develop Americans' civic capacity and inculcate participatory norms. In addition, U.S. social policy has shaped citizens' experiences of government and their political participation and attitudes. Established social policies have influenced citizens' ability to practice their political rights, the extent of solidarity or division in society, and people's inclination to engage in civic life. In sum, American civil and political rights cannot be fully understood apart from their interaction with social rights and provision. This essay offers an introduction to thinking about the relationship between citizenship and social policy. It considers the place of social policy in different theoretical understandings of citizenship in social science research. It explores the mechanisms through which social policies can influence citizenship, tracing their impact on: membership, identity, and belonging; political attitudes; and political participation and other forms of civic involvement. Finally, it considers the contemporary relationship between social policy and citizenship and offer directions for future research on this relationship.

1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Davis Graham

Scholarship on the political development of the United States since the 1960s is dominated, not surprisingly, by social scientists. Such recent events fall within the penumbra of “contemporary history,” the standard research domain of social scientists but treacherous terrain for historians. Social scientists studying American government and society generally enjoy prompt access to evidence of the policy-making process–documents from the elected and judicial branches of government, interviews with policy elites, voting returns, survey research. Historians of the recent past, on the other hand, generally lack two crucial ingredients–temporal perspective and archival evidence–that distinguish historical analysis from social science research. For these reasons, social scientists (and journalists) customarily define the initial terms of policy debate and shape the conventional wisdom. Historians weigh in later, when memories fade, archives open, and the clock adds a relentless and inherently revisionist accumulation of hindsight.


1996 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Bradley Cousins ◽  
Marielle Simon

To enhance the relevance and usefulness of social science research, large-scale research grant allocation policies are emphasizing, if not requiring, the formation of research partnerships between researchers and members of the community of practice. The emergence of a revisionist conception of traditional dissemination and utilization theoretical frameworks is consistent with this policy direction, but supportive empirical evidence remains thin. This study reports on a multi-method evaluation of a major Canadian strategic grant program that has such partnership guidelines. Surveys of 74 funded projects and four case profiles and interviews with researchers, members of the community of practice, and grant application adjudicators concerning a strategic grant program called Education and Work in a Changing Society provided the primary basis for investigating the nature and impact of policy-induced partnerships. Results show favorable effects of partnerships on research and dissemination strategies and impact in the practice community, but ideological and pragmatic issues surfaced as inhibitory factors. The results are discussed in terms of implications for the revisionist dissemination and utilization framework, the role of granting agencies and ramifications for future research and grant allocation policy.


Author(s):  
Zafar Najmiddinov

Freedom, civil society legalism, pluralism, useful, constructive and healthy competition in society, political participation, elections, a comprehensive constitution, and the growth of non-governmental organizations, fundamental freedoms and the provision of civil and political rights are the most important components of political development are. People in society and the establishment of a parliamentary system. New movements are also mainly social and cultural in nature and emerged with the aim of reviving identity, deepening and developing political participation in Islamic and Arab societies. Some affiliated Arab regimes, such as the government of Al-Saud and the military regime of al-Sisi in Egypt, consider democracy to be a great and serious threat to the survival of their regime. Findings show that political culture, diplomatic support and guarantees, economic aid and foreign intervention are important obstacles to political development in the Arab world, and Arab regimes deliberately and sometimes inadvertently engineer polarization methods in society to prevent this. By the way, their authoritarian methods seem to be the last obstacle to the total collapse of their countries. Such conditions are certainly crucial to the survival of the Arab world governments and the Arab coup military regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. The method used in this research is qualitative (descriptive-analytical) and the method of collecting information is the use of library resources.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Loretta Lou

Purpose This purpose of this paper is to explain Macau’s successful pandemic response through an analysis of its social, political and economic landscapes. In particular, it focusses on the economic relief brought by casino capitalism in this era of COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach As mobility is highly restricted during the coronavirus pandemic, digital technologies have become central to ongoing social science research. Thanks to videoconferencing programmes such as Zoom, Facetime and WhatsApp, the author was able to carry out virtual interviews with 13 local people from different sectors of Macau in July 2020. In addition to in-depth interviews, the author also undertook an extensive review of the Macau government’s pandemic policies. Findings This paper argues that the Macau government’s swift and effective coronavirus policies are deeply intertwined with the urban fabric and political economy of the city’s casino capitalism, which endowed the government with surplus funds and an infrastructure that enabled the implementation of an array of strict measures that few other countries could afford to subsidise. Factors that have led to Macau’s extraordinarily low rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths include: competent leadership and the public’s high compliance with mandatory health measures; the generous benefits and financial support for citizens and businesses; and the compulsory quarantine required of all incoming travellers, who are lodged in hotel rooms left empty when casino tourists stopped coming. All of these measures have been made possible by a political economy backed by the peculiarities of casino capitalism and its resultant tax revenues. Research limitations/implications Future research could compare the case of Macau with other small but affluent economies (ideally economies that do not depend on the gambling industry) to ascertain the role of casino capitalism in building up economic resilience. Originality/value Although previous studies tend to emphasise the negative impacts of casino capitalism, this paper shows how tax revenues and infrastructure from the gambling industry can make a contribution to the host society in times of crisis.


Author(s):  
Thomas J. Leeper

Online experimental methods have become a major part of contemporary social science research. Yet the method is also controversial and experiments are frequently misunderstood. This chapter introduces online experimentation as a method, by explaining the logic of experimental design for causal inference. While experiments can be deployed in almost any setting, online experiments tend to take two forms: online survey experiments and experiments in naturalistic online environments. Discussing the advantages and disadvantages of these types relative to each other and relative to their offline analogues, the chapter demonstrates ways that experimentation has been used to learn about political behavior, media and campaign dynamics, and public opinion. Emphasizing trade-offs between internal validity, experimental realism, and external validity, the chapter demonstrates how researchers have used online platforms in tandem with randomization to gain insights into both online and offline phenomena. Though experiments are sometimes seen as trading off external for internal validity, this is not an accurate depiction of all experimental work. Rather, online experiments exist on spectrums that trade-off these features to varying degrees. And with those trade-offs come key challenges related to experimental control, the generalizability of experimental results across settings, units, treatments, and outcomes, and the ethics of online experimentation. The chapter concludes by suggesting how future research might innovatively push beyond existing work.


2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 968-983 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Sue Fisher ◽  
Alyssa Kaplan ◽  
Mia Budescu ◽  
Jamison Fargo ◽  
Deborah Tiller ◽  
...  

Medical-legal-social science research has documented that nongenital and/or anogenital injuries play a significant role throughout the criminal justice system from victims reporting to judges determining the length of a sentence. What remains an open question is whether the documentation of anogenital injury influences women’s willingness to engage in the criminal justice system. A sample of women age 21 years and older residing in an urban area were asked about willingness to report to police, file charges, and work with the courts to prosecute after rape. Questions were framed with a qualifying statement about the forensic examination being able to detect injury related to forced sexual intercourse. Results show that women had a high willingness to act if the examination could detect anogenital injury and women with and without a history of forced sexual intercourse had significant differences in their responses to these questions. Implications for health care, criminal justice system, and future research are discussed.


Author(s):  
Philipp Schoenegger

AbstractA key challenge in experimental social science research is the incentivisation of subjects such that they take the tasks presented to them seriously and answer honestly. If subject responses can be evaluated against an objective baseline, a standard way of incentivising participants is by rewarding them monetarily as a function of their performance. However, the subject area of experimental philosophy is such that this mode of incentivisation is not applicable as participant responses cannot easily be scored along a true-false spectrum by the experimenters. We claim that experimental philosophers’ neglect of and claims of unimportance about incentivisation mechanisms in their surveys and experiments has plausibly led to poorer data quality and worse conclusions drawn overall, potentially threatening the research programme of experimental philosophy in the long run. As a solution to this, we propose the adoption of the Bayesian Truth Serum, an incentive-compatible mechanism used in economics and marketing, designed for eliciting honest responding in subjective data designs by rewarding participant answers that are surprisingly common. We argue that the Bayesian Truth Serum (i) adequately addresses the issue of incentive compatibility in subjective data research designs and (ii) that it should be applied to the vast majority of research in experimental philosophy. Further, we (iii) provide an empirical application of the method, demonstrating its qualified impact on the distribution of answers on a number of standard experimental philosophy items and outline guidance for researchers aiming to apply this mechanism in future research by specifying the additional costs and design steps involved.


Author(s):  
Emily Haynes ◽  
Judith Green ◽  
Ruth Garside ◽  
Michael P. Kelly ◽  
Cornelia Guell

Abstract Background Innovative approaches are required to move beyond individual approaches to behaviour change and develop more appropriate insights for the complex challenge of increasing population levels of activity. Recent research has drawn on social practice theory to describe the recursive and relational character of active living but to date most evidence is limited to small-scale qualitative research studies. To ‘upscale’ insights from individual contexts, we pooled data from five qualitative studies and used machine learning software to explore gendered patterns in the context of active travel. Methods We drew on 280 transcripts from five research projects conducted in the UK, including studies of a range of populations, travel modes and settings, to conduct unsupervised ‘topic modelling analysis’. Text analytics software, Leximancer, was used in the first phase of the analysis to produce inter-topic distance maps to illustrate inter-related ‘concepts’. The outputs from this first phase guided a second researcher-led interpretive analysis of text excerpts to infer meaning from the computer-generated outputs. Results Guided by social practice theory, we identified ‘interrelated’ and ‘relating’ practices across the pooled datasets. For this study we particularly focused on respondents’ commutes, travelling to and from work, and on differentiated experiences by gender. Women largely described their commute as multifunctional journeys that included the school run or shopping, whereas men described relatively linear journeys from A to B but highlighted ‘relating’ practices resulting from or due to their choice of commute mode or journey such as showering or relaxing. Secondly, we identify a difference in discourses about practices across the included datasets. Women spoke more about ‘subjective’, internal feelings of safety (‘I feel unsafe’), whereas men spoke more about external conditions (‘it is a dangerous road’). Conclusion This rare application of machine learning to qualitative social science research has helped to identify potentially important differences in co-occurrence of practices and discourses about practice between men’s and women’s accounts of travel across diverse contexts. These findings can inform future research and policy decisions for promoting travel-related social practices associated with increased physical activity that are appropriate across genders.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-76
Author(s):  
Stephanie M. Anglin ◽  
John E. Edlund

Despite discussion and institution of new reforms in psychology research, little is known about how much reform psychologists believe is still needed across various research practices and whether instructors are teaching students about replication and reform in their courses. To investigate these questions, we distributed questionnaires assessing perceived need for reform in psychology research and the teaching of replication and reform to instructors of undergraduate and graduate psychology courses across multiple listservs ( n = 328). Participants reported discussing topics related to replication and reform briefly in their courses and that moderate changes are still needed in psychology research. Topics were discussed more extensively in advanced vs. introductory courses, and in methods/statistics vs. content courses. Perceived need for reform and number of student researchers supervised/year correlated with teaching these issues, suggesting that those who believe more change is needed in psychology research and are more involved in shaping the next generation of psychology researchers are more likely to discuss replication and reform in their courses. Our questionnaires provide a preliminary tool to be further refined, validated, and applied in future research on knowledge and perceptions of problems in social science research and the impact of teaching these issues in the classroom.


Author(s):  
Erin Dej ◽  
Jennifer M. Kilty

AbstractThis research note begins by situating some of the major areas of inquiry within social-science research on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS non-disclosure. The evolution of the use of this criminal justice measure in the attempt to regulate HIV/AIDS transmission illustrates what has been termed “criminalization creep,” whereby steadily increasing numbers of people are charged with increasingly severe crimes. We outline some of the key and precedent-setting cases in Canadian law in order to explore the problematic of criminalization and suggest avenues for future research on this subject.


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