scholarly journals Securitization of Public Policy and Pandemic: Taiwan’s Case Against Covid-19

WIMAYA ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Kai-Chun Wang

Taiwan’s relatively better performance in the early stages of the on-going COVID-19 pandemic can largely be accredited to the rapid mobilization of public resources and the fast restructuring of government agencies to meet the pandemic-fighting coordination demand, but these measures are only possible when a community adopts a serious attitude followed by serious actions achieved via securitization of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper attempts to compare and contrast the securitization of pandemic response and management of Taiwan, the United States, and Japan to highlight the importance of how even developed states with equal or better health infrastructure than Taiwan, by contextualizing the pandemic into different security scenarios has resulted in the performance gap against COVID-19.

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 871-905 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael L. DeVaughn ◽  
Myleen M. Leary

Public policy regulations, designed to legitimate and protect fragile, fledgling new firms from failure, on the surface, appear to be of great value. According to Stinchcombe, to the extent that such policies serve as “standard social routines,” they may even work to decrease the liability of newness. Using a sample of more than 2,600 new banks chartered in the United States over a 15-year span under the supervision of three different regulatory agencies, we find that failure rates vary according to nuances in the differences in regulations levied by these agencies. Paradoxically, banks that are initially subject to more stringent regulations, intended to limit their strategic choices to a set of “safe and sound” practices, and protect them from failure during their early stages of existence, in fact, have a higher likelihood of failure after those restrictive regulations are lifted. Our results suggest that public policy attempts to thwart the liability of newness are in fact a “fix that fails,” as public policy regulations designed to reduce the liability of newness merely delay the inevitable.


1987 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Sprague Zones ◽  
Carroll L. Estes ◽  
Elizabeth A. Binney*

ABSTRACTThose 85 years of age and older are the fastest growing subpopulation in the United States. Because they represent a very small proportion of the population (just 1% in 1980), the oldest old have not been studied until recently. Much of the interest in this group is related to their growth (over 50% per decade in the past 50 years) coupled with their disproportionate use of public resources, particularly health and social services. Women are strikingly overrepresented among the oldest old, with a gender ratio of approximately 44 males for every 100 females age 85 and older.


Author(s):  
Katherine Eva Maich ◽  
Jamie K. McCallum ◽  
Ari Grant-Sasson

This chapter explores the relationship between hours of work and unemployment. When it comes to time spent working in the United States at present, two problems immediately come to light. First, an asymmetrical distribution of working time persists, with some people overworked and others underemployed. Second, hours are increasingly unstable; precarious on-call work scheduling and gig economy–style employment relationships are the canaries in the coal mine of a labor market that produces fewer and fewer stable jobs. It is possible that some kind of shorter hours movement, especially one that places an emphasis on young workers, has the potential to address these problems. Some policies and processes are already in place to transition into a shorter hours economy right now even if those possibilities are mediated by an anti-worker political administration.


Author(s):  
Andrew Valls

The persistence of racial inequality in the United States raises deep and complex questions of racial justice. Some observers argue that public policy must be “color-blind,” while others argue that policies that take race into account should be defended on grounds of diversity or integration. This chapter begins to sketch an alternative to both of these, one that supports strong efforts to address racial inequality but that focuses on the conditions necessary for the liberty and equality of all. It argues that while race is a social construction, it remains deeply embedded in American society. A conception of racial justice is needed, one that is grounded on the premises provided by liberal political theory.


Author(s):  
Franklin E. Zimring

The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. Why did it happen when it happened? What explains the unprecedented magnitude of prison and jail expansion? Why are the current levels of penal confinement so very close to the all-time peak rate reached in 2007? What is the likely course of levels of penal confinement in the next generation of American life? Are there changes in government or policy that can avoid the prospect of mass incarceration as a chronic element of governance in the United States? This study is organized around four major concerns: What happened in the 33 years after 1973? Why did these extraordinary changes happen in that single generation? What is likely to happen to levels of penal confinement in the next three decades? What changes in law or practice might reduce this likely penal future?


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
JAE YOUNG LIM ◽  
KUK-KYOUNG MOON

Abstract Despite the importance of public transport for urban vitality, social equity, and mobility, the discussions surrounding these topics have become heated ideological battles between liberals and conservatives in the United States, as in other countries. Conservatives, in particular, have exhibited anti-transit attitudes that have worked against the development of public transport. Scholars note that political trust functions as a heuristic and its impact is felt more strongly among individuals who face ideological risks with respect to a given public policy. Based on several studies noting the relationships between political trust, ideology and policy attitudes, the study employs the pooled data of the 2010 and 2014 General Social Surveys. It finds that conservatives are negatively associated with supporting spending on public transport, but when contingent upon high levels of political trust, they become more supportive of it. The study discusses the potential of political trust as a mechanism to influence public policy discourses as well as certain methodological and substantive limitations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Carbone

AbstractAlone among Western nations, the United States has a two-tier system for welfare protections for vertebrate animals in research. Because its Animal Welfare Act (AWA) excludes laboratory rats and mice (RM), government veterinarians do not inspect RM laboratories and RM numbers are only partially reported to government agencies1. Without transparent statistics, it is impossible to track efforts to reduce or replace these sentient animals’ use or to project government resources needed if AWA coverage were expanded to include them. I obtained annual RM usage data from 16 large American institutions and compared RM numbers to institutions’ legally-required reports of their AWA-covered mammals. RM comprised approximately 99.3% of mammals at these representative institutions. Extrapolating from 780,070 AWA-covered mammals in 2017–18, I estimate that 111.5 million rats and mice were used per year in this period. If the same proportion of RM undergo painful procedures as are publicly reported for AWA-covered animals, then some 44.5 million mice and rats underwent potentially painful experiments. These data inform the questions of whether the AWA needs an update to cover RM, or whether the NIH should increase transparency of funded animal research. These figures can benchmark progress in reducing animal numbers in general and more specifically, in painful experiments. This estimate is higher than any others available, reflecting the challenges of obtaining statistics without consistent and transparent institutional reports.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Newton-Howes ◽  
M. K. Savage ◽  
R. Arnold ◽  
T. Hasegawa ◽  
V. Staggs ◽  
...  

Abstract Aims The use of mechanical restraint is a challenging area for psychiatry. Although mechanical restraint remains accepted as standard practice in some regions, there are ethical, legal and medical reasons to minimise or abolish its use. These concerns have intensified following the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Despite national policies to reduce use, the reporting of mechanical restraint has been poor, hampering a reasonable understanding of the epidemiology of restraint. This paper aims to develop a consistent measure of mechanical restraint and compare the measure within and across countries in the Pacific Rim. Methods We used the publicly available data from four Pacific Rim countries (Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the United States) to compare and contrast the reported rates of mechanical restraint. Summary measures were computed so as to enable international comparisons. Variation within each jurisdiction was also analysed. Results International rates of mechanical restraint in 2017 varied from 0.03 (New Zealand) to 98.9 (Japan) restraint events per million population per day, a variation greater than 3000-fold. Restraint in Australia (0.17 events per million) and the United States (0.37 events per million) fell between these two extremes. Variation as measured by restraint events per 1000 bed-days was less extreme but still substantial. Within all four countries there was also significant variation in restraint across districts. Variation across time did not show a steady reduction in restraint in any country during the period for which data were available (starting from 2003 at the earliest). Conclusions Policies to reduce or abolish mechanical restraint do not appear to be effecting change. It is improbable that the variation in restraint within the four examined Pacific Rim countries is accountable for by psychopathology. Greater efforts at reporting, monitoring and carrying out interventions to achieve the stated aim of reducing restraint are urgently needed.


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