Who's Afraid of the Welfare State Now?

Who's Afraid of the Welfare State Now?
Author: Anton Hemerijck
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2024-03-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0198875487

This book primarily explores the welfare-policy responses to the Great Recession, reform trajectories that swept across Europe over the last decade, with a final chapter that focuses on Covid-19 welfare management. The 2008 crash marked a critical stress test for European welfare states with dramatic repercussions, including a massive surge in unemployment, a widening in wage and income disparities, and rising poverty. Hikes in fiscal deficits and public debt, required to pre-empt an economic meltdown, forced policymakers to make painful cuts in welfare services to shore up public finances, thereby jeopardizing welfare support for vulnerable groups. The overall scope of welfare-policy responses is heterogeneous, disparate, and uneven. In some cases, the response to the Great Recession was accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in others unpopular crisis-management measures received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions, and employer organizations. Alongside serious retrenchments, there have been assertive attempts to rebuild social programmes and institutions, to accommodate policy repertoires-not merely domestically but also at the EU level-to the new realities of the knowledge economy and an ageing society. Overall, the long 2010s showed that the future of work and welfare is in our hands: it is perfectly possible to shape this future in such a way as to provide inclusive social security, achieve high employment, advance and maintain human capabilities across the life-course, and fight poverty and inequality.

Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?

Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?
Author: Frances Piven
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2011-08-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1595587543

The sociologist and political scientist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward have been famously credited by Glenn Beck with devising the “Cloward/Piven Strategy,” a world view responsible, according to Beck, for everything from creating a “culture of poverty” and fomenting “violent revolution” to causing global warming and the recent financial crisis. Called an “enemy of the people,” over the past year Piven has been subjected to an unprecedented campaign of hatred and disinformation, spearheaded by Beck. How is it that a distinguished university professor, past president of the American Sociological Association, and recipient of numerous awards and accolades for her work on behalf of the poor and for American voting rights, has attracted so much negative attention? For anyone who is skeptical of the World According to Beck, here is a guide to the ideas that Glenn fears most. Who's Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? is a concise, accessible introduction to Piven's actual thinking (versus Beck's outrageous claims), from her early work on welfare rights and “poor people's movements,” written with her late husband Richard Cloward, through her influential examination of American voting habits, and her most recent work on the possibilities for a new movement for progressive reform. A major corrective to right-wing bombast, this essential book is also a rich source of ideas and inspiration for anyone interested in progressive change.

Handbook on the Political Economy of Social Policy

Handbook on the Political Economy of Social Policy
Author: Bent Greve
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2024-05-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1035306492

Research in social policy has been greatly influenced by the emergence of modern political economy in the late 1970s. The Handbook on the Political Economy of Social Policy offers a systematic, yet comprehensive, framework for understanding how concepts, theoretical standpoints and methodological approaches stemming from political economy have been applied to the study of social policies, and models of welfare provision. The authors also signpost current developments and discuss their likely impact on future research.

Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?

Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?
Author: Touré
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2011-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1439177554

How do we make sense of what it means to be Black in a world with room for both Michelle Obama and Precious? Tour , an iconic commentator and journalist, defines and demystifies modern Blackness with wit, authority, and irreverent humor. In the age of Obama, racial attitudes have become more complicated and nuanced than ever before. Americans are searching for new ways of understanding Blackness, partly inspired by a President who is unlike any Black man ever seen on our national stage. This book aims to destroy the notion that there is a correct or even definable way of being Black. It’s a discussion mixing the personal and the intellectual. It gives us intimate and painful stories of how race and racial expectations have shaped Tour ’s life as well as a look at how the concept of Post-Blackness functions in politics, psychology, the Black visual arts world, Chappelle’s Show, and more. For research Tour has turned to some of the most important luminaries of our time for frank and thought-provoking opinions, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Malcolm Gladwell, Harold Ford, Jr., Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Chuck D, and many others. Their comments and disagreements with one another may come as a surprise to many readers. Of special interest is a personal racial memoir by the author in which he depicts defining moments in his life when he confronts the question of race head-on. In another chapter—sure to be controversial—he explains why he no longer uses the word “nigga.” Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? is a complex conversation on modern America that aims to change how we perceive race in ways that are as nuanced and spirited as the nation itself.

Between Voters and Eurocrats

Between Voters and Eurocrats
Author: Johannes Karremans
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2024-02-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192886584

Karremans investigates the concern that financial considerations are more important than people's demands through the comparative study of five countries - Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain - and explores how governments maintain a balance between institutional responsibility and democratic responsiveness.

The Rise of the Military Welfare State

The Rise of the Military Welfare State
Author: Jennifer Mittelstadt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2015-10-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0674915399

This study of US military benefits “offers a disturbing view of the armed forces as a high-value target in political clashes over public assistance” (The Nation). Since the end of the draft, the U.S. Army has prided itself on its patriotic volunteers who heed the call to “Be All That You Can Be.” But beneath the recruitment slogans, the army promised volunteers something more tangible: a social safety net including medical care, education, housing assistance, legal services, and other privileges that had long been reserved for career soldiers. The Rise of the Military Welfare State examines how the U.S. Army’s extension of benefits to enlisted men and women created a military welfare system of unprecedented size and scope. In the 1970s, widespread opposition to the draft led to the establishment of America’s all-volunteer army. For this to succeed, a new strategy was needed for attracting and retaining soldiers. The army solved the problem, Jennifer Mittelstadt shows, by promising to take care of its own. While the United States dismantled its civilian welfare system in the 1980s and 1990s, army benefits continued to expand. Mittelstadt also examines how critics of this expansion fought to roll back its signature achievements, even as a new era of war began.

Who's Afraid of Children?

Who's Afraid of Children?
Author: Helen Brocklehurst
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351873040

Brocklehurst's impressive work breaks new ground in normative international political theory. It develops a new theoretical framework which exposes how children are present in international relations and security practices using an empirical and comparative assessment of the role of children and youth in a range of conflicts including Nazi Germany, Mozambique, South Africa, Northern Ireland, the Cold War and the British Empire. The author argues powerfully that concepts of children are partial and 'contained' through their construction as non-political. Global in scope, this book is a timely and important contribution given the growing visibility of children in international relations evident after September 11. The political and ethical question at the heart of this book is: will international relations dare to catch up?

Fear City

Fear City
Author: Kim Phillips-Fein
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0805095268

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue. In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York—and reshaped ideas about government across America. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.

Who's Afraid of Adam Smith?

Who's Afraid of Adam Smith?
Author: Peter J. Dougherty
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2003-04-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0471471771

"Peter Dougherty does the near-impossible in this brilliant book .. . [he] makes economics engaging and accessible." --Professor Larry J. Sabato, University of Virginia In this spirited and timely book, Peter Dougherty shows howeconomists are drawing on Adam Smith's civic writings to illuminatehow the market creates not only fiscal capital, but "socialcapital." Dougherty demonstrates how Smith's ideas are currentlyexperiencing a renaissance. He then explores several impressiveinitiatives to demonstrate what today's theoretical and practicingeconomists are accomplishing in the spirit of Adam Smith's moralsentiments: the institutional reform of transitional and developingeconomies; the financing of new technological, medical, andeducational initiatives; and the economic revival of cities.Capitalism pervades every aspect of our daily life. Peter Doughertynow offers a fascinating peek at its hidden soul.

Who's Afraid of the Religious Right?

Who's Afraid of the Religious Right?
Author: Don Feder
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1996-05-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780895264565

Who and what is the religious right and why do liberals fear and loathe it?