bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Politics to Policy
Authors: Kus Basak
Published: April 2024

Chapter 4 delves into the translation of new economic ideas on risk regulation into specific policy tools tailored to a financialized economy. Moving beyond the dominant narrative that links American neoliberalism primarily to deregulation, this chapter unveils a more multifaceted policy transformation from the 1970s onward, which was not a mere reduction of rules but a reimagining of government and market roles in risk mitigation. While deregulation was significant—paving the way for new market entities and instruments—it was just one facet of the shift. As financial markets evolved, presenting new risks, the government’s response was often characterized by a regulatory drift, with existing statutes becoming outdated. When the government stepped in, it did so with a growing focus on market discipline and individual rationality, evident both in its pivot toward a micro-oriented regulation and its embrace of information-based measures.
Disembeddedness in Financial Times
Authors: Kus Basak
Published: April 2024

Chapter 5 delves deeper into the concept of “disembeddedness” in the era of finance. It examines the inadequacies of neoliberal risk regulation policies and instruments in protecting against systemic risks and safeguarding consumer interests, highlighting the shortcomings of micro-oriented, information-based regulatory methods and the problems stemming from the fragmented regulatory structure of US financial markets. The chapter argues that the systemic risks and challenges faced by consumers in financial markets, including predatory and unjust practices, are neither inherent to the markets nor solely the result of actions by a few greedy CEOs. Rather, they directly result from specific regulatory choices made by the American government in the three decades preceding the financial crisis.
In Search of Protection
Authors: Kus Basak
Published: April 2024

Chapter 7 concludes by summarizing the book’s primary insights and contributions. It first revisits the components of the neoliberal approach to regulation, explores its political reception starting in the 1970s, and discusses the policies that emerged from it. The chapter then links the regulatory framework to the financialization of the economy, pinpointing where and how risk deficits materialized. Transitioning to the backdrop of the financial crisis, it evaluates the management of these risk deficits in its wake. The chapter concludes by drawing connections between regulatory shifts, financialization, and the implications for democracy.
The Law of Yours and Mine
Authors: Essert Christopher
Published: April 2024

This chapter argues that property, and only property, can solve the Problem of Yours and Mine and allow us to relate as equals with respect to spaces and objects. It begins with a characterization of the way that we relate through the idea of yours and mine, which happens whenever an action or relation is structured through claims about what belongs to someone. It then shows that such a relation is an egalitarian relation when it is realized through an omnilateral institution understood in roughly Kantian terms. “Property” is our name for such an institution. So property solves the Problem of Yours and Mine. But nothing else can solve the Problem: various putative alternative forms of resource allocation are not alternatives to property, either because they do not allow us to relate as equals or because they are, in fact, implicitly relying on an idea of property.
Property within Private Law
Authors: Essert Christopher
Published: April 2024

This chapter considers the place of the law of property within private law more generally. Two contrasts are explored: the contrast between property rights and personal rights, and the contrast between property rights and contract rights. Property implicates the idea of a res, a subject matter of a property right that is separate from the person whose property it is and which has an existence independent of any transaction between right holder and duty ower. The first feature of the idea of the res distinguishes property rights from personal rights, which are not separate from the person whose rights they are; the second feature distinguishes property rights from in personam rights including contract rights. Various liminal cases are discussed, including property in biological materials, property in intangibles, and property in cases understandable as in rem protection of an existing in personam right, such as corporate shares, debts, and trusts.
Property and Regulation
Authors: Essert Christopher
Published: April 2024

This chapter returns to the idea of structural subordination and introduces the public law of property—the part of the law of property aimed at responding to structural subordination—and locates the public law of property within public law more generally. It considers the phenomenon of homelessness and shows how the need to eliminate homelessness is based entirely within the institution of property and the idea of yours and mine. There is an exploration of important parts of the right to housing including an explanation of why this is a right against the state, what the state is obligated to do to fulfill it, and various factors that need to be taken into account in understanding provision of adequate homes. It shows how other forms of regulation of property rights, including noise bylaws and various tenant protections, can be understood in the same way.
Public Property
Authors: Essert Christopher
Published: April 2024

This chapter turns to the idea of public property. Public property is contrasted with private property by showing how public property does not involve any idea of yours and mine, but instead involves an idea of something belonging to all members of the public at the same time. This illuminates our intuitive understanding of our experiences on public property, the rights we have to access it, and the ways in which the state can regulate it. It also allows us to see how certain kinds of private property are held open to the public and so regulated as if they were public, explaining rules about public accommodations. Finally, this chapter returns to some of the justificatory considerations from Chapter 2 and shows why the society of equals needs both private and public property.
Disjointed Origins
Authors: Staszak Sarah
Published: April 2024

Chapter 3 details the development of commercial and securities arbitration, one of arbitration’s original institutional orders later converted in the service of modern, private arbitration. It examines the origins and development of arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and 1930s securities laws, as each arose and unfolded in an historically-situated politics that was legitimated on the basis that arbitration would be a voluntary alternative to litigation agreed upon by institutions of relatively equal bargaining power. But its original features would later be converted in the service of contemporary forced arbitration nonetheless. This transition, however, required reformers across government to strip commercial and securities arbitration of its original context so as to repurpose it as a foundation for the modern PDAA.
The Consumer Rights Movement
Authors: Staszak Sarah
Published: April 2024

Chapter 5 details the consumer rights movement and the ways in which actors and institutions across government prompted the advent of consumer arbitration in the United States. It shows that a mix of Republicans and Democrats in Congress clearly recognized arbitration’s potential use as a tool for unburdening the judiciary in the 1970s, putting it on the radar as a bipartisan mechanism for litigation reform. It details the ways in which liberals in Congress and on the courts allowed arbitration with Progressive era trappings—voluntary, reviewable—to expand into new areas of dispute resolution. These coalitions were very different than those who would pursue the modern pre-dispute arbitration agreement (PDAA). But once the Supreme Court further embraced arbitration through a merger of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), labor, and securities jurisprudence, the unfettered expansion of consumer arbitration clauses that followed increasingly made their anti-litigation prowess clear to corporate America.
Privatizing the Workplace in the New Millennium
Authors: Staszak Sarah
Published: April 2024

Chapter 6 details the modern shift toward the use of mandatory, private arbitration between employers and employees. Facilitated by conservatives in Congress, the executive, and on the Supreme Court, a wave of corporations rushed to include mandatory arbitration clauses in their standard contracts in the 2000s. These modern employment arbitration provisions took a form that would be unrecognizable to arbitration’s original proponents: they became mandatory, pre-dispute, employer-promulgated contracts between individual employees and employers, required as part of the terms of accepting a job. In short order, this led to predictable patterns in Congress, where a Democratic legislative movement aiming to limit arbitration’s use ran headlong into conservative resistance, itself fortified by what was then a fully developed Supreme Court jurisprudence in support of the PDAA employment contracts.
The Direct Primary and the Decline of the Progressive Movement
Authors: Boatright Robert G.
Published: April 2024

The direct primary was one of the most widely implemented Progressive Era political reforms, yet it was not necessarily one of the most popular reform proposals among leading Progressive intellectuals. It has at times been argued that the decline of the Progressive movement in the 1920s and beyond left the direct primary without strong defenders, and that states were consequently able to restrict the use of the direct primary without facing strong objections from the public or election reform advocates. This chapter evaluates links between the decline of Progressivism and the reassertion of party control over primary elections between 1928 and 1970. It considers the role the direct primary played in Progressive reform arguments and explores the reasons behind changes to primary law in states where the Progressive movement was particularly influential.
Primaries and Partisan Advantage
Authors: Boatright Robert G.
Published: April 2024

In the decades following the adoption in most states of the direct primary, many states repeatedly changed their primary laws. Such changes included adjusting ballot access rules, changing voter eligibility requirements, moving the primary date, adopting or prohibiting runoff elections, and permitting or prohibiting cross-filing. This chapter categorizes primary law changes in terms of whether they benefited or harmed party control of elections. It then explores the relationship between these primary election changes and changes in party strength in these states’ electorates or legislatures. It concludes that there is clear evidence of a quest for partisan advantage in the enactment of primary laws, but the particular types of laws enacted vary according to the heterogeneity of the majority party’s coalition and whether the changes were enacted by a majority party threatened with the loss of power or a newly empowered party.
Contemporary Primary Reform Efforts
Authors: Boatright Robert G.
Published: April 2024

This chapter assesses the reasons for proposals to change state primary election laws over the past twenty years. It supplements the National Conference of State Legislatures database of introduced legislation with measures of partisan composition of the legislature and changes in that composition. It evaluates several different explanations for proposals to change state primary laws, concluding that while both partisan advantage and political ideology lead to proposed changes, ultimately ideology appears to matter more than partisan gain. Despite relatively meager findings of research on the consequences of actual changes, the analysis shows that beliefs about the consequences of changes continue to prompt proposals for change.
The Future of the Direct Primary
Authors: Boatright Robert G.
Published: April 2024

This chapter summarizes the findings in the book. It argues that the history of the direct primary shows that we should not have high expectations for future primary law changes. It evaluates four different approaches to primaries in the future: accepting the status quo; abandoning the direct primary; seeking a national open primary law; or exploring less tested reforms such as top four or five primaries, ranked choice voting, or establishing a national primary election date. The chapter concludes by observing that historically, political parties have adapted to primary reforms in ways that limit the effects of the reform laws. Although ranked-choice voting or nonpartisan primaries have shown signs that they could slightly reduce polarization, history shows that these reforms are unlikely to have the dramatic effects some reformers predict.
Envisioning Europe
Authors: Ferrera Maurizio
Published: April 2024

In the early 2010s, the Euro crisis triggered an escalating conflict between different conceptions of solidarity and bonding within the EU polity, which jolted the EU into an existential crisis. To fully understand this conflict, it is necessary to engage in a historical reconstruction of the way in which the various ideological families have ‘envisioned’ Europe and in particular the goal of an ‘ever closer’ union among its peoples. Visions and symbols play a role which is not only important, but also causally autonomous in shaping political and institutional development. Elaborating a shared view of the EU as a polity characterized by a modicum of communality has been a demanding task. And while crisis moments tend to catalyse latent conflicts, they also provide fertile ground for political imagination, reviving togetherness feelings and coping with common challenges.
The nature and causal autonomy of ideology
Authors: Ferrera Maurizio
Published: April 2024

Recent debates have acknowledged the relevance and autonomy of ideology, stripping it from the traditional negative biases of the Marxian tradition. Ideologies are sets of normative and descriptive meanings (statements, arguments, proposals) drawn from political theories and (re)bundled together with a view to motivating action. The content of ideologies is inevitably linked to a given cultural and material context. Once emerged, however, ideologies acquire a capacity to shape actors’ orientations, thus becoming an autonomous driver of change. Is there a logic which presides over the organization of meanings into coherent conceptual bundles? Are there internal features of ideology which are more conducive to motivational effectiveness? Providing answers to such questions is the necessary step for showing how ideological constructs play a key role in the cognitive and normative structuring of the sphere of practical politics.
Ideological structuring during the Golden Age
Authors: Ferrera Maurizio
Published: April 2024

The 1945–1975 period witnessed the emergence of a ‘social democratic’ consensus around welfare state building. In the Nordic countries and the UK the formation of this consensus proceeded in a relatively smooth way. In the original Six (and especially in France and Italy), instead, the coming together of the Christian democratic and socialist traditions was more contentious and gave rise to more fragmented forms of welfare state solidarity. Also the launch of European integration suffered from a climate of harsh contrapositions. The limited, market-making mandate of the European Economic Community (EEC) resulted from a paradoxical ‘negative’ convergence between the Christian democrats and the left in opposing a wider mandate. Thus, the market-making bias of the Rome Treaty reflected less the strength of the neoliberal ideology than the failure of both Christian democrats and socialists to mobilize in order to create a more socially friendly supranational architecture.
The fragile ideological underpinnings of EU building
Authors: Ferrera Maurizio
Published: April 2024

Starting from the 1980s, integration accelerated its course and assumed a clear and increasingly aggressive neoliberal complexion. In the eyes of large segments of national publics, the EU came to be increasingly associated with a Trojan horse of Thatcher-style neoliberalism, with the explicit goal of disembedding markets and destabilizing national social contracts. The rise of nationalism and Euroscepticism launched an explicit and vocal challenge to integration as such. An equally important (but generally neglected) role in delegitimizing the EU was played by the inability of the socialist ideology to generate a clear and recognizable progressive vision of the EU. The persistence of the ‘fifth’ cleavage—linked to the Soviet revolution—within the Southern European lefts (radicalism vs reformism) and the ordoliberal ‘capture’ of the Northern (especially German) social democracies were the main causes of this inability.
Technocracy
Authors: Ferrera Maurizio
Published: April 2024

EU policy making is frequently accused of being technocratic and too insulated from democratic scrutiny. Technocracy is not a mere practice, but it is underpinned by a specific ideological outlook, centred on the assumption that ‘functional’ thinking and instrumental rationality ought to have primacy over political demands and pressures as well as consensus building and legitimation. Especially within the Commission, the increasing entanglement between the economic profession and policy making has originated over time a new power system which has been dubbed ‘econocracy’: a performative regime which, by defining problems and prescribing solutions, contributes to change reality and its perceptions in the direction which the econocracts themselves favour. Underneath its apparent technical neutrality, the econocratic ethos is inherently prone to moralization—an Eigendynamik which has increasingly blurred the boundaries between descriptive and moral discourse in EU arenas. During the crisis, moral worth has become an implicit but powerful criterion for (re)shaping power hierarchies, paving the way for the ‘disciplinarian’ turn of EMU governance during the first half of the 2010s.
Free movement, Europolitanism, and citizenship
Authors: Ferrera Maurizio
Published: April 2024

The 2010s witnessed the escalation of a conflict line around transnational solidarity—essentially linked to free movement. The sharp rise of labour mobility in the wake of the Eastern enlargement was not accompanied by suitable ideological frames, capable of fostering transnational communalization. Despite the party-political potential of this innovation in a decade—the 1990s—when the left was in power in most member states, EU citizenship was born with a minimalist and market-conforming design. The Northern European lefts strongly opposed a symbolic valorization and substantial strengthening of this institution, thus hampering its potential to foster a specifically pan-European civic political identity. Devoid of materiality and symbolic thickness, the Europolitan frame remained too thin and was unable to withstand the aggressive competition of the nationalist and exclusionary frames. There is evidence that the ‘Europolitan constituency’—i.e., a large segment of pro-EU and pro-free movement voters—did exist and that it registered an increase during the 2010s, but the absence of a suitable ideology left it without a blueprint for articulating their preferences and mobilizing in support of a deeper political integration.
Crisis, catharsis, and recovery
Authors: Ferrera Maurizio
Published: April 2024

Crises, disasters, and wars extend the scope of political possibilities in a multitude of directions. The COVID-19 pandemic produced an unprecedented political trauma, resurrecting the spectre of EU disintegration. A number of institutional backstops contained, however, the escalation of life-threatening challenges and opened up the margins for a solidaristic turn. A key role was played by Franco-German cooperation. But the turn was facilitated by a process of ideological and programmatic convergence among the European centre-lefts, which gradually reduced the long-standing fault lines between North and South—and, to a lesser extent—between radicals and reformists. This coming together of left parties was eased by new ideas and symbols which re-oriented the discourse. The elaboration of some novel ‘meta-concepts’ allowed in fact the gradual bridging of crossnational ideological oppositions, generating a different conceptual Gestalt. A new area of overlapping consensus took shape, acknowledging the desirability of both a greater activism of the EU in social regulation and the creation of crossnational risk pooling schemes funded by common debt.
Imagining possible futures
Authors: Ferrera Maurizio
Published: April 2024

In the wake of the pandemic, the EU image has shifted from the guardian of fiscal discipline to the guarantor of resilience and the provider of backstops (resources and guidance) to withstand catastrophic risks. The EU seems to have regained a sufficient degree of ‘polity consensus’, i.e., a diffuse support for the elementary foundations of a polity, i.e., the desirability of both its existence and its point and purpose. The challenge remains, hoverer, to provide the process of ‘an ever closer union’ with a coherent sense of direction. Climate change and the widespread social insecurity of EU citizens are the obvious points of departure for elaborating novel, forward-looking visions, capable of combining the twin goals of sustainable prosperity and social justice.
Standing to Blame
Authors: Hills Alison
Published: April 2024

For blame to be appropriate, the target of that blame must be blameworthy: that is, they must have done something wrong, they must be responsible for their actions and have no excuses. It is widely thought that another factor is important too. One is permitted to blame the blameworthy only if one has the ‘standing’ to blame. It is a matter of controversy what conditions contribute to lacking standing, why these conditions make blame inappropriate or impossible, and whether blame has standing conditions at all. This chapter distinguishes different kinds of blame and suggests that ‘juridical’ blame requires a kind of moral authority along several dimensions; if one lacks this authority, then one will lack standing to blame juridically, but one might be permitted to blame in another way, as a kind of moral criticism.
The Reasonable and the Justified
Authors: Dindjer Hasan
Published: April 2024

This chapter isolates an often overlooked standard for assessing action: the standard of reasonableness. Reasonableness, in the ‘threshold’ sense described, is not a requirement of justification. Instead, it demands only that action be supported by sufficiently strong reasons, which may include defeated reasons. It is best understood as a requirement of ‘relativized justification’: to be reasonable is to be justified relative to some eligible view of the balance of reasons. The chapter explores which criteria might determine the eligibility of views of the balance of reasons, and how this can depend on the relations that hold between those assessing action and those whose actions are being assessed.
Varieties of Reasonableness
Authors: Scanlon T. M.
Published: April 2024

An examination of Hasan Dindjer’s account in Chapter 13 of the threshold notion of the reasonableness of a decision in terms of the reasons an assessor has for countermanding such a decision in some way or letting it stand. After examining the diverse senses of reasonableness in the work of John Rawls’s and T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism, which Dindjer also discusses, the chapter considers Dindjer’s account of a ‘threshold’ sense of reasonableness and his explanation of why the reasonableness of a decision can be enough to make it one that should not be overruled by a higher-level reviewer, even if it is not entirely correct.
Distributive Egalitarianism as Aspirational Justice
Authors: Schouten Gina
Published: April 2024

A standard framing of the debate over the value of equality casts distributive egalitarians against relational egalitarians in disagreement about what kind of equality matters non-instrumentally: Distributive egalitarians think egalitarian justice non-instrumentally favors an equal distribution of some good(s) among individuals; relational egalitarians think it non-instrumentally favors some kind of egalitarian social relationships. This chapter sketches a systematic pluralist account on which both kinds of equality matter non-instrumentally, and begins the work of defending this pluralistic picture by demonstrating its practical and theoretical usefulness. In particular, this chapter defends the picture by showing that it enables distributive egalitarians to give powerful defenses against persistent objections to the view that distributive equality matters in its own right. It is concluded that relational egalitarians therefore can accept the pluralist picture—and distributive egalitarianism contextualized within it—notwithstanding their battery of objections to distributive egalitarianism generally.
Relational Equality and Pluralism about Justice
Authors: Scheffler Samuel
Published: April 2024

The idea of equality as a value that applies to human relationships should be distinguished from ‘relational egalitarianism’, considered as a master theory of justice or of political justification. This chapter seeks to clarify the motivation for, and the implications of, the idea of relational equality. To insist on the importance of equality as a social or relational ideal is not to deny the importance of economic equality. Nor is it to endorse a ‘sufficiency’ view of distribution. And although relational equality as a value is neither normatively autonomous nor distributively self-sufficient, it is thoroughly aspirational and normative; it is not a compromise between justice or equality and feasibility or stability. Against this background, the chapter concludes with some observations about Gina Schouten’s complex anatomy of political normativity, expressing a degree of skepticism about her distinction between aspirational and verdictive justice.
On Domination
Authors: Watson Lori
Published: April 2024

This chapter argues that the republican accounts of domination are underinclusive—even in the limited domain of citizenship—despite the fact that they do capture one important form of domination, namely the power to impose one’s will on another. Feminist accounts of domination serve as a contrasted here to show the constructive power of domination. The republican view is narrower and more circumspect, feminist views are more expansive. Beyond establishing the limits of republican analysis of domination, this chapter aims to develop a preliminary statement of what features an account of domination must capture in order to center the constructive power of dominators to assign, reinforce, and benefit from the inferior status of subordinates.
Intentional Legislation
Authors: Flanagan Brian
Published: April 2024

The story of why legislators’ attitudes should result in the enactment of one particular text over another has obvious significance. But it is not a story that can be read off any constitution, and is told in different ways, featuring different protagonists. For some, it is individual member legislators who call the shots, cooperating on the selection of a decision procedure; for others, it is the collective legislature, as directed either by a mind all of its own or, alternatively, by the application of majority rule to members’ voting intentions. This chapter describes the challenge of reconciling these existing accounts with both (1) the actual content of the statute book, and, (2) legislators’ assumed rationality. Drawing on Robert Dahl’s model of a ‘procedural’ democracy, an alternative version of the story is proposed that overcomes this twin difficulty by identifying legislators’ procedural preferences as the true subject of majoritarian attitude aggregation.
Arguing a Contrario
Authors: d’Almeida Luís Duarte
Published: April 2024

This chapter offers a new account of arguments a contrario. It is divided into six sections. Section 1 presents the argument a contrario as it is commonly seen by legal practitioners and theorists. Practitioners and theorists diverge in how they see it: while the former think of the argument as a ‘product of logic and common sense,’ the latter view it with suspicion. Section 2 explains why: according to the standard theoretical account, the argument a contrario boils down to a logical fallacy. But there are reasons, Section 3 suggests, to resist the standard account. Section 4 shows where the standard account goes wrong. Sections 5 and 6 give a new account of arguments a contrario.
A Contrario Argument and Default Reasoning
Authors: Horty John
Published: April 2024

In Chapter 29, Duarte d'Almeida criticizes a standard account of a contrario argument and develops an alternative account that relies on higher-order reasoning. In this chapter, I sketch yet another alternative account, according to which a contrario argument, and legal reasoning in general, is to be understood against a background of default rules. This account and that of Duarte d'Almeida differ in important ways, but also have much in common. A careful comparison would be useful.
Consensus, Contract, and Diversity
Authors: Thrasher John
Published: April 2024

Contractualist theories of political order put agreement at the heart of the justificatory enterprise. A social consensus on fundamental principles of justice is the goal of political contractualist theories. Diversity and disagreement, though, jeopardize such consensus, especially in modern, pluralistic societies. This chapter argues that the problem of diversity threatens all major social contract theories from Hobbes to Rawls, and even more contemporary theories that are explicitly built to solve this problem. The problem has been misdiagnosed mainly as a problem of stability rather than a problem of identifying the correct target of justification. Focusing on generating a consensus on high-level principles of justice creates the problem. The chapter argues that this problem can be solved by changing the target of contractual justification to institutions and principles at a lower level. Doing so generates a novel form of political contractualism that is neither justice-first nor consensus-based.
Partisan Politics and Constrained Institutions
Authors: Cormier Ben
Published: April 2024

Chapter 2 presents a partisan theory of sovereign external debt accumulation in EMs. The causal mechanism is a novel model of the points at which politics inserts itself into borrowing decisions through the annual fiscal policymaking process. The chapter illustrates how borrowing decisions are a function of—and thus cannot be analyzed independent of—fiscal policymaking. It then details the importance of class politics in EMs and identifies how these politics inevitably affect annual external borrowing decisions through the fiscal policymaking process. This provides observable implications for the book’s partisan theory of EM external borrowing, tested using multiple methods in subsequent chapters. More broadly, the model has implications for wider political economy and public policy literature on the relationship between bureaucracies, politics, and macroeconomic policy outcomes.
Conclusion
Authors: Cormier Ben
Published: April 2024

Chapter 7 concludes by outlining some of the book’s implications for research and policy, including: (1) reframing and setting limits to disciplinary models of borrower partisan politics in EM sovereign debt markets; (2) showing borrower autonomy, so the political economy of demand-side use of markets and official creditors, is central to understanding market flows to EM governments, official credit flows to EM governments, and the composition of EM sovereign debt; (3) suggesting the importance of the demand side to the cyclicality of EM financial flows; (4) highlighting the importance of distinguishing between price and volume in sovereign debt, and ways to make clearer linkages between theory and measurement of flows in the IPE of sovereign debt; (5) advancing questions about politically feasible DMO effects on public debt structure and sustainability; (6) noting a limited literature on domestic bond market depth; (7) identifying how and why the role and effect of ministerial institutions like DMOs varies not only across different aspects of public debt structure, but across different areas of the economy.
The Frontline Care Workforce
Authors: Elliott Robert
Published: April 2024

This chapter details the size and occupational composition of the frontline health and social care workforce in the UK. It details the size of the workforce in health and social care industry which supports the frontline workforce. It reports the long-run growth in the frontline health and social care workforce in the UK and details the growth in the number of nurses, doctors, care workers, and Allied Health Professions since the start of the twentieth century and in particular since the founding of the NHS. It reports how the growth in the frontline workforce compares to employment growth in general and how the UK compares to other countries. It details the occupational composition of the frontline workforce in each of the four nations of the UK and in hospitals and general practice. It reports the gender composition and the ethnic diversity of the frontline workforce, the dependency of frontline care on workers trained abroad, and it reveals the importance of women and ethnic minorities in the delivery of health and social care in the UK.
Labour Supply to Frontline Care
Authors: Elliott Robert
Published: April 2024

This chapter explores the reasons people want to work in frontline care jobs in the UK. It uses economic theory to analyse labour supply decisions in the short and long run, and constructs labour supply schedules to illustrate key relationships. It analyses the role of altruism and the importance of pay in labour supply to frontline jobs. It explains the economics of human capital investment and the incentives for individuals and government to invest in human capital. It details the scale of government investment in health care human capital in the UK, the number of people investing in health and social care human capital, and how this has changed in recent years. It further reports how the numbers training to become doctors and nurses in the UK compare to those in other major European countries.
The Demand for Frontline Care Workers
Authors: Elliott Robert
Published: April 2024

This chapter looks at the demand for frontline health and social care workers in the UK. It reports how this demand is driven by what the UK spends on health and social care and compares this to what other countries spend. It details how this spending is distributed between health and social care and what part goes to the NHS and hospitals. The chapter explains the economic theory of the production function and the derivation of the labour demand schedule. It shows how this schedule reveals the optimum level of employment at each rate of pay. It contrasts the drivers of labour demand in the commercial sector of the economy with those in the NHS. It details the methods by which the NHS could construct labour demand schedules that would enable it to identify the optimal levels of employment and output in each area of activity. Finally, the chapter reviews the methods of workforce planning used to forecast the future demand for labour by health and social care organizations.
The Labour Market for Frontline Care Workers in the UK
Authors: Elliott Robert
Published: April 2024

This chapter brings the supply and the demand sides of the health and social care labour market together. It explains that the market is an aggregate of several different occupational and spatial labour markets and employs the tools of economics to analyse and discuss the most important differences between these labour markets. The concept of equilibrium in the labour market is explained, and the role of competition, local and international, in establishing equilibrium explored. The concepts of the natural rate of vacancies and the natural rate of employment are explained. The consequences of the dominance of the NHS in the UK health care labour market are explored. The productivity of health care workers in recent years is reported.
The Theory of Pay Setting and Its Application to Frontline Care Workers
Authors: Elliott Robert
Published: April 2024

This chapter details the economic theory of net advantages, which is central to setting the pay of frontline health and social care workers. It details the basic economic principles which should underpin how health and social care workers are paid. It explains how job characteristics affect pay and identifies the very distinctive characteristics of the jobs that frontline workers do which will affect what they are paid. It explains why frontline workers’ pay should be related to the time they spend at work, not what they produce, and why pay should increase incrementally during early years of work. It further explains why frontline workers’ pay should vary according to the area of the country in which they work. It discusses measures of labour shortage, details vacancy rates, and documents the extent of shortage in key occupations.
Anti-colonial intervention and the Bandung Spirit
Authors: Quinton-Brown Patrick
Published: April 2024

If dictatorial intervention was an attempt to narrow state-based non-interventionism to banning the threat or use of force, an anti-colonial redescription of intervention provided for a broad non-interventionism that was also a solidarist internationalism. An anti-colonial reordering of the intervention problem successfully reconciled the international responsibility to promote human rights with the international responsibility of non-intervention in domestic matters. The historical institutionalization of particular international rights and duties, by which certain matters were transferred outside of and so no longer belonged essentially to the domestic jurisdiction of states, legitimated the emergence of a ‘Bandung UN’. This chapter provides a broad sweep of Third World organizing in the early Cold War period to draw out and evaluate different logics of anti-colonial intervention. It focuses on extra-UN diplomacy and on encounters in cross-regional forums both of states and of representatives of colonized and neocolonized nations and peoples.
Boko Haram and the Chibok kidnapping
Authors: Oriola Temitope B.
Published: April 2024

This chapter explores the robust marketplace of ideas about Islam in Northern Nigeria and the evolution of dissidence to contextualize the rise of Boko Haram and the kidnapping of the Chibok girls. It problematizes Boko Haram’s ideology, grievances, objectives, and recruitment. The chapter also examines the implications of the division within Boko Haram and the rationale behind the kidnapping of the Chibok girls. The chapter demonstrates that the dissidence embodied by Boko Haram is one of several forms of manifestation of Islamism in Northern Nigeria. The interplay of factors that led to the kidnapping of the Chibok girls is explored. Overall, the Chibok kidnapping is articulated as a prism for understanding terrorism and the landscape of human rights advocacy in Africa.
Conclusion
Authors: Oriola Temitope B.
Published: April 2024

This book focuses on the challenges encountered by contemporary women-led movements and human rights advocacy in Africa. The #BringBackOurGirls (#BBOG) movement was founded through an elite middle-class coalition in Nigeria to advocate for the rescue of the Chibok schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram. The analysis demonstrates that the Chibok girls were caught in a complex web of multilayered toxic presidential politics and movement dynamics in an environment where some lives do not matter. As demonstrated throughout the book, the #BBOG experience has broad implications for human rights advocacy in postcolonial spaces, peace and security in Africa, the war against terrorism in the Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin and persistence of social problems in developing countries. This chapter presents a review of the findings and contributions of the book. It also offers suggestions for future research.
Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on? Employment
Authors: Chen Martha Alter , Vanek Joann
Published: April 2024

This chapter provides a comparative summary of recent national statistics from five Latin American countries—Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, and Peru—on employment losses and recovery during the peak COVID-19 years compared to pre-pandemic levels. These findings complement findings from other regions on the employment impact of COVID-19 which are featured in other chapters in this volume. This chapter also summarizes findings from a panel study carried out by the Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) network in mid-2020 and mid-2021 in 11 cities around the world, using both a survey questionnaire and in-depth interviews. These micro-findings supplement the national data with information on the dynamics of employment losses and gains for workers in specific groups of urban informal workers. The chapter concludes with reflections on the use of mixed data sources and research methods and on policy responses to the informal economy going forwards.
Impact of COVID-19 on Employment and Earnings in Ghana
Authors: Danquah Michael , Osei Robert Darko , Schotte Simone , Sen Kunal
Published: April 2024

The first two cases of COVID-19 were reported in Ghana on 12 March 2020. As a first response, all public gatherings exceeding 25 people were banned until further notice. Following that, the country’s borders were closed. In the interest of public safety, a partial lockdown was introduced, which included the Greater Accra and Greater Kumasi Metropolitan Areas and contiguous districts. The decision to lift the partial lockdown was largely influenced by mounting concerns regarding the severe economic burden that the pandemic restrictions posed. Workers in the informal sector were particularly vulnerable to the crisis as they generally rely on daily sales for their earnings, have limited or no access to health care or social safety nets, lack mechanisms for collective bargaining, and tend to be in activities that are contact-intensive and, thus, particularly affected by the pandemic response measures.
South Africa’s Informal Economy and COVID-19
Authors: Rogan Michael , Skinner Caroline
Published: April 2024

This chapter seeks to identify the differentiated impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on specific groups of informal workers. The analysis draws on official, nationally representative labour force surveys collected quarterly by Statistics South Africa. The chapter aims to identify the labour market impacts of the first three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and of one of the world’s strictest lockdowns. The research focuses on the different impacts by gender, sector, and status in employment. The findings show that job losses have been greater in the informal economy. The data suggest uneven impacts within the informal economy, with women being particularly hard hit. The pandemic period has thus widened pre-existing inequalities and fault lines. In policy terms, this suggests that the informal economy should be a priority in economic recovery efforts but also that support requires differentiated approaches and a range of measures.
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Intra-household Bargaining
Authors: Chakravarty Deepita , Nayak Nandini
Published: April 2024

Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated that poor women have been the worst sufferers in terms of pay cuts and job losses and have been the hardest hit also at the household level. They have had to bear the brunt of constrained household budgets and domestic violence during pandemic-induced lockdowns and restrictions. This chapter on the gender impact of the pandemic in Delhi, India, seeks to explore whether women who have achieved some agency from their work gain a stronger capacity for intra-household bargaining and are less likely to face household-level discrimination. We also try to understand whether the extent, severity, and nature of discrimination within the household may change if women have better chances than men to retain or get back their jobs. Empirically, we rely on 31 interviews with women domestic workers, conducted inperson in Delhi.
Social Protection, the COVID-19 Crisis, and the Informal Economy
Authors: Alfers Laura , Juergens-Grant Florian
Published: April 2024

This chapter considers the implications of COVID-19 relief measures for the building and extension of comprehensive and universal social protection systems. It highlights three key areas emerging from the crisis, which are likely to impact the shape of social protection systems moving forwards. These include the contested meaning of universality, the digitization of social protection systems, and the possibilities for informal worker’s participation in building a more inclusive social protection. In doing so, the chapter argues that the terrain of the social protection debate is shifting—it is increasingly uncontroversial that universal social protection is needed and that the state must play a role. However, the more nuanced debates that are emerging across the three areas identified above will shape the terrain of whether the form of universal social protection that remains after COVID-19 is a positive and supportive form of inclusion.
Foundation-theoretic Epistemology III: Optimality Justifications
Authors: Schurz Gerhard
Published: April 2024

The major justification load for the foundation-theoretic account developed in this book lies in the higher-order justification of inferences. Most pressing is the justification of induction (Hume’s problem), and of the abductive inference to external reality (Descartes’ problem); but in the light of contemporary non-classical logics the higher-order justification of logical frameworks also becomes a challenge. Many contemporary epistemologists consider these problems unsolvable. The central innovation of this book consists in the attempt at solving the higher-order regress problem by the method of optimality justifications, a novel research programme within the paradigm of epistemic engineering. Chapter 5 presents the programme of optimality justifications at a general level. An optimality justification does not demonstrate that an epistemic method is reliable; it pursues the more modest goal of demonstrating that a given method is optimal with regards to a given epistemic goal, for example, predictive success. The breakthrough of the optimality programme lies in its application at the level of meta-methods. Meta-methods use the track records and outputs of accessible object-level methods as their input and try to construct from this input a universally optimal meta-method; one that is never worse but is possibly better than all accessible alternative methods. Another important cornerstone of the optimality programme is the optimality principle. It leads from justifiably optimal methods to the rational acceptance of the beliefs recommended by these methods, under the proviso that we are forced to act as if we believe in one of the competing belief candidates generated by the competing methods.