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Having a good job and living in a nice community was not an unrealistic dream in the United States for the first half of the twentieth century. There was a golden age when U.S. companies built and nurtured the towns in which their workers lived. But that era began to decline in the early 1970s because of changes in the U.S. economy that allowed for more global competition and increased capital mobility. Through historical processes research an analysis of the end of the American Social Compact was applied to a small paper manufacturing community in Wisconsin. Following a series of corporate acquisitions, the community that was built to make and depend on paper is in decline. Workers and residents no longer have the leverage to make companies care about the communities in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through in-depth interviews and observations, I have begun to explore the meanings and implications of female coming-of-age rituals for the lives and experiences of the immigrant individuals, families, and communities who celebrate them in the United States. In particular, I ask: What can Filipino American debutantes and Mexican American quinceañeras tell us about the individuals, families, and communities who organize and participate in them? And, what can studying quinceañeras and debutantes reveal about how actors can transform ?culture?? This paper-in-progress explores how debutantes and quinceañeras are sites for the production of multiple and intersecting identities, including gender, race and ethnicity, class, and age, and can therefore help us better understand immigrants, the fastest growing proportion of the US population; as well as the processes by which by which we are shaped into gendered, racialized, socioeconomic, and national beings; and/ or how we might be able to change the conditions that disadvantage certain beings over others. Preliminary findings discussed include debutantes and quinceañeras as immigrant strategies for trying to survive and transcend ?multiple liminalities,? and experiences of limited economic and social mobility. Also discussed is the hypothesis that quinceañeras and debutantes are methods of culturally socializing younger generations, especially young women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger project designed to explore components of identity along the lines of race, gender and class in the process of mobilization and maintenance of social movements through the lens of the contemporary welfare rights movement. Welfare is a central organizing image of American political discourse around issues of race, class and gender. The most popular frame of this program is the ubiquitous stereotype of the "welfare queen" has generated a great deal of scholarly attention to the reaction of public and elites to these images and the policy consequences of such reactions. While research has been devoted to the efficiency of the welfare system, the construction of the stereotypes behind this program and how both public and elites respond, there is little scholarship related to how recipients and their allies have reacted to these images at a grassroots level. The welfare rights movement first emerged in the early 1960s with the rise in demands for expansion of poverty relief. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), composed of mostly African American women, reached its peak in 1969 with 22,000 members. Although the NWRO disbanded in the early 1970s, the movement has endured despite challenges to the concept of welfare since that time and has continued through the current reauthorization process in 2004 of the 1996 act. This paper will focus on how the welfare rights movement has or has not developed strategies to respond to these images of welfare recipients through a comparison of two welfare rights organizations in Washington. The primary hypothesis asserts that identity-based social movements organized around a single, marginalized identity will fail to mobilize around a potentially negative frame that issue targets both the primary marginalized identity as well as other multiple marginalized identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do ideas play in the establishment and maintenance of hegemony? The proposed paper seeks to answer these questions by building upon the model of international relations (Role Realignment theory) described in International Political Science Review 24/1 (January 2003), and refined in The Precarious Balance Revisited: The War on Terrorism and System Transformation (CEISA/ISA Conference, Budapest, 26-28 June 2003). The paper will explore the proposition that this theory sheds light on the process of endogenous norm generation in international relations. The model incorporates ideas/ideology as endogenous variables alongside traditional measures of power in a closed-system model that emphasizes the process dynamics through which ideas/ideologies compete for acceptance/dominance in international relations. The four major variables (foreign policy role elements) are operationalized using metrics that can be tested historically, producing an explanatory rather than a normative theory. Findings will emphasize U.S. foreign policy role behavior and its impact on America’s leading role in world affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, an increasing number of scholars have reintroduced religion into the study of American politics. Included in this new wave of research is research focused on ‘social capital’ in the United States. The social capital line of research has become interested in religion in part as it is manifest in the rise of Faith Based Organizations (FBOs). While increased scholarly interest in FBOs can serve to invigorate the discussions of how religious Americans shape politics and society, we must carefully note how religion is treated in these emerging social capital studies. What role do religion and Faith play in the social capital framework? What are religion and Faith credited with doing? When are religion and Faith no longer included in the analysis? This paper will attempt to address such questions by presenting a close-reading of Mark R. Warren’s Dry Bones Rattling. The paper makes two central arguments. First, the paper argues that Warren places too much separation between the religious and the political, when in fact the political becomes religious for Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) participants. Second, and building on this distinction between what constitutes the political and religious spheres, it will be argued that although Warren readily acknowledges the role of religion in the IAF, in the final analysis he writes Faith out of the picture. The paper is organized into three sections. Section I provides an introduction to the issues at hand, attempting to address several prominent objections to the paper’s premise. Section II provides the bulk of the analysis, a detailed reading of Dry Bones Rattling text. Section II answers the question, ‘How exactly does Warren write about religion?’ Section III presents a discussion of the implications of the findings in Section II, addressing the question, ‘Why does it matter that Warren treats religion in this way?’ Section II highlights three patterns of note. First, it will be argued that Warren consistently presents a story of social activism that is ‘based’ in Faith, but eventually moves toward a more secular purpose. In one sense, this is the difference between a ‘Faith-based’ vs. ‘Faith-centered’ description of FBOs. Warren treats the idea of ‘Faith-based’ as meaning primariliy that an FBO has its foundation and origin in Faith traditions. He does not give adequate attention to the notion that FBOs are also Faith-centered organizations - always and everywhere aware of God’s presence in their lives and work. Second, and related to the first point, the paper will argue that Warren repeatedly downplays or ignores comments from his research subjects that would point toward a more central role for Faith and God in the IAF’s story. Taking a close look at the way Warren treats these God-centered quotes reveals that although Warren is willing to put the quotes in front of the reader, he is not willing to dwell on the theological content the quotes contain. Third, the paper will suggest that Warren’s references to Sacred Scripture strip the Scriptures of much of what makes them unique to the Faith traditions from which they come. In Section III, the paper will address three important implications of these three patterns in the text. First, because the IAF is not considered as a Faith-centered organization, a false dichotomy is created between the work of the IAF and the Christian Right. The theology of the IAF is not deeply probed, and the theology of the Christian Right remains unchallenged. Second, it will be argued that forcing the IAF into the social capital framework prevents the author from witnessing the whole IAF story. A brief comparison will be made between Warren’s work and Rogers (1990) Cold Anger. Third, the paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the public policy implications of Warren’s analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to consider the role of deliberative justice in health care rationing. Although health care rationing is normally considered in terms of distributive justice and/or social justice, it is the contention of this paper that the mechanism to mediate these divergent forms of equity is deliberative justice. Using a broad definition of health care rationing, it is argued that rationing exists currently in the U.S., with all health care institutions, all health care providers, all health insurance carriers, and the market acting as rationing devices. Yet stakeholder input concerning policy preferences receives minimal consideration in these health care systems. The questions asked are: To what extent is current rationing just? and What can be done to make it more just? There is a wealth of literature in political theory, as well as in health care policy, which addresses these issues. What is needed is a consideration of the values involved and the impact of policy decisions on the expression of these values. The goal is to explain how deliberative justice can approach the questions raised, but not answered by, distributive justice or social justice. Special thought is given to addressing outliers, those cases which lie at the extremes of health care, either in terms of cost or in terms of the probability of successful treatment. An exploration is given of how stakeholder participation in the deliberation of rationing choices can and should provide more viable equity in health care rationing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is theoretically guided by Sharing the Journey (1994). A key finding of Robert Wuthnow’s (1994) work, besides small groups being enclaves of social capital, was the illustration that ‘community is what people say they are seeking when they join small group.’ Reflecting on this scholarship, this paper, qualitatively, through 50 personal interviews with members of small religious groups in the Greater Washington DC area, illustrates that today, in the post-Mosaic digital world, while small groups remain enclaves of social capital, small group participants’ usage of ICTs in recent years- notably email, and to a lesser degree instant messaging and cell phones- has resulted in the drying up of the fluidity in group memberships Wuthnow found in the late 1980s. This is especially true for America’s youngest, and more technologically adept, adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the disruption of the social environment within the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) of the U.S. Congress has weakened the committee to the point where it can no longer fulfill its historical role as the stable keeper of Congress’s power of the purse. From the 1940s to the 1980s the committee maintained a well-developed set of informal norms and socialization processes that promoted committee integration (internal unity) by fostering close friendships and a sense of belonging that supplemented members perception of their power. The resulting unanimity allowed it to craft masterful appropriations bills designed to garner the support of other House members, Senate conferees, and the executive branch. The increase in partisan politics, along with other changes in congressional social structure during the 1990s, have undermined that integration, the committee’s success, and its members’ sense of power. Scholars of congressional politics, increasingly focused on promoting institutional theories of party government have been largely blind to these changes and thus unable to explain the recent breakdown in the congressional budget process. This paper examines that failure and concludes that the discipline must recapture earlier theories of congressional politics that centered around sociological concepts, as well as broaden to include newer political science concepts like the economy of affection and social capital, in order to best understand and explain Congress and congressional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at attempts by unions and NGOs to improve working conditions in apparel factories. While some NGOs have sought to improve working conditions by monitoring compliance with internationally recognized labor rights, unions have pursued organizing strategies to ensure empowerment at the work place. These strategies at times have complemented each other while at other times have been in conflict. This dynamic of complementarity versus conflict is also present in the relationship between Northern-based and Southern-based NGOs and unions. This paper contributes to the literature on transnational activism by exploring how alliances among activists with diverse interests, cultural understandings, and power resources affect campaign outcomes. Field research for this paper was conducted in the United States, El Salvador, and Honduras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to build on the burgeoning literature on social diversity theory (Hero 1998) by making a conceptual and a methodological distinction between social diversity’s direct and indirect influence on policy outcomes. I argue that social diversity influences outcomes directly through inter-minority resource competition and indirectly through majority/minority competition that influences political processes. I develop a set of hypotheses and test social diversity’s direct and indirect effects on Latino and African-American access to elite public universities in 45 states using a set of pooled cross sectional time series models. The findings indicate that high numbers of Asian-Americans and Latinos have a negative effect on African-American access. The findings also find that social diversity, interacted with a number of political variables (political competition, political culture) affect minority enrollment levels. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the public choice school, which has dominated the debate on metropolitan governance since the 1980s, is facing new intellectual challenges. Like the reformers during the first half of the 20th Century, many urban scholars and practitioners are again demanding more integrated governance structures for sprawling metropolitan areas. There are also fundamental differences between the early reformers and the current advocates of a new regionalism in metropolitan areas. The new conceptions can be seen as the latest step in a dialectic development of governance paradigms. Whereas the early reformers adopted a technocratic, "steering" perspective and proposed a consolidated regional city, the public choice advocates relied on an individualistic "choice" approach to propose decentralized and (territorially or functionally) fragmented government structures. The latest turn of the debate goes beyond a pure instrumentalist view on political institutions which is embodied in both traditions. Social constructivists understand the attempts for "boundary (re)drawing", which is at the core of all metropolitan reform plans, primarily as a process of constructing/ constitutionalizing individual and collective identities. This paper presents an analysis of distinct definitions of fundamental governance goals and the corresponding proposals for institutional design. Very different understandings of "democracy" can be described in Abraham Lincoln’s terms: Early reformers based their plans on a top-down perspective on democracy as "government for the people", rational choice advocates stress the bottom-up concept of "government by the people" and social constructivists focus their attention on "government of the/of what people" - an aspect which is gaining center stage in a world where socio-economic and cultural spaces of flows are superposing traditional spaces of place. The formula for economic success has changed from focusing on effectiveness (a concept based on welfare theory) over efficiency (based on political economy) to competitiveness (based on trade theory). Dominant definitions of social justice have been transformed from equality over equivalence to equity/difference. The paper uses those different definitions of core values and the corresponding proposals for institutional design to analyze the discourse on institutional reform in metropolitan areas in the United States from the 1950s to the year 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why people ?violate? rationality and take part in their communities, differentiating by types of participation, particularly political versus other, more communal, types of participation. We argue that trust plays an important role in participation levels, but contrary to more traditional models, the causal relationship runs from trust to participation. In addition, we posit that trust is strongly affected by economic inequality. Using aggregated American state level data for the 1970s, 80s and 90s, we present a series of two-stage least-squares models on the effects of inequality and trust on participation, controlling for other related factors. Findings indicate that inequality is the strongest determinant of trust, and that trust has a greater effect on communal participation than on political participation. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why has the U.S. developed policies that are largely inadequate in alleviating the difficulties many people have balancing work and family? I argue it is essentially because traditional assumptions about men’s and women’s separate roles in the areas of work and family persist in public policy in spite of women’s, particularly mothers’, dramatically increased labor force participation. Over the last half century, women’s acceptance as breadwinners, a status entailing recognition of the need to provide for a family, has been slow and incomplete. This incomplete acceptance, I theorize, then carried over into more recent public policy debates on the work-family nexus. This carryover, if it emerges, would then help to account for the otherwise puzzling persistence of traditional assumptions about gender roles in current work-family policy. In this paper, I build on previous research I conducted showing that relative to men, women have had less, but growing access to private-sector employer-provided benefits over the previous fifty years. To see if the slow and incomplete acceptance of a breadwinning role for women suggested by this association emerges, I examine women’s and men’s relative treatment in policy debates concerning the regulation of employer-provided benefits. I identify and track gendered and non-gendered statements in U.S. Congressional hearing testimony discussing workers and family-oriented employer-provided benefits. Overall the results here indicate increased acceptance of equal breadwinning roles for women and men, but with a still prominent place in the debate for traditional gender-role conceptions. The final linkage, beyond the scope of this paper, similarly involves comparing women’s and men’s treatment in congressional debates concerning explicitly work-family benefits. The idea is that consistent findings, across both sets of debates, of a relatively prominent place for traditional gender-role conceptions would lend support to the theory set forth here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President Reagan used the Justice Department for a major component of his school policy curtailing desegregation. This paper makes two contributions to the regime theory of presidential politics. First, the paper argues that Reagan’s presidency was in fact reconstructive. Contrary to the presidency literature that has concluded Reagan was ultimately a failure at establishing a new and lasting institutional order, this paper suggests Reagan created a ?voluntary state? and focuses on the example of school desegregation policy. The Reagan White House weakened the Department of Education and strengthened the Department of Justice in order to enact a new voluntary desegregation policy that has considerable authority today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the complexities of the intersection of racial and gender construction(s) with respect to the public sphere and private sphere dichotomy. Through the analysis of black women’s social conditions, this paper argues that the historical constructions of race and gender and the historical period of analysis affect the applicability of the "public-private dichotomy" to black women’s experiences. Consequently, racial exclusion and gender discrimination induced black women’s consciousness and their socio-political development. Although social capital theory accounts for the importance of social networks, norms, and trust in building social relations, we need a conceptualization of social capital theory that accounts for the complexities of racial and gender construction(s) and their effect on racially "divided publics," racio-gendered spheres, and racial uncertainty. Therefore, this paper presents black socio-political capital and racio-sexual social capital as frameworks most appropriate for analyzing black women’s conditions during this era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from classical negative liberty, this paper shows how a civil regime of private property under liberty must assure to each individual the opportunity to provide a socially decent standard of living through work as measured by current societal norms. The paper then shows how contemporary economic and social policies of the United States, expending more than $1 trillion annually, relate to and logicaly grow out of this concept of liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses data from the American National Election Studies and the 2000 Voter News Service national exit poll to test the social identity theory of party identification proposed by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler. Contrary to their claim that outside of the South the distribution of party identification has been static for decades, we find that Republican identification has increased substantially since the 1970s among several major groups of voters outside of the South including white males and Catholics. Within these groups, however, Republican gains occurred mainly or exclusively among self-identified conservatives. As a result, the relationship between party identification and ideology has grown substantially stronger over time in almost every major group in the electorate. Party identification is now much more strongly related to voters? ideological preferences than to their social identities as defined by their group memberships. Our results indicate that there is a much larger rational component to party identification in the U.S. than Green et al. acknowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been a resurgence of attention to the concept of culture in analyses of urban politics ? a resurgence that is an important development in studies of identity politics, morality issue politics, progressive development politics and other important matters in the urban sub-field. That resurgence has taken a different path from the religion, race, and ethnicity-dominated approach of Elazar?s (1970, 1984) classic formulation and Lieske?s (1993) reformulation of Elazar. Instead, a variety of scholars have conceptualized and measured subculture in terms of trends alleged to be at the heart of a post-industrial, cultural divide in the U.S. Focusing on change in women?s social roles, greater prevalence of post-secondary education, increases in non-traditional household arrangements, the decline in traditional religious attachments, and the growing importance of high-tech and ?creative-class? occupations (Florida, 2000), writers such as Rosdil (1991), Sharp (2002; in press), and Clark and Inglehart (1998) have identified an emergent ?unconventional? or ?new political culture? that can be differentiated from a traditional or conventional subculture. Most recently, Sharp (2002; in press) has developed an Index of Unconventional Culture based on Census Bureau data and applied it to analyses of 10 cities? handling of morality issues. Meanwhile, DeLeon and Naff (2003) have used the surveys conducted by Putnam and colleagues in roughly 30 Social Capital Benchmark Communities to create a New Political Culture Index based conceptually on much of this work. The emergence of different measures of local subculture that share a very similar (but not identical) conceptual foundation calls for the kind of measurement validation study that Adcock and Collier have recommended more generally (2001). In part, this paper tackles this matter of measurement validation. However, the existence of different methods of operationalizing the emergent unconventional or new political culture also provides an important opportunity to determine whether measurement of local sub-culture using Census Bureau data yields results consistent with the measurement of local sub-culture using survey data. Urban scholars almost never have resources for random sample surveys on the same topic in many different cities ? the Social Capital Benchmark survey is highly exceptional in this regard. But if it can be shown that the measurement of unconventional or new political subculture using Census Bureau data corresponds to the measurement of unconventional or new political culture using SCBS data and that both meet other tests of validity, then urban scholars will be able to conduct research on many samples of cities using this important measure. The analysis here shows that there is substantial correspondence between the Census Bureau-based and the SCBS survey-based measures of the degree to which a community exhibits unconventional, or new political culture. The survey-based index does have measurement reliability advantages. But both measures are about equally strong on construct validation, even when the criterion variables for construct validation are drawn from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the debate regarding the desirability of kin support for givers and recipients. On one side of this debate, scholars view kin support as a valuable resource benefiting both givers and recipients. On the other side, scholars argue that social support has a number of potential problems, bringing disadvantages to the giver of such support (and sometimes the recipient as well) and, in case of African Americans, ultimately makes them worse off as a group. They discuss detriments to physical health, psychological well-being, economic well-being, and social capital of support providers. This paper uses two waves of the NSFH data to test the proposition of the advantages versus disadvantages debate, and evaluate the appropriateness of its either/or terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the role of complex work organizations and professions in the nonprofit sector. Supported by the empirical case of professional communications and fundraising work in U.S. higher education, the paper identifies problems in the contemporary postmodern sociology of citizenship and public-sphere theory. The main effort of the paper is to understand how professional organization of institutional audiences for formal organizations can be adequately theorized in the light of the problem of social integration and suggests the methodological adjustment by organizational theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the past three decades American Indian tribes have gone from being extremely marginal social groups largely dominated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to wielding advantageous ? and distinctively governmental ? rights and powers. They are now legitimate and functional members of the American intergovernmental structure, and enjoy unique access to federal actors and decision-making processes. These striking outcomes present a puzzle to students of social movements, racial politics, and political institutions, as well as to those studying American political development and federalism in particular. In this paper I explain these distinctive outcomes and offer an innovative account by extending the synthesis of cultural institutional and social movement theory. I focus on tribal institutional entrepreneurship. To gain acceptance as legitimate governments rather than as minority groups or wards of the state, tribes newly adopted conventional territorial organizational forms and functions. These actions were accompanied by discursive advocacy providing justifying accounts for this status. Entrepreneurs opportunistically exploited contradictions and ambiguities in federal policy statements to promote this shift in the accepted status of tribes. The paper provides a detailed analysis of the contingent and iterative process through which this institutionalization of tribal status occurred, as well as analytically accounting for the pivotal events and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounts of changes in U.S. welfare and criminal justice policy over the last thirty years usually treat them as separate phenomena. This paper advances the argument that they are related to each other and attempts to provide a better understanding of welfare and criminal justice policy by viewing them as alternative methods of governing social marginality. This is accomplished in three ways: first, by documenting a ?bars versus butter? tradeoff between spending on welfare and corrections in U.S. states from 1970 to 2001. Second, this paper demonstrates that existing theories of welfare and corrections as forms of labor market control are unable to account for the effect of unemployment on welfare and corrections spending. An alternative explanation of state responses to unemployment that is sensitive to the relationship between welfare and corrections is shown to better predict state responses to unemployment. Finally, in contrast to lopsided depictions of the U.S. labor market as having become increasingly deregulated over this period, this paper provides evidence that states have adopted an increasingly punitive form of labor market regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a transnational, quasi-permanent ?alliance and conflict system? (Klandermans 1990) over international trade has developed in North America. In the ten years since NAFTA?s passage major mobilizations against neoliberal trade institutions occurred in cities throughout each country of North America. In the U.S.A., sustained coalition activity over the period, as well as the expansion of U.S. SMO?s in transnational movement activity, serve as indicators of a quasi-permanent alliance system in the U.S. Additionally, political and legal challenges to the environmental and labor side agreements have occurred regularly, with petitions filed from movements in all three countries. Some of these trends from the U.S.A. are examined in this paper. Finally, a defensive, corporate and ideological countermovement remains mobilized and capable of responding in all three countries to movements that threaten the expansion of neoliberal trade institutions, such as the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. An overview of activity by key advocates of neoliberalism, and their coalition activity in the U.S.A., will highlight the substantial power and institutional base of a quasi-permanent conflict system. The sustained mobilizations and conflicts on both sides of the global trade agenda points to a relatively new, transnational institutional space for solidarity and contention over free trade. The conflict over NAFTA in all three countries helped set this stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement theorists belonging to both the resource mobilization school and the framings school tend to define social movements as phenomenon that actively pursue political goals, despite disagreements over whether cognitive conceptions or resources are more important in the successful attainment of these goals. The following paper seeks to enter into a dialogue with these two traditions by examining the possibility that social movements may contain features that are not overtly political, or themselves be entirely unconcerned with political goals, and yet still produce politically relevant consequences. Borrowing loosely from mechanisms for the generation of discourse developed by Foucault, the paper conceptualizes social movements as unique loci of discourse interaction, which both generate and are sustained by an incipient new discourse. The discourse created therein, furthermore, is important due to its cognitive aspect, which constrains the thinking of individuals within the movement, and due to its communicative aspect, which allows it to be spread outside of the movement through the simple act of communication (thus breaking free of the initial locus). This new discourse is further relevant, because it effects which aspects of reality are communicated in inter-personal interaction, thus severely constraining which action oriented frames can be constructed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibility of a division of labor within social movements, in which discourse is generated via discursive interaction in several loci, and subsequently woven together in other movements before becoming framed in a politically relevant manner. The paper ends with several implications of the importance of discourse in formulating a more complete understanding of social movements, as it relates to generating more nuanced theories of power. The case study of the 1960s in the United States is employed to highlight these phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project begins to map out the connections among the ideologies of individualism, conformism, and gender. Read through the lens of gender, the language of individualism is rife with the agentic characteristics typically coded as masculine?independence, autonomy, and success orientation. Individualism?s nemesis, conformism, can be read as feminine?dependence, passivity, and other-orientation. But neither individualism nor conformism, as traits or central values of societies, have typically been studied with an attention to gender. I begin with a short discussion of individualism and conformism, how they have been conceptualized, and the place of these ideologies in US culture. I briefly move to a discussion of the social construction of gender, and then on to the main part of this paper: laying out the interconnections among the three. The last part of the paper tackles the issue of whether ideology translates into patterns of behavior and attempts to answer the question of whether men are more individualistic and women more conforming based on social psychological studies of sex differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goode (1962) argues that at the start of modern society the upper classes will have higher divorce rates, but as divorce procedures are gradually made available to all classes this differences will dwindle away. Since family strain towards the lower strata is greater, the proportion of lower strata divorces will increase, and eventually Goode expects an inverse relation between class and divorce rate. The partly contradicting results on this relation between class and divorce risk ask for a more systematic, cross-national and cross-cohort analysis of the relation between education and divorce and separation. This will be the first aim of this paper. We use multi-level analysis to analyze this relation in various countries in Europe and the USA. We analyze this relation for both all unions (whatever their juridical form) and for the married couples only (with or without cohabitation). The second aim of this paper is to explain these cross-national and cross-cohort differences in the relation between education and divorce/separation by (changes in) state regulations of marriage and divorce, social policies, the level of female full time labor market participation and the general acceptance of divorce. We use the files of the Fertility and Family Survey project. These data were collected during the 1990s. They are national representative samples of male and female respondents in Finland, Poland, Estonia, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, West Germany, Sweden, USA and Greece. Final results will be presented at the conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of social and cultural capital are heuristic for understanding civic participation in urban U.S. communities as these theories help determine how decisions are made, who makes them and when does real decision-making occur. This paper examines the decision-making processes in a Southern California urban community targeted for renewal. Resident participation in the redevelopment of this area is analyzed through the social and cultural capital frameworks to ascertain the methods by which the transmission of participatory inequality continues to occur. This analysis shows that the acquisition of knowledge as a tool for meaningful civic participation is a gendered, classed and racialized process. Furthermore, the rules are not known to all participants. Similar to the ‘hidden curriculum’ that exists in educational settings, there are unwritten rules and knowledge of political processes that those from racialized minority groups are not fully made aware. As a result, participatory processes may on the surface appear democratic and inclusive, when in practice they are not open and available to everyone. This paper analyzes participation through cultural resource theory to problematize cultural and social capital within a culturally diverse urban setting. Through ethnographic methods this paper illustrates the ways that cultural resources are valued and devalued within the civic participatory sphere. More specifically, an analysis of three cultural resources integral to civic participation are examined through the eyes of Latino, Vietnamese, African American and Anglo residents active in the revitalization of City heights. The cultural resources analyzed are general cultural awareness, verbal facility and scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When is a social problem a socially constructed social problem? To a social constructionist the answer is obvious: all social problems are socially constructed. Taking an overtly agnostic stance towards putative conditions, constructionists have made it their business to demonstrate that claims, not objective conditions, are at the bottom of all social problems. And yet, the field has focused disproportionately on what might be called social problem spectacles. In this paper, using a comparison of teenage pregnancy in Sweden and the United States as our example, we address two interrelated problems with the focus on spectacular social problems, the first having to do with what kinds of problems are appropriate for social constructionist analysis, and the second with the relationship between so called facts and claims in social constructionist analyses. Rather than using the different problem statuses in Sweden (not a public problem) and the United States (a public problem) as evidence that it is the magnitude of a problem that determines its problem status, we show in this paper that the key difference when it comes to explaining the different problem statuses in Sweden and the United States refers to the institutional and interpretive configurations that preceded the modern approach to ?teenage pregnancy? as a distinct social problem. These configurations were quite different in the two nations and, as a result, constrained future claimsmaking in somewhat different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses tenant compliance with the Department of Housing and Urban Development?s 1996 ?One Strike and You?re Out? policy which was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 2002. The regulation requires public housing leases to stipulate that if a public housing tenant, any member of the tenant?s household, or any guest or other person under the tenant?s control engages in criminal activity or any drug-related criminal activity on or off premises, tenancy will be terminated. My interest in this paper is on the set of obligations public housing tenants are compelled to abide by in the signing of a lease ? to scrutinize the behaviors of family members, their friends, and visitors within the home and outside of it. In total, these expectations form an ?affirmative obligation? on the part of leaseholders to prevent criminal activities through control of third party behavior, hence implicating each tenant of public housing in a system of social regulation and control. I do not intend that such compliance is completely willing; indeed, the presence of real and negative consequences for violation of the policy means that it is compelled. Nonetheless, I contend there is much to be gained by a focus on the majority of people who do not violate certain civil legal prescriptions ? that through their compliance, we can see the mostly pernicious ways the state has slipped control, surveillance and regulation into ordinary everyday behaviors of specific populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When people think of an ingroup to which they belong, they tend to think of the prototypical member of the group. And people tend to think of themselves as prototypical members. What this means is that people tend to think of ingroup members as ?people like me.? This process of establishing ingroup boundaries, boundaries that place the person firmly within the group, is an important one, especially when considering national groups. By establishing national group boundaries, Americans include some people, marginalize others, and fully exclude still others. Those who are marginalized or excluded are objectively members of the ingroup (i.e., the American people) lose out on the benefits of being an ingroup member. This paper explores the issue of establishing boundaries and national identity by drawing heavily on political theory and social psychology. I find that national identity is significantly related to feeling an obligation toward fellow Americans, that national identity is strongly related to setting exclusionary boundaries for the national group, and that for those who strongly identify with the American people, those who are excluded are denied the benefits of being part of the national group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we seek to understand the political actions of individuals? Is political behavior best understood within the scope of a particular nation or should we attempt to explain political behavior as a set of social activities that might be generalized across nations? While students of American political behavior may approach their subject as if it applied principally in the United States, in this paper I argue that there is a good deal of value to thinking about political behavior in an explicitly comparative manner. To support this argument, I draw on research seeking to understanding the working of social context as an influence on individual political behavior. Specifically, I use data from the United States and Britain to examine the role of social interaction and individual cognition as explanations for how the class context of a community may influence individual vote choice. This example illustrates the value of using comparative data to seek more general explanations of political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a feminist exploration of disability studies and the movement that gave it birth. It is part of my work as a nondisabled feminist to interrogate my own ablism and to look for the opportunities disability analysis provides for fuller theorizing and activism. I explore possible paths toward feminist theorizing and praxis that are inclusive of disability. These paths offer expanded theoretical landscapes and additional tools for use in feminist social justice struggles. I begin by briefly sketching the context in which we find ourselves as U.S. citizens, scholars, and activists since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the founding of the Society for Disability Studies. This environment offers imperatives, opportunities, risks and responsibilities for the inclusion of disability awareness and people with disabilities within every aspect of life. I then focus on a few illustrative theoretical tools and sites of feminist inquiry and activism that are deepened and challenged through the deployment of disability analysis: simultaneity, irony, interdependence, body politics, and ?choice.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the longstanding traditions of tolerance, inclusion, and democracy in the United States, dissident citizens and social movements have historically experienced significant and sustained--although often subtle and difficult-to-observe--suppression in this country. Using mechanism-based social-movement theory, this paper explores a number of episodes of contention in twentieth-century USAmerica, involving such groups as the early-century anarchists, the Black Panther Party, and the modern-day globalization movement. First I delineate a typology of actions that the state and mass media engage in to suppress dissent. Then I shift analytically from these twelve Modes of Suppression to the five dynamic, interactive Mechanisms of Suppression that animate demobilization: Resource Depletion, Stigmatization, Divisive Disruption, Intimidation, and Emulation. Drawing from mass-media accounts, FBI documents, secondary histories, and other data sources, I explain how the state and mass media have engaged in activity that--operating through social mechanisms--inhibits the preconditions for collective action, either through raising the costs or minimizing the benefits of mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines breastfeeding policy as enacted through state and federal laws and court decisions. Using social construction theory as a framework to analyze this corpus of policy, we find that what appears to be an impressive array of breastfeeding initiatives, in fact fail to support women’s breastfeeding decisions. In addition, children’s interest are rarely considered by policy makers. Rather, these policies are typical of those whose target populations are dependents (positively constructed by politically weak) or deviants (negatively constructed and politically weak). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the difference in U.S. missile defense policy between President Reagan?s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) on March 23, 1983 and President Bush?s announcement of Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) during his State of Union Address on January 21, 1991--specifically, considering the difference in the technical goals of SDI and GPALS. It asks how individuals involved in missile defense policy made decisions on the feasibility of various technologies?what were the criteria for success and failure and how was this criteria established. The focus of analysis is on the role of strategic beliefs held by policymakers in determining the technical assessments that lead to judgments of technical feasibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the hypothesis that the social reproduction of affluence tends to intensify national and human in/security, a contradiction that is projected on a universal scale by US strategies of world order. In the context of the hierarchy of social and political forces in a global order configured by disciplinary neo-liberalism, an exploration of the US political economy is crucial. This is partly because American lifestyles are increasingly energy-intensive, consumerist, individualist and premised on forms of social Darwinism that entail restructuring of social institutions and patterns of social risk. This, along with the shock associated with the mega-terrorist attacks of 9/11, as well as violence within US society, have led to generalized and growing perceptions of increasing insecurity. Here, one of the paradoxes of intensified globalization is that there appears to be an inverse correlation between the wealth held by individuals and their sense of personal security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. welfare reforms of 1996 rode to victory not on a philosophical theory of justice, but on a wave of voter dissatisfaction with past welfare efforts and a vague promise to make recipients more ‘responsible.’ Yet, the rationales for the reforms bear at least a surface resemblance to the theory of capability espoused by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. This paper explores the depth of that resemblance and its policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to our understanding of two important puzzles: the causal mechanism linking social capital to government performance, and the role of institutions as compared to the cultural variables explaining performance. In order to tackle these puzzles, the concept of government performance is disaggregated into two dimensions: policy responsiveness and administrative effectiveness. The effect of social capital vs. institutional variables on either of these variables is then assessed. Empirical tests with data from the U.S. and German sub-national governments provide support for the linkage between social capital and the policy responsiveness attribute of government performance. This finding supports the causal argument that social capital increases the level of political sophistication and facilitates the cooperation within society, helping people to voice their policy demands better. Further, the analysis finds no empirical link between the level of social capital and administrative effectiveness. The variance on this dimension is explained by institutional and socio-economic variables. The implication of the latter finding is that a competing causal argument linking social capital to government performance via the behavior of bureaucratic elites is incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars theorize that social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups. Robert Putnam claims to have found support for this theory in his studies of Italy and the United States. In each case he concludes that the presence of social capital - generalized norms of trust and reciprocity - is sufficient to predict progress on a variety of social indicators. Using demographic and public opinion data collected at the state level in the U.S, Putnam links the performance of schools to his measure of social capital. Schools perform best where social capital is found in greater abundance. This paper attempts to replicate Putnam’s finding using data from local communities in North Carolina. Since social contacts and social capital occur at the local level between individuals and groups in a community, a logical extension of Putnam’s work is to verify that these relationships exist locally. I propose and test the following two hypotheses using data from the 100 counties of North Carolina: 1) Students score higher on statewide tests in school districts where social contact is greater among residents; 2) Students drop out of school at lower rates in school districts where social contact is greater among residents. If local evidence exists to support the claim that social contacts matter, then what programs governments fund in the name of social progress may need to be reconsidered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some have argued that recent American welfare reforms can be usefully compared to the English Poor Law Reforms of 1834. The parallels are intriguing, but we need neither go quite so far back in history nor cross the Atlantic to find policy antecedents. Gilded Age assaults on municipal programs of poor relief may provide a more apt and instructive comparison. In both anti-relief eras it was similar sets of actors with similar class-based interests who were driving reforms. During these periods of profound economic transformation, they used similar arguments to make ending or restricting relief an act of compassion, not cruelty, thus giving political viability and moral legitimacy to their self-serving cause. Such propaganda was disseminated through similar kinds of well-funded and well-connected organizations of ‘experts,’ which functioned as mediating institutions, linking their funders, the media, and the political system; those funders remained behind the scenes during these battles, achieving their goals by dressing their economic campaigns in moral rhetoric. These anti-relief movements led to the enactment of similar kinds of work-enforcing policies that had similar results, with need among the poor increasing, along with their dependence on the low-wage labor market, public costs rising, and private contractors reaping the financial rewards. Both campaigns, moreover, were battles in much larger wars about the proper role of the state and the legitimacy of its interference in the free market, responses to gains made by poor and working people in the post-Civil War and post-World War II periods. This paper seeks to flesh out some of that comparison in part to ask whether understanding the ultimate outcome of Gilded Age reforms and the eventual return to relief can shed predictive light on more recent events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do different communities volunteer for different types of organizations? Why do some communities have much higher rates of volunteer participation than other, similarly situated communities? The author develops a new conceptualization of civil society that classifies civic organizations continually rather than categorically. This conceptualization serves as the basis of the Community Volunteerism Model, which utilizes a state-in-society approach to explain the types and rates of volunteering found in communities. Citizen images of state and individual responsibility for caring for society determine the type of organizations (community-based or issue-based) prevalent in that community. The practices of state and social institutions (how well they legitimize, organize, and fund volunteers and their organizations) determine the rate of participation in that community. The model is tested using the cases of the United States and Japan, and the paper concludes with some implications of this model for the study of comparative civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting a new political party is always a costly endeavor, but it is a well-known fact that doing so and challenging the existing two-party system usually ends up in miserable electoral defeat under the first-past-the-post voting system, at least in most circumstances. If this is the case, why would anyone want to launch a third party in such a situation in the first place? Employing the concepts of organizational repertoire and organizational form, hitherto used primarily in sociological research on social movements, this paper seeks an answer to this question by investigating why a couple of reformist social movements, prohibitionists and labor reformers, began forming their own political parties several years after the Civil War. In the course of analysis, two subproblems to the original research question are addressed. First, why did the social movement leaders think creating a political party was better suited to achieve their reform than their previous mode of action? Second, even if forming a political party was superior to their earlier organizational form in terms of policymaking, why did they think that they could win elections once they formed a political party? My analysis, which treats these reformers as utility-maximizing actors rather than narrow-sighted zealots, reveals that the political experience of the immediate past, namely the rise of the Republican Party and its conduct of the war, served as an organizational model that changed their views on political parties and party system change in a positive way. This experience convinced the reformers to follow its course by starting a party founded on a reformist political issue, thereby realizing their reform through federal public policy after a party realignment, just as the Republicans did, in the reformers’ view, with the slavery issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether popular militarism is shaped by basic punitive values and beliefs. Assuming that punitiveness influences opinions about both criminal punishment and war, I infer hypotheses about relationships between death penalty support and support for war and military spending. I test these with 1990-92 American National Election Studies panel data and find death penalty support to be an important predictor of opinions about U.S. involvement in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. Death penalty supporters disproportionately favored destroying Saddam’s regime rather than just containing it, and showed less sympathy for the Iraqi people, including enemy civilians caught in the crossfire. Death penalty support is also related, though less strongly, to general support for the acquisition and utility of military power. These findings help explain public enthusiasm for punitive wars, and the efforts of political leaders to demonize enemy ‘evildoers.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thesis of this paper is that the Appropriations process has broken down because the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) can no longer fulfill its historical role as the stable anchor of the process and the keeper of Congress’s power of the purse. The primary reason for the HAC’s weakening is that the highly ideological partisanship that engulfed the House of Representatives from 1994-2002, undermined the historical supports for internal unity within the House Appropriations Committee. In The Power of the Purse (1966), Richard F. Fenno, Jr. argued that the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) of the 1950s and 1960s possessed great policy making power because its integration (internal unity) and member expertise allowed it to craft masterful appropriations bills designed to garner the support of other House members, Senate conferees, and the executive branch, while protecting the autonomous authority of the committee and the House itself. The committee maintained its integration because of high membership stability, well-developed and supportive norms, collegial social relationships, autonomous decision processes, and minimal partisanship. After extensive participant-observation of the committee and supplemental quantitative analysis, I increasingly came to the view that the social system described by Fenno for the 1950s and 1960s, and which appears to have survived into the early 1990s, deteriorated markedly in the face of the Republican revolution of the 90s. The reason for this deterioration was that polarized partisanship and its reforms and policy shifts, eroded the membership stability of the HAC, its socialization processes and norms, its cohesive internal social relations, its policy making autonomy. Thus, the committee lost its capacity to lead the Republican leadership’s legislative agenda and allowed the executive, and to some degree the Senate, to increase their roles in determining federal spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent release of US and Canadian census data has sparked interest among politicians, journalists, and researchers in imigrant dispersal outside major urban centers. This paper analyzes how collective meaning is constructed in media accounts of census information. We argue that the 2001 Canadian census has been used to construct an understanding of immigration that assumes federal intervention in immigrants’ settlement patterns; peresentationsof the 2000 US census construct immigration settlement as the outcome of choices made by individual immigrants and as local policy problems. In each country the construction of immigration dispersal omits alternative interpretations of its causes and effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements and other ‘exogenous’ interests play an important yet insufficiently understood role in presidential politics. With this paper I will explore the various theoretical understandings of exogenous interests and the presidency, and then examine the case of President Reagan and regulatory politics. I explain that Reagan built new regulatory structures that survive today, and thus created a new regulatory politics according to his obligations to exogenous interests. I argue that presidential policymaking is compelled by the imperatives of responding to exogenous political forces like social movements, organized interest groups, and key voting blocs. I find evidence that three exogenous interest groups, the business sector, right-wing social movements, and the Democrats, were forces that compelled Reagan’s policymaking decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a prologue to a study of the argument that Americans became ?consumerists? sometime in the 19th or 20th centuries. That thesis rests on psychological models of over-buying. The paper outlines three categories of such models ? emulation, indulgence, and signaling ? and the critiques that have been presented of the very notion of consumerism. It also sketches the sort of casual, observational evidence that makes claims of historical change difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between social movement strategies, their use of culture(in particular music), and their relationship to race in America. Social movement organizations differ in whether they define themselves as vanguards of the general population or catalysts, in whether they use music as a propaganda tool or a Asocial glue@ and in whether they define race as a means to a deeper goal or an irreducible goal in itself. The paper argues that these three qualities are related: Social movements that define themselves as catalysts and use music as a social glue are more successful in bridging racial boundaries than social movements that adopt a vanguard strategy and use music as propaganda, because they are more fully embedded in communities. This conclusion is supported with a comparison of the American Communist Party and the Highlander School of Monteagle, TN from the 1930s to the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper examines how punk and alternative rock subcultures have created their own commercially independent media, such as independent record labels and fanzines, through a so-called "do-it-yourself ethic." The formation of independent media is a response to the growing concentration of power among corporate conglomerates in the entertainment and music industries. The do-it-yourself ethic gives people involved with punk and alternative rock music democratic access to a means of creative expression, empowering them to be cultural participants rather than just consuming spectators. In many cases, it also enables them to use music as a vehicle of protest and activism, a kind of "public sphere" that gives voice to viewpoints marginalized by mainstream media while facilitating dialogue about critical social issues. My paper gives special attention to the "riot grrrl" movement and subculture, a collective of young women who sought to revitalize feminism by using fanzines and music as media for consciousness-raising and community organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Deal?s federal works program comprised a third tier of social policies that were institutionally distinct from social insurance and public assistance. This paper examines the political consequences of these work programs in comparison to the political consequences of social insurance and public assistance. In addition, the paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu?s notion of "classification struggles" to criticize and improve upon social citizenship and social control theories of the welfare state, which have been linked respectively to the social insurance and public assistance tiers of the U.S. welfare state. I argue that while the constitution of relief recipients as a clearly demarcated pariah class may facilitate their regulation, attempts by the state to regulate ill-defined subjects encourage political contention over the very constitution of those subjects. A careful examination of political contention over the Works Progress Administration (WPA) illustrates this thesis and provides historical evidence for it. First, I show how the WPA positioned its workers in contradictory ways that resembled both public employment and public assistance. Second, I show how the contradictory location of WPA workers expanded opportunities for them to contest their classification as paupers, not by shunning public aid, but by redefining it as legitimate employment. Third, I argue that these claims were contentious because of the potential material and symbolic profits that corresponded to the status of employee. As other New Deal institutions like the National Labor Relations Board granted new rights to workers in private industry, WPA workers demanded similar rights and privileges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]