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The Dominican Republic retroactively stripped thousands of Dominico-Haitians of their Dominican citizenship yet managed to defuse international opprobrium over time. After a direct assault on people’s citizenship status in 2013 provoked the human rights community’s ire, the DR employed administrative obstructionism to maneuver around human rights activism and institutions. Policies instituted in 2014 appeared to offer a pathway for Dominico-Haitians to reinstate their citizenship yet were so administratively onerous that most of the affected population remains effectively stateless. Administrative obstructionism makes for an elusive target of attack because it unfolds across a series of decisions over time, transfers responsibility from a highly visible leader to dispersed and faceless bureaucrats, and is exceedingly difficult to monitor. Administrative obstructionism drags out proceedings, causing media attention to wither. Because international forces face special challenges in countering this strategy, a strong domestic opposition movement is necessary to sustain pressure on a rights-violating government.
In the last two decades governments across Latin America have adopted and implemented conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, lifting large numbers of poor families out of economic destitution and inducing child beneficiaries to attend school and receive preventive health care on a regular basis. First emerging in Mexico and Brazil, this social policy innovation was quickly adopted in a wide range of other countries in the region. This chapter employs the analytical framework of diffusion to examine and analyze the spatial and temporal clustering that characterized the spread of CCTs in Latin America. Distinguishing between the adoption of the new policy innovation and its implementation, the chapter argues that diffusion dynamics were crucial in the adoption phase. It leverages a diffusion framework to explain why so many countries adopted CCTs at all. At the same time, the chapter grants that many other factors influenced how CCTs unfolded during the implementation phase, shaping the varied forms they have taken across the region.
Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) have emerged as an important social welfare innovation across the Global South in the last two decades. That poor mothers are typically the primary recipients of the grants renders easy, but not necessarily correct, the notion that CCTs empower women. This article assesses the relationship between the world’s largest CCT, Brazil’s Bolsa Família, and women’s empowerment. To systematize and interpret existing research, including our own, it puts forth a three-part framework that examines the program’s effects on economic independence, physical health, and psychosocial well-being. Findings suggest that women experience some improved status along all three dimensions, but that improvements are far from universal. A core conclusion is that the broader institutional context in which the Bolsa Família is embedded—that is, ancillary services in health and social assistance—is crucial for conditioning the degree of empowerment obtained.
Understood simply, people are either citizens of a country or stateless. Yet reality belies this dichotomy. Between absolute statelessness and full citizenship exist millions of people who are nationals of a country in principle but lack the identity documents to prove it, beginning with a birth certificate. Languishing in a gray zone, undocumented nationals have difficulty accessing the full services and rights that their documented counterparts enjoy. Drawing on a range of country examples, Undocumented Nationals: Between Statelessness and Citizenship calls attention to and analyzes the plight of people who cannot exercise full citizenship owing to evidentiary deficiencies. The existing literature has not adequately conceptualized and examined this in-between status, which results sometimes from state neglect and other times from intentional state discrimination. By highlighting its causes and consequences, and exploring ways to address the problem, this Cambridge Element addresses an important gap in the literature.
The purpose of this study was to analyse the consistency and extent of palliative content across high-level guiding documents related to the care of persons residing in Canadian long-term care homes. A systematic search was conducted examining documents at the national level and across five provinces (Alberta, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec). Twenty-five documents were selected based on inclusion criteria from 273 documents identified in the systematic search. The majority of these documents were created nationally (48%) or in Ontario (28%). Documents varied in palliative topics discussed, and long-term care was discussed minimally. A minimal number of palliative care guiding documents were found. Long-term care specific documents were absent, and all documents lacked consistency on palliative topics. It is imperative that palliative principles are present and consistent in high-level documents in order to improve the quality of life and care for long-term care residents across Canada.
A birth certificate is essential to exercising citizenship, yet vast numbers of poor people in developing countries have no official record of their existence. Few academic studies analyze the conditions under which governments come to document and certify births routinely, and those that do leave much to be explained, including why nontotalitarian governments at low to middle levels of economic development come to prioritize birth registration. This article draws attention to the impetus that welfare-building initiatives give to identity documentation. The empirical focus is on contemporary Latin America, where extensions in institutionalized social protection since the 1990s have increased the demand for and supply of birth registration, raising the life chances of the poor and building state infrastructure in the process. The authors' argument promises to have broader applicability as welfare states form in other developing regions.
Welfare programs distribute benefits to citizens. Perhaps even more importantly, by conveying powerful messages about how the state views poor people, welfare programs shape people’s views about themselves as subjects or citizens. Theoretical debates on how public policies can enhance democratic citizenship inspire our study of Brazil’s Bolsa Família (Family Grant). Has this conditional cash transfer program, which forms a major point of contact between the state and millions of poor Brazilians, elevated feelings of social inclusion and agency? A prominent perspective in the welfare-state literature would not expect a positive outcome given the strict means testing and behavioral requirements entailed. Yet our focus group research with Bolsa Família recipients suggests that the program does foster a sense of belonging and efficacy. Policy design and government discourse matter. This innovative welfare program yields rich insights on alternative paths to citizenship development for middle- and low-income countries in the third wave of democracy.
The purpose of the study was to determine patterns of diet use among middle-aged Australian men and women and the relationships between these different usage patterns and demographic characteristics, health status and health habits. A cross-sectional mail survey was conducted among a random sample of 2975 people aged 40–71 years in Victoria, Australia. A total of 1031 usable questionnaires were obtained which included information about the use of diets (e.g. low-fat and low-salt) during the past 3 months along with demographic information, health status and health habits. Based on the responses about the use of thirteen diets for both sexes, latent class analysis was employed to identify the optimal number of use of diets and the assignment of participants to particular groups. Three types of diet uses were identified and provisionally named: diet use, selected diet use and non-diet use. This classification was associated with demographics, health status and health habits, and these associations differed between men and women. The findings suggest that nutrition education programmes should be tailored to the different needs of the diet use groups.
The PT is a case of the successful and fairly gradual transformation of a radical institutionalized mass party into a more electorally competitive professional party. Given its start as exceptionally ideological and grassroots oriented, it was the kind of party we might least expect to have reoriented in a vote-maximizing way. Ultimately, the PT did adapt but its adaptation was fairly slow – arguably slower than, for example, the Argentine Peronists, the Chilean Socialists, or the Argentine FREPASO. After three failed presidential bids, the PT went on to win two consecutive presidential contests, an unprecedented feat for the left in Brazil. Although Lula had responded rationally to externally induced incentives (and persuaded significant elements in the party to go along with him), there was also internal resistance to change. The PT's origins and structure created lags and distortions in adaptation but also some real advantages, namely endowing the party with credibility as the voice of opposition in 2002, discipline in passing difficult reforms once Lula became president, and a reliable foundation that would help it weather a number of serious crises.
In this chapter I return to the analytical approaches that frame the book. I draw out the broader theoretical implications of the book's analysis after first revisiting the reasons for change within the PT and comparing anew the features of its adaptation that are explained by a strategic framework to those that historical institutionalism helps to understand.
Events of the late twentieth century put leftist parties in a bind all over Latin America. This was true for Brazil as well. While the international socialist referent lost ground symbolically, economic developments in the very countries where left parties had gained traction forced them into a difficult position. Trade opening, privatization, and the reform and restructuring of the state – backed in considerable measure by key domestic elites, international financial institutions, and public opinion itself – required such parties to adapt in order to survive politically. Successful adaptation generally entails changes in strategy and organization that improve a party's ability to gain and keep electoral office amidst changing environmental challenges. The specific changes required depend on the given context, but in general they involve orienting the party away from the preferences of militants and more toward those of large groups of voters. These changes must find support within the party and the electorate.
To help us understand and assess adaptations within the PT, this chapter presents two broad analytical frameworks – rational choice and historical institutionalism – that offer different insights and perspectives on the issue of change, and it examines several studies on political parties that draw on these frameworks in key ways. Against this backdrop, the chapter examines and analyzes the distinctiveness of the PT as a mass left party prior to the mid-1990s, and it explains how and why it became a more electoral-professional and catchall party in the decade thereafter.
Drawing on historical institutionalism and strategic frameworks, this book analyzes the evolution of the Workers' Party between 1989, the year of Lula's first presidential bid, and 2009, when his second presidential term entered its final stretch. The book's primary purpose is to understand why and how the once-radical Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) moderated the programmatic positions it endorsed and adopted other aspects of a more catch-all electoral strategy, thereby increasing its electoral appeal. At the same time, the book seeks to shed light on why some of the PT's distinctive normative commitments and organizational practices have endured in the face of adaptations aimed at expanding the party's vote share. The conclusion asks whether, in the face of these changes and continuities, the PT can still be considered a mass organized party of the left.
On January 1, 2003 Lula assumed office. Leftist circles in Brazil and abroad rejoiced over this long-awaited event. Nevertheless, remaining tensions – the radicalism of some PT factions on the one hand and Lula's efforts at moderation on the other – raised the question of which direction his government would take. Would the PT stand by its core programmatic ideals and historic principles or adapt to the constraints of the global economy and the institutionally derived incentives of Brazilian politics? Would it carry out the party's vision of redistributive state-led economic development, progressive social policy, and ethical government or would it conform in wholesale fashion to contemporary economic trends and the structure of Brazilian politics? With respect to these questions, many wondered whether Lula would be able to control the radicals inside the PT. Just as external economic and political constraints had eroded some of the PT's distinctiveness in the opposition, would the process of adaptation be furthered with the PT in government? How would the PT, as well as its relationship to Lula and his government, change as a result of government decisions? This chapter contends that the experience of government made it even more difficult to retain the norms, commitments, and policy orientations of the past and therefore contributed crucially to the PT's normalization.