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This casebook presents interdisciplinary, critical perspectives on race and racism and covers the roles of law and history in shaping the meanings of race in the United States. Updates the second edition with new material on: President Obama's election and "post-racialism"; important studies of implicit bias; the Voting Rights Act and allegedly race-neutral restrictions on voting; recurring violence against and harassment of Latino immigrants; book-banning in Arizona; and demographic changes and their implications. Includes new cases such as Shelby County v. Holder and Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, current statistics, and updated references. Features rich historical treatment of major racialized groups in the United States: African Americans, Indians, Latinos/Latinas, Asian Americans, and Whites. Contains chapters on differing implications of enslavement, conquest, colonization, and immigration, as well as on equality, education, freedom of expression, family and sexuality, stereotyping, and crime. ; https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1088/thumbnail.jpg

The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) is among the few political organizations in the US that has organized hundreds of homeowners in protest against foreclosures. Since the height of the national foreclosure crisis in 2010, ACCE has organized a Home Defenders League among homeowners facing foreclosure and underwater mortgages. Already, this campaign has helped dozens of families to successfully obtain loan modifications from banks and to save their home from foreclosure. ACCE members have also worked in coalition with unions, community organizations, students, and other groups to promote statewide legislation to improve regulation of the home loan industry, as well as a successful statewide tax hike initiative targeting bank executives and other wealthy Californians. The foreclosure crisis has had a devastating impact on families and communities. It has been deeply felt within California, where foreclosure rates were among the highest in the nation. Adapted from the source document.

The UK has been a high profile policy innovator in welfare-to-work provision which has led in the Coalition government's Work Programme to a fully outsourced, 'black box' model with payments based overwhelmingly on job outcome results. A perennial fear in such programmes is providers' incentives to 'cream' and 'park' claimants, and the Department for Work and Pensions has sought to mitigate such provider behaviours through Work Programme design, particularly via the use of claimant groups and differential pricing. In this article, we draw on a qualitative study of providers in the programme alongside quantitative analysis of published performance data to explore evidence around creaming and parking. The combination of the quantitative and qualitative evidence suggest that creaming and parking are widespread, seem systematically embedded within the Work Programme, and are driven by a combination of intense cost-pressures and extremely ambitious performance targets alongside overly diverse claimant groups and inadequately calibrated differentiated payment levels.

L'élection du gouverneur de Tokyo, le 9 février dernier, avait tout d'un flm hollywoodien : deux anciens Premiers ministres retirés font leur come-back pour une guerre électorale contre l'establishment politique. Koizumi Junichiro (72 ans), chef du gouvernement de 2001 à 2006, a en effet décidé contre toute attente, et en opposition au Parti libéral-démocrate qu'il dirigea, d'apporter un soutien actif à Hosokawa Morihiro (76 ans). Ce dernier était à la tête de la coalition qui écarta le PLO du pouvoir en 1993-1994, pour la première fois depuis 1955. Les deux hommes jouissent d'une grande popularité, surtout le premier ; ils ont de surcroît adopté un leitmotiv partagé par une majorité de l'opinion publique : zéro nucléaire, le plus vite possible. Face à eux, Masuzoe Yoichi, ancien ministre de la Santé soutenu à la fois par le PLO d'Abe Shinzo et le puissant syndicat Rengo, représentait - un peu malgré lui - cet establishment. [Début de l'article]

L'élection du gouverneur de Tokyo, le 9 février dernier, avait tout d'un flm hollywoodien : deux anciens Premiers ministres retirés font leur come-back pour une guerre électorale contre l'establishment politique. Koizumi Junichiro (72 ans), chef du gouvernement de 2001 à 2006, a en effet décidé contre toute attente, et en opposition au Parti libéral-démocrate qu'il dirigea, d'apporter un soutien actif à Hosokawa Morihiro (76 ans). Ce dernier était à la tête de la coalition qui écarta le PLO du pouvoir en 1993-1994, pour la première fois depuis 1955. Les deux hommes jouissent d'une grande popularité, surtout le premier ; ils ont de surcroît adopté un leitmotiv partagé par une majorité de l'opinion publique : zéro nucléaire, le plus vite possible. Face à eux, Masuzoe Yoichi, ancien ministre de la Santé soutenu à la fois par le PLO d'Abe Shinzo et le puissant syndicat Rengo, représentait - un peu malgré lui - cet establishment. [Début de l'article]

This paper examines the emergence of libertarian paternalism or 'nudge' as a rationale of government in the UK and charts the way in which this development has been enabled by, and has enabled, a process of policy translation. We examine: the reasons for the emergence of libertarian paternalism in the UK; the processes that have enabled libertarian paternalism to become a significant way of framing policy in the UK for both the New Labour and the Coalition administrations; the way in which this set of policy initiatives has been predicated upon a process of social and spatial embedding that has seen it become interpreted as a meaningful and default solution to a whole host of social ills. We conclude by arguing that there is a need to appreciate both the political malleability of libertarian paternalism as a concept and the complex geographies that have enabled it to assume political significance in the UK.

Published online: 14 August 2014 ; This article explores the political economy of reform under the technocratic government of Mario Monti. Unlike the technocratic governments of the 1990s, the Monti interregnum was an experiment in unmediated democracy, in which a government is actively supported neither by political parties nor by encompassing social groups. Italian political leaders adopted unmediated democracy because of the underlying interest group conflicts in the Italian political economy. Unmediated democrats such as Monti can impose bitter medicine on a stalemated society when it is in a stage of acute crisis, but the passage of longer-term reforms requires a social coalition to support those reforms beyond the critical stage of crisis. Thus the government implemented budget cuts, but liberalisation and institutional reform stalled in the face of opposition. Italy is unlikely to be durably reformed by a government that is not anchored to society through political parties or interest groups.

Societies are severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions that make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. Two commonly proposed methods of amelioration are called consociational and centripetal. Three problems derive from these proposals: The first concerns the adoptability of either of the two principal prescriptions. Under what conditions can either be adopted? The second relates to a possibility inherent in centripetal regimes: the potential degradation of the electoral arrangements that sustain the interethnic coalition. The third, derives from a common consequence of the adoption of a consociational regime: Where robust guarantees, including minority vetoes, are adopted, immobilism is a strong possibility, and it may be very difficult to overcome the stasis that immobilism can produce. By examining these three problems, we can uncover some of the frailties inherent in both of the common prescriptions.

Recent actions by French military forces in Niger and the global prominence of terrorist groups such as Al Shabaab and Boko Haram, have highlighted the growing counter terrorist focus on the countries of Sub Saharan Africa. Additionally in a post Bin Laden world and with the immanent withdrawal of coalition combat troops from Afghanistan, there is the possibility of Africa as a continent becoming the new front in the Global War on Terror (Mben et al., 2013). However, it is a mistake to assume that Africa's story is uniformly one of violence and death. Vibrant cultures and a rugged entrepreneurial spirit have combined with a robust Internet backbone, to create the embryonic emergence of high tech hotspots across Africa. With rising IT literacy levels, more and more Africans are becoming connected to the information super highway on a daily basis (Graham, 2010). A tiny minority of these Africans are terrorists.

Soon after Barack Obama won a second term with surprising ease, Pulitzer-Prize-winning artist Clay Bennett, depicted a wealthy, white-haired man staring grimly at his television screen while around and behind him four servants, white and black, go about their jobs with big smiles on their faces.

For many Americans on the left, the outcome of the 2012 election brought more relief than satisfaction. They had supported and some had campaigned for Barack Obama and other Democrats because they were horrifi ed by the prospect of a nation ruled and ruined by Mitt Romney and his GOP. But a president whom four years ago they had hoped would begin a new era of far-reaching reform now seemed just another lesser evil, albeit one who had managed to thrash a right-wing coalition whose economic ideology harked back to the glory days of Calvin Coolidge.

Strong rhetorical differences between the European Union and the United States on climate matters have been evident for almost two decades. Since the mid-2000s, such differences are becoming visible in their respective climate policies as well. We propose three explanations for differences in climate policy outcomes in the EU and the US. First, the agenda-setting privileges of their policy-makers are significantly different, influencing how agenda setters shape policies and link issues, such as energy and climate policy. Second, while issue linkage has helped overcome distributional obstacles in the EU, it has led to more complexity and greater policy obstacles in the US. Finally, legislative rules, procedures, and norms have constrained the coalition-building efforts of lawmakers in the two systems in different ways, affecting negotiation processes and outcomes. Such differences in agenda-setting privileges, potential for issue linkages, and legislative procedures in the EU and the US have left them wide apart in international climate negotiations.

The UK Conservative–Liberal Democratic Coalition government has declared that marriage is imperative for society. This article examines couple relationship education (CRE), which aims to strengthen marriage and relationships. It argues that these programmes have potential because they offer opportunities for women and men to enhance their relationships through adult education that develops relationship skills and knowledge. For CRE to have a population level impact, however, knowledge of how to promote access to services designed for disadvantaged or vulnerable couples is critical. Gender disadvantage interacts with class, ethnicity, age and disability. Advocating marriage per se is too simplistic a solution to the complex problems of couples with diverse needs or low-income earners. If the government is serious about wanting to strengthen relationships and marriage, CRE would be a better investment if it was coordinated with policies and services such as balancing work and family and alleviating problems for low-income families.

More than two years after the heady days of protest and uprising that characterized the Arab Spring, the glow of revolution has given way to the intricacies and complications of regime building. Coalitions are being formed, constitutions written, judiciaries vetted, and security services (re)built. As collective attention focuses on these complexities of regime restructuring, it is worth noting that a fundamental security paradox sits at the heart of transitions in the Middle East and North Africa. On one hand, individuals who hit the streets or battlefields in support of revolution in 2011 did so in the belief that a new form of government would improve their political, social, and economic security over the long term. On the other hand, subsequent (and ongoing) efforts to draft new rules of the political game have triggered internal conflicts and, on occasion, those conflicts have compromised citizens' physical security over the short term.

Increasing social mobility is the 'principal goal' of the current Coalition Government's social policy. However, while mainstream political discourse frames mobility as an unequivocally progressive force, there is a striking absence of studies examining the long-term impact of mobility on individuals themselves. In British sociology the most influential research was carried out by Goldthorpe 40 years ago and argued that the mobile were overwhelmingly content with their trajectories. However, using a critique of Goldthorpe as its springboard, this article calls for a new research agenda in mobility studies. In particular, it proposes a large-scale re-examination of the mobility experience – one which addresses the possibility that people make sense of social trajectories not just through 'objective' markers of economic or occupational success, but also through symbols and artifacts of class-inflected cultural identity. Such enquiry may yield a richer account that explains both the potential social benefits and the costs of mobility.