infonet-economy

“Statistical models are like bikinis: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.” Aaron Levenstein What is the role of lay deliberation – if any – in health-care rationing, and administration more generally? Two potential answers are suggested by recent debates on the subject. One, which I will call the technocratic answer, suggests that there is no distinctive…

Is forcing Catholic opponents of abortion to pay taxes for abortion coverage in health plans the same as forcing pacifists to fight? The answer, we’ll see is, is ‘no’, because of the nature of abortion, taxation, and democratic government. We will then examine the implications of these claims for the role of religious bodies in the provision of public services.

Research proposals on security sometimes involve plans to examine people’s perceptions of security. Innocuous though these may seem – especially compared to much security-related research which involves the development of devices for spying on people, for mining social networking sites, or the construction and testing of dangerous devices of one sort or another- surveys are less ‘…

The Rhone River has long been regarded upon its productive capacities. Shared between two Nation-States, Switzerland and France, the River has been a major development factor for the two countries and the regions situated along its banks. The Swiss part of the Rhone is characterised by the great diversity of its uses. It flows from the Rhone glacier through the agriculture plains of…

The December 2012 issue of SPSR featured a collection of short essays that explored the domestic politics of the financial crisis, the ensuing international recession and the ongoing difficulties of managing the debt problems and trade imbalances of the Eurozone. The contributors to the first installment of our debate on crisis politics engaged in historical and comparative…

Barrie Thorne – who was until recently Professor and Acting Chair of Gender and Women's Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley – has been active in the collective effort to bring feminism into the US academic world. She has fought relentlessly for over 40 years to promote women and gender studies in higher education. This creative…

This article engages with the systematic analysis of two main dimensions of political opportunities—namely institutional opportunities and discursive opportunities—so as to appraise their impact upon claim-making in the field of Islam. We account for cross- national variations of claim-making in terms of (1) visibility of Muslims, (2) use of collective action, and (3) salience of…

Social and political movements have a wide range of effects. The biographical consequences of social movements are one of them. They can be defined as effects on the life-course of individuals who have participated in movement activities, effects that are at least in part due to involvement in those activities (see McAdam 1989; Goldstone & McAdam 2001; Giugni 2004 for reviews).…