Partant du débat entre représentation descriptive et substantielle d'une part, et de l'analyse féministe de la citoyenneté d'autre part, cette contribution s'intéresse à l'impact des parlementaires sur le développement de la citoyenneté sociale des femmes. Dans ce cadre, le Parlement constitue pour les femmes une arène de choix pour pratiquer leur propre citoyenneté à un niveau élevé. En même temps, le mandat politique représente une structure d'opportunité exceptionnelle pour renouveler les normes et les rapports sociaux de genre. En conséquence, nous tenterons, à travers une analyse des votes nominatifs de la Chambre basse suisse, de tester l'impact du sexe des parlementaires sur les projets de loi qui régulent les rapports de genre.
To what extent does the inclusion of marginalized groups in policymaking institutions influence policy outcomes? This article examines whether and under which conditions female legislators are more likely to represent women’s interests compared to male legislators. Building on the literature on women’s substantive representation, it is argued that the advocacy of women’s interests by female representatives depends on a number of factors, namely party affiliation, contact with women’s organizations, electoral district, and seniority. This argument is evaluated using vote level fixed-effect models based on a unique dataset from a direct-democratic context which combines representatives voting behaviour, women’s voting preferences, and recommendations from feminist groups. The findings show that female legislators defend feminist interests more than their male colleagues but that they only marginally respond to women’s electoral preferences. Moreover, gender has its most visible effect within the populist party.
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 Valais, into the Lake Geneva and then through the city of Geneva. The River has always produced numerous goods and services. It is mainly used for agriculture in its upper part and for hydropower production in Geneva where management of the Rhone is delegated to a semi-public company, the SIG (Services Industriels de Genève). The River has long been canalised and its natural flow massively modified. On the French side, since the 1933, the CNR (Compagnie Nationale du Rhone) is in charge of the river management from the Swiss border to the Mediterranean Sea. The company has three missions: hydropower production, navigation and irrigation. Later on, in a post-war context, the French central State canalised the River considering the Rhone first of all as an industrial tool of Nation’s reconstruction (Pritchard, 2011). This phase greatly modified the state of the River with the construction of 19 infrastructures of hydropower production. The emergence of new water management perspectives (IWRM for example), the implementation of the water framework directive and the increase of environmental legislations and concerns modified the very nature of the Rhone. If, on both sides of the border, the management of the river has been partly delegated to hydropower companies, public stakeholders tend to look for new ways of managing the river basin. Thoughts emerge to reconsider the scale of governance of the river and its actors’ configuration. This communication concerns the current debates and shift in the management of the Rhone river. It aims to show the issues related to a River when its flow is essentially governed through Hydropower companies. It shows what are the constraints of shifting from a sectorial and industrial management of the river to a more integrated water governance perspective. It analyses how the integration of a basin management could be achieved in a River mainly governed by private arrangements, between hydropower companies, benefiting from strong use rights. Our communication has several objectives. Firstly, we analyse the existing management arrangements of the Rhone River. We look at the actors’ configuration and try to understand the rivalries emerging among the different uses of the Rhone, focusing on the central function of hydropower companies and their multiple scales of intervention. Secondly, we concentrate ourselves on the actual new phase of River management and look at how public actors attempt to tackle the central issue of increasing coordination at the basin scale. Finally, we discuss different questions such as which scale to adopt to achieve an IWRM in a transborder context? To what extent could it be done in an intersectoral perspective (Nahrath et al. 2009) while hydropower producers have such a central function in the regulation of the River? Should it be based on the river basin scale (Hering & Ingold, 2012) or on more flexible and multi-scalar arrangements? What kind of institutional and governance structures could match with those scale rearrangements?
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 ‘innocent’ and straightforward than they may first appear. In particular, the moral and political questions that they raise can be surprisingly complex and knotty.
Should Catholic adoption agencies be required to serve gay couples because they are willing to serve non-Catholics? Should Catholic hospitals be required to provide contraceptives to those who want them? Such questions lie at the heart of contemporary controversy, in Britain and the USA, over the appropriate scope for conscientious exemptions from antidiscrimination law, and over the implications of allowing voluntary associations a role in providing important public goods and services. Freedom of conscience requires that faith-based institutions be free to serve their members’ needs in accordance with their religious teachings. But what should happen when faith-based institutions serve the general public, often with public funds? There are two logically coherent but opposed answers to these questions: ‘conscience trumps all’ and ‘equality trumps all’. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York and President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, represents the first position, and the British Humanist Society represents the second. Both positions are too absolute to be persuasive. However, they illuminate the complexities of the issues, and the scope for political choice in crafting morally acceptable solutions to these complex problems.
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.
Through a theoretical and empirical examination of the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1966 NATO crisis, and the 2003 Iraq crisis, Eznack explores the connections between affect and emotion, the occurrence of crises, and the repair of those crises in close allies' relationships. This book constructs a new history and theory of the workings of alliances and provides a new perspective on alliances and friendly relations among states.
