Egalitarian Goals Research Articles

Universal health coverage and equal access in Sweden: a century-long perspective on macro-level policy

BackgroundWhen today’s efforts to achieve universal health coverage are mainly directed towards low-income settings, it is perhaps easy to forget that countries considered to have universal, comprehensive and high-performing health systems have also undergone this journey. In this article, the aim is to provide a century-long perspective to illustrate Sweden’s long and ongoing journey towards universal health coverage and equal access to healthcare.MethodsThe focus is on macro-level policy. A document analysis is divided into three broad eras (1919–1955; 1955–1989; 1989–) and synthesises seven points in time when policies relevant to overarching goals and regulation of universal health coverage and equal access were proposed and/or implemented. The development is analysed and concluded in relation to two egalitarian goals in the context of health: equality of access and equal treatment for equal need.ResultsOver the past century, macro-level policy evolved from the concept of creating access for the neediest and those reliant on wages for their survival to a mandatory insurance with equal right to healthcare for all. However, universal health coverage was not achieved until 1955, and individuals had to rely on their personal financial resources to cover the cost at the time of care utilization until the 1970s. It was not until 1983 that legislation explicitly stated that access to healthcare should be equal for the entire population (horizontal equity), while a vertical equity-principle was not added until 1997. Subsequently, ideas of free choice and privatization have gained significance. For instance, they aim to increase service access, addressing the Swedish health system’s Achilles’ heel in this regard. However, the principle of equal access for all is now being challenged by the emergence of private health insurance, which offers quicker access to services.Conclusions: brief summary and potential implicationsIt can be concluded that there is no perpetual Swedish healthcare model and various dimensions of access have been the focus of policy discussion. The discussion on access barriers has shifted from financial to personal and organizational ones. Today, Sweden still ranks high in terms of affordability and equity in international comparisons: although not as well as a decade ago. Whether this marks the beginning of a new trend intertwined with a decline in Sweden’s welfare ‘exceptionalism’, or is a temporary decline remains to be assessed in the future.

Women’s Colleges and Economics Major Choice: Evidence from Wellesley College Applicants

Many observers argue that diversity in Economics and STEM fields is critical, not simply because of egalitarian goals, but because who is in a field may shape what is studied by it. If increasing the rate of majoring in mathematically intensive fields among women is a worthy goal, then understanding whether women’s colleges causally affect that choice is important. Among all admitted applicants to Wellesley College, enrollees are 7.2 percentage points (94 percent) more likely to receive an Economics degree than non-enrollees (a plausible lower bound given negative selection into enrollment on math skills and major preferences). Overall, 3.2 percentage points – or 44 percent of the difference between enrollees and non-enrollees – is explained by college exposure to women instructors and students, consistent with a wider role for women’s colleges in increasing women’s participation in Economics. HIGHLIGHTS In US colleges, men are more than twice as likely as women to major in Economics. Enrollees are twice as likely as non-enrollees to major in Economics. The difference is a plausible lower bound given patterns of selection on observed variables. Over 40 percent of the difference is explained by the gender of students and faculty.

Improving the accessibility of health care for internal migrants in China: Achieving the aim of equalization.

Although equitable access to healthcare is considered key to the health of internal migrants, more concerted efforts are needed to improve the accessibility of healthcare in low- and middle-income countries. The software CiteSpace was used to analyze scientific literature on healthcare utilization among internal migrants in China since 2000. We focused on factors influencing access to healthcare, including geographical, economic, sociocultural, and institutional aspects. The government is urged to play a role in ensuring equal access to healthcare through policies, resource distribution, and information technology. Improving the accessibility of healthcare for internal migrants and achieving egalitarian goals is of great significance to promoting public health and fostering social equity and inclusivity.

The Profitability of Purchase Limits During Shortages

Pandemics, natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, droughts, fires), strikes, piracy, and other events can unexpectedly disrupt supply or spike demand, creating shortages. Unlike ordinary stockouts caused by store-specific inventory policies, shortages involve the entire supply chain. One tool for managing shortages is imposing purchase limits. Purchase limits restrict the quantity each shopper can purchase of the scarce product (e.g., gasoline, toilet paper, sanitizers, meat, batteries), possibly increasing availability to other shoppers. Although altruistic stores might use purchase limits for egalitarian goals (e.g., reducing hoarding, waste, panic buying, arbitrage, unfair distribution), the authors find that profit-maximizing stores can use purchase limits to increase profits during shortages. These findings suggest that stores’ price-and-limit strategies depend on shortage severity, store size, competition, and seasonality. For moderate shortages, large multiproduct stores, where average shopping basket sizes are large, should maintain low prices and impose limits, whereas small stores should increase prices and not impose limits. For severe shortages, by contrast, large stores should keep low prices but not impose limits, whereas small stores should increase prices and impose limits. Generally, large stores benefit from increased future store traffic when they impose limits. Interestingly, purchase limits can improve both store profits and, with lower prices, consumer surplus.

Eliminating Explicit and Implicit Biases in Health Care: Evidence and Research Needs

Health care providers hold negative explicit and implicit biases against marginalized groups of people such as racial and ethnic minoritized populations. These biases permeate the health care system and affect patients via patient–clinician communication, clinical decision making, and institutionalized practices. Addressing bias remains a fundamental professional responsibility of those accountable for the health and wellness of our populations. Current interventions include instruction on the existence and harmful role of bias in perpetuating health disparities, as well as skills training for the management of bias. These interventions can raise awareness of provider bias and engage health care providers in establishing egalitarian goals for care delivery, but these changes are not sustained, and the interventions have not demonstrated change in behavior in the clinical or learning environment. Unfortunately, the efficacy of these interventions may be hampered by health care providers’ work and learning environments, which are rife with discriminatory practices that sustain the very biases US health care professions are seeking to diminish. We offer a conceptual model demonstrating that provider-level implicit bias interventions should be accompanied by interventions that systemically change structures inside and outside the health care system if the country is to succeed in influencing biases and reducing health inequities.

A Brief Study on Social Networks and Feminism

This study investigates the connection between feminism with social networking and assesses social media's potential to serve as an important forum for the promotion of modern feminism goals. Feminism's influence declined in the ages until social networking became an important aspect of society and female viewpoints were sceptical that it might be resurrected or popularised again. In current history, though, people have utilised social networks to collaborate and distribute progressive concepts. The emergence of "hashtag feminism" has resulted in a radical change in the way femininity is practised and argued for in popular society. Educational women are posing a number of important concerns in view of this drastic change in location for female discussions: Is social platforms beneficial to empowerment and the pursuit of egalitarian goals? This article contends that social network has given feminists a voice to tell their experiences, and has helped in the formation of feminist communities. That's also modern feminism most critical work since it makes us more open to progressive values and concepts, changing our world into one that will embrace and battle for feminism's goals. This paper would look at a number of case reports wherein feminist debates have taken social media by storm. It would assess the effect of social networking as a forum for progressive arguments and the usage of social platforms as a feminism medium in the struggle to accomplish feminism's goals.

A Brief Study on Social Networks and Feminism

This study investigates the connection between feminism with social networking and assesses social media's potential to serve as an important forum for the promotion of modern feminism goals. Feminism's influence declined in the ages until social networking became an important aspect of society and female viewpoints were sceptical that it might be resurrected or popularised again. In current history, though, people have utilised social networks to collaborate and distribute progressive concepts. The emergence of "hashtag feminism" has resulted in a radical change in the way femininity is practised and argued for in popular society. Educational women are posing a number of important concerns in view of this drastic change in location for female discussions: Is social platforms beneficial to empowerment and the pursuit of egalitarian goals? This article contends that social network has given feminists a voice to tell their experiences, and has helped in the formation of feminist communities. That's also modern feminism most critical work since it makes us more open to progressive values and concepts, changing our world into one that will embrace and battle for feminism's goals. This paper would look at a number of case reports wherein feminist debates have taken social media by storm. It would assess the effect of social networking as a forum for progressive arguments and the usage of social platforms as a feminism medium in the struggle to accomplish feminism's goals.

Unequal values: equality and race in state of the union addresses, 1960–2018

AbstractWe analyze the prevalence and framing of references to equality and inequality in presidential state of the union addresses (SOTUs) delivered between 1960 and 2018. Despite rising income inequality and increased attention among political elites to structural inequalities of race and gender in recent years, we find very few direct or indirect references to inequality as a social problem and surprisingly few references even to the ostensibly consensual and primary values of equal opportunity and political equality. References to racial inequality have been few and far between since the height of the civil rights era. By contrast, another primary value in the American political tradition—economic individualism are a major focus in these SOTUs. We trace the scant presence of equality talk in these speeches to the ambiguous scope of egalitarian goals and principles and their close tie-in with race in America. We rely on automated text analysis and systematic hand-coding of these speeches to identify broad thematic emphases as well as on close reading to interpret the patterns that these techniques reveal.

Reducing defensive responding to implicit bias feedback: On the role of perceived moral threat and efficacy to change

The last decade has seen a rush to address the causes and consequences of bias in applied contexts across the world. When and why might these initiatives promote attitudes and behavior that align with egalitarian goals? A common assumption is that increasing awareness of bias can motivate control over prejudiced responding. However, learning that one's actions are biased is threatening, and often motivates a range of self-protective responses to buffer that threat. In the current research, we tested a strategy for reducing such defensive responding and increasing the kind of awareness central to contemporary theories of prejudice regulation and egalitarian behavior. Four experiments (N > 2500) and a mini meta-analysis demonstrate that interventions that (a) decrease perceived moral blameworthiness for having bias and (b) increase the perceived ability to control bias, can reduce defensive responding and increase awareness both in the short-term and approximately 6 months later. Interventions that minimize threat and facilitate efficacy can motivate increased bias awareness and commitment to egalitarian values.

Estimating public space metrics from nineteenth-century urban cartography: Barcelona’s Cerdà Plan of urban expansion

Urban cartography enables us to trace the historical and spatial evolution of human settlements, but it also furnishes us with the opportunity to obtain and analyse urban data from the perspective of the present day. Urban plans drafted for the reform and expansion of a city can provide us with valuable urban information about the planned use of new public space. In Western Europe, the historical cartography of Barcelona (Spain) maps the city’s mid-nineteenth century urban expansion project designed to fulfil egalitarian, social and hygienist goals. Here, using geographic information system tools, we digitize Barcelona’s cartography so as to create an urban dataset based on the city’s urban plans – the Cerdà Plans (1859 and 1863) – and to estimate its public space typology. Social centres, hospitals, green spaces, residential areas and communication infrastructures are identified and metrised, and urban public open spaces are analysed using various urban indicators. The urban data thus obtained represent a notable advance on attempts to quantify Cerdà’s original project. The importance attached to public space (>75%) and to both communication infrastructure and urban public open spaces is indicative of the desire to create a new city and to break with the values of old Barcelona. In short, the data obtained serve to undertake a detailed comparison with the present-day reality of Barcelona.

Differences in Explicit Stereotype Activation among Social Groups Based on the Stereotype Content Model: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence in Chinese Sample.

The stereotype content model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick and Xu, 2002) identifies four basic categories of stereotyped social groups: high warmth-high competence (HW-HC), high warmth-low competence (HW-LC), low warmth-high competence (LW-HC), and low warmth-low competence (LW-LC). However, many of these groups have not been directly examined in stereotype activation research. The purpose of the present research was to extend stereotype activation research to groups that more fully represent those identified under the SCM. Employing explicit sequential priming task, participants responded to prime-target stimulus pairs that were either congruent or incongruent with stereotypes of social groups from all four SCM quadrants in two studies in the current investigation. Study 1 was to determine the behavioral pattern of explicit stereotype activation among four quadrants (the sample included 60 Chinese undergraduate students, 51%—female). Study 2 further employed event-related brain potentials (ERPs) technique to track the time course and electrophysiological underpinnings of explicit stereotype activation (the sample included 22 right-handed Chinese undergraduate students, 76%—female). In Study 1, participants responded more quickly and accurately on stereotype congruent trials than incongruent trials for all social groups except LW-LC groups. This reverse priming effect on LW-LC social groups in RTs was also replicated in Study 2. ERPs findings further showed that incongruent targets elicited larger N400 amplitudes than congruent targets for all four SCM quadrants. Moreover, congruent targets elicited larger P2 than incongruent targets, but only found for the LW-LC social groups. In addition, congruent targets elicited larger amplitudes of late positive component than incongruent targets for the low warmth (LW-LC and LW-HC) groups. Together, these results highlight the unique processing that LW-LC groups receive throughout the cognitive stream, ultimately manifesting in distinctive behavioral responses. Unconscious activation of egalitarian goals, disgust, and distrust accounts are discussed.

Background Characteristics of the Individuals Attaining Higher Education in India: A Sociological Study of Srinagar City

Aim: Higher education has experienced major changes in last few decades in India in terms of its expansion, content and reach. Massification of higher education has increased access to education and people belonging to different social backgrounds are getting enrolled in higher education. A pertinent question that emerges here is: what kind of relationship exists between the background characteristics of people and the levels and types of higher education they attain? This descriptive study provides a comprehensive answer.
 Method: This empirical work is conducted in Srinagar city of India. It covered 704 respondents belonging to 245 households. Survey method was used for collecting primary data and structured interviews were conducted by making use of interview-schedule.
 Results: This study finds that higher education in Srinagar is readily available for many but such availability is embedded within constraints related to gender, age, occupation and education of parents and caste related identities. People coming from different social backgrounds acquire different types and levels of higher education. It creates hierarchy among and within academic courses of higher education and inequalities among the groups.
 Conclusion: Higher education reflects as well as promotes social inequalities in contemporary context and thus the egalitarian goals of higher education are getting compromised. There is need to bring change in the courses and contents of higher education so that it can address to dynamic needs of people coming from different backgrounds. Education needs to become a vehicle for liberation and social transformation and should not remain a mere agency of social reproduction.
 Key words: social background; courses within higher education; higher education in different contexts; gender; caste; parent’s background; descriptive study.

Carbon Markets: Rehabilitationg the Egalitarian Objection

While carbon markets have been increasingly scrutinized for their moral merits, the egalitarian critique of carbon markets has been largely neglected. Many admit that emission-trading schemes (ETSs), in their actual form, reproduce pre-existing inequalities. However, this is often seen as a contingent, easily-fixed problem, as carbon markets can fulfill egalitarian goals as long as the initial allocation of permits is made according to an egalitarian ideal. The goal of this paper is to challenge this idealistic rejection of the egalitarian critique of carbon markets by underlying seven structural features of carbon markets that explain why, in all likelihood, ETSs will always reproduce pre-existing inequalities (without even curbing carbonemissions). First, carbon markets are bound to cover mainly the activities of wealthy and powerful corporations. Second, carbon markets are excessively complex and their operations typically lack transparency. Third, information asymmetries persist between public servants and private firms regarding ETSs. Fourth, target setting is a political, highly partisan process. These four features give private firms the power to manipulate at their advantage the rules of a carbon market. Three other features explain why the motivations of agents under an ETS will most of the time be corrupted: carbon markets trivialize the harm done by carbon emissions; they alter our perception of nature’s value; and they crowd-out our intrinsic motivations. Thus, influential private firms will have the power and willingness to bend carbon markets at their advantage.

What principle of difference for a truly egalitarian social democracy? Rereading Rawls after social democracy\u2019s failures

Social democracy based on welfare and the redistribution of social contributions is failing. The accumulation of wealth and the increase in inequalities are the two faces of Janus that social democracy has not been able to contain over the recent decades. In this context, it matters to discuss John Rawls’s influential difference principle. According to the maximin criterion put forth by Rawls, it does not suffice that no one becomes worse off; those who are worse off must also become better off than they are. Here, we note that the existence and growth of inequality find no opposition in the maximin rule. Despite appearances, strictly speaking it merely introduces a factor of social compensation, a sort of “assistencialism” to the victims of the greatest inequality. Even the most robust formulation of the principle of difference, according to which the greatest advantage to the less advantaged is indispensable, does not per se preclude an aggregate growth of inequalities. It seems clear that it was an egalitarian goal what Rawls had in mind in A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s critical comments on welfare capitalism must indeed not be forgotten—especially in his further explanations about the application of the principles of justice in a property-owning democracy. Here, as in liberal socialism, the dispersion of property, capital and resources prevents economic and political powers from being concentrated into the hands of a minority. However, the egalitarian aim does not strictly follow from the difference principle as stated, whether taken literally as an application of the maximin rule or inferring from its strongest formulation. A reformulation that does justice to the egalitarian aim of the principle of difference is, however, possible: namely, a degrowthist reformulation, truly requiring a degrowth in accumulation and inequalities, making explicit a brake clause that hinders the aggregate growth of inequalities. Such a degrowthist conception of the difference principle may justify some concrete rules that are able to enforce the egalitarian commitments of social democracy.

Competition, contest and the possibility of egalitarian university education

Competition and contest underpin academic life in many ways, not all of them constructive or valuable. In this paper I make a start on the task of distinguishing valuable academic competition from its opposite and suggest reforms of academic institutions that would diminish the prevalence of destructive competition and approach more nearly the egalitarian goal of treating all members of the academic community—especially, but not only, students—as equally valued and equally deserving of respect. To do this, I develop a distinction between two kinds of competition: tender competition and rank competition. I analyse the illusion of meritocracy in terms of them. My principal recommendation for university pedagogical practice is to eliminate grading of student work and replace grading systems with a system of demanding pass/fail assessments.

One More Time: How Do You Get Both Equality and Excellence in Education?

The tension between egalitarian goals and excellence in education comes to the fore when democratic societies attempt to educate their citizens. Rather than resolving the tension in Favor of either side of the polarity, a theory is advanced whereby both equality and excellence may be seen not only as compatible, but as requiring each other. The argument is made that "equal education" achieves real equality only through excellence. At the same time, and particularly in democracies, educational excellence demands equality as its foundation. Finally, the mutually supportive interrelationship between equality and excellence is adumbrated in a framework drawing upon perennial philosophical views of the nature of freedom.

Autonomy, Degrowth and Prefigurative Politics: Voices of Solidarity Economy Activists amid Economic Crisis in Greece

Drawing upon in-depth interviews with key informants of grassroots alternative organisations in anti-austerity Greece, the study sheds light on the structures of meanings of invisible voices, revealing the motives, worldviews and value-systems that lay behind their actions. Using critical discourse analysis, the text offers a thorough understanding of the meaning and experience of building social and economic experiments with transformative potential within the solidarity economy alternative, in the context of the Greek economic crisis. The narratives of solidarity economy informants reveal militant investigations, ro-mantic humanism, egalitarian goals and an ethos of collectivism that call into question the prevalent capi-talist imaginary. Participants employ utopian thinking, imagining a future that departs significantly from what we know. They call on us to re-assess hegemonic values and norms in the light of alternative realities which embody forms of workers' cooperativism, participatory actions and ways of being, which prefigure the future vision of another form of social life.

¿Which Automatic Associations Prevail? Congruency andReverse Priming Effects on Implicit Gender Stereotyping

Objectives
 . This study aimed to test whether gender stereotypes remain automatically activated following cues
 related to gender, despite years of promoting equality, and how it could correspond with explicit measures.
 Method
 . Seventy undergraduates performed a sequential priming task, in which the gender categories were
 presented subliminally. Culturally speci
 fi
 c gender stereotypes were used as targets. In addition, other signi
 fi
 cant
 variables related to gender (self-assignment of stereotypes, identity and ideology) were assessed explicitly.
 Results
 . At
 fi
 rst, the results showed a non-priming effect, indicating no implicit gender stereotyping. However,
 a more detailed observation of the data revealed that participants could be differentiated according to the
 effects that appeared: the congruency and the reverse priming effects.
 Conclusion.
 While gender stereotypes
 were automatically activated in Group 1 (positive socres), implicit stereotype inhibition seemed to take place
 in Group 2 (negative scores). Egalitarian goal activation is assumed to explain the reverse effect. The activation
 of different contents from the same primes emphatically suggests that more effort is needed to develop strong
 egalitarian commitments. Results also support the potential dynamic of gender stereotypes, even at an implicit
 level.

Postponing a General Practitioner Visit: Describing Social Differences in Thirty-One European Countries.

To describe social differences in postponing a general practitioner visit in 31 European countries and to explore whether primary care strength is associated with postponement rates. Between October 2011 and December 2013, the multicountry QUALICOPC study collected data on 61,931 patients and 7,183 general practitioners throughout Europe. Access to primary care was measured by asking the patients whether they postponed a general practitioner visit in the past year. Social differences were described according to patients' self-rated household income, education, ethnicity, and gender. Data were analyzed using multivariable and multilevel binomial logistic regression analyses. According to the variance-decomposition in the multilevel analysis, most of the variance can be explained by patient characteristics. Postponement of general practitioner care is higher for patients with a low self-rated household income, a low education level, and a migration background. In addition, although the point estimates are consistent with a substantial effect, no statistically significant association between primary care strength and postponement in the 31 countries is determined. Despite the universal and egalitarian goals of health care systems, access to general practitioner care in Europe is still determined by patients' socioeconomic status (self-rated household income and education) and migration background.

Four concepts of rules: A theory of rule egalitarianism

This article outlines the foundations of a nomos-observing theory of social justice, termed ‘rule egalitarianism’, that explains how the seemingly contradictory merger of classical liberalism and social justice is conceivable. The first step towards such a theory consists in ensuring that a concern for the rule of law is etched in the very core of our understanding of social justice, in which case some egalitarian rules will be acceptable from a classical liberal viewpoint. The legal framework of capitalism can indeed be designed to reduce inequality in the name of justice inasmuch as any egalitarian goal is specified in terms of institutional rules. More precisely, rules in a liberal polity should be general and abstract, which will lead us to establish a distinction between four concepts of rules, namely between laws, regulations, statutes and decrees. Moreover, against the neoclassical liberal understanding of social justice, rule egalitarianism argues that having general and abstract rules of market capitalism imposes some constraints on any institutional framework so that social justice becomes necessary to correct the errors of imperfect generalisations, leaving some people behind.