Progressive Reform Research Articles

Empire's Embezzlers: Fraud and Scandal in U.S.-Occupied Cuba, 1900–1902

AbstractIn 1900, news of U.S. postal officials committing fraud in Cuba became a scandal that influenced the political, legal, and governmental trajectory of U.S. imperialism. Anti-imperialist Democrats used the frauds to undermine Republican pro-imperialists on the eve of the 1900 election. Prominent Republicans hoped to contain the scandal through swift punishment, but when the accused refused extradition, the resulting Supreme Court case, though rarely discussed, became the first of the Insular Cases. In 1900, it was not yet clear whether the U.S. empire would be run by self-interested actors or self-proclaimed progressive reformers. The commitment to progressive imperialism observed later in other colonies was, at least in part, worked out in this postal frauds case, as individuals chose how to respond to the scandal. Their actions were guided as much by scandal and the pursuit of self-interest as they were by lofty ideals about good government.

3.M. Round table: Health System Strengthening in the European Union: infrastructure, digitization, health workforce

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has been a severe external shock for health systems across Europe. While immediate responses included building surge capacity and rolling out mass vaccination programmes, the pandemic has highlighted longstanding problems in all health systems. Consequently, policy responses are now focussed on health system strengthening to protect health systems and health workers during future health shocks. For European Union member states, building resilience into health systems has been supported by funding for National Recovery and Resilience Plans that have focussed on investing in infrastructure and digital architecture to future-proof health systems. However, there is also an urgent need to support the health workforce and addressing shortages of health workers will require long-term solutions. This workshop will provide a platform for sharing knowledge on health system strengthening in EU countries. The objectives of the roundtable are to i) identify cross-cutting themes and approaches to health system strengthening in the EU, and ii) establish opportunities for cross-border research and learning. In the workshop we will describe the recent developments in Czechia, Denmark, France and Italy from a comparative perspective. The workshop will consist of a roundtable with four speakers, followed by a broad discussion with audience interventions to bring in the experience of other Member States. The moderated discussion will emphasise learning from other countries in the European Union and the potential for cross-border solutions. Each panel member will make a short presentation on the latest developments in Czechia, Denmark, France, and Italy, drawing on their work writing the latest Health Systems Reviews - highlighting common themes and the role of EU Recovery Funds. Health System Reviews underpin the Health Systems in Transition (HiT) series, a core part of country monitoring undertaken by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. These Reviews are routinely updated and provide a systematic description of the functioning of health systems in countries as well as reform and policy initiatives in progress or under development. As these are in-depth descriptions which detail the intricacies of health systems and an assessment of their performance, they provide the ideal basis for understanding the true complexity of acute system-wide challenges countries are currently facing. Key messages • Even health systems in high-income countries need strengthening to better cope with future external shocks and building sufficient health workforce capacity is a long-term policy goal. • Drawing on evidence, the workshop will help to identify trends in how health systems are adapting and building resilience in the face of acute system-wide challenges. Speakers/Panelists Karsten Vrangbaek University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Zeynep Or IRDES, Paris, France Antonio Giulio de Belvis Fondazione Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli-IRCCS, Rome, Italy Nathan Shuftan Berlin University of Technology, Berlin, Germany

Reflecting on the boundaries of the demos: A virtual deliberative experiment with German citizens

AbstractThis article combines the fields of deliberative theory and citizenship studies. Drawing from a deliberative experiment on foreigner political rights with almost 300 German citizens, we find that a short virtual deliberative treatment produced a clarification effect, whereby especially those with already negative views increased their scepticism. Participants in our deliberative treatment displayed higher levels of argument repertoire and integrative complexity, underlining that the treatment led to well‐considered opinions. A qualitative analysis of participants’ substantive rationales unravels traces of what De Schutter and Ypi dub ‘mandatory citizenship’, implying that political rights must be attached to obligations. These results have wide ranging implications: They indicate that the practice of deliberation is not quasi‐automatically programmed to progressive outcomes (as some have argued) but can have a communitarian dimension (where preferences are determined on the basis of existing communal values and self‐understandings); this suggests that participatory practices may not always advance progressive reforms.

Intellectual property system and urban green innovation: Evidence from China

AbstractGreen innovation (GI) can enable win‒win style economic and ecological benefits. Using China's pilot scheme for the construction of the intellectual property protection (IPP) system as an example, this paper empirically tests the impact of IPP system reform on the GI level and its spatial spillover effect. The results show that IPP system reform has significantly promoted urban GI, indicating that a progressive reform model characterized by experimentalist governance is applicable to innovation policy practices in developing countries. The dynamic effect analysis shows that IPP system reform can be applied to continuously promote urban GI. The mechanism analysis shows that such use of IPP system reform can improve the level of urban GI by promoting investment and talent agglomeration, confirming the viewpoint of the institutionalist school. The heterogeneity analysis shows that IPP system reform plays a stronger role in promoting GI in peripheral cities than in central cities, in cities with lower rather than higher scientific and educational levels and in cities with weaker rather than stronger GI capacity. Consistent with the theory of institutional diffusion, IPP system reform has a significant spatial spillover effect, promoting GI activities in surrounding cities while working to improve the local GI level. This paper affirms the effectiveness of the pilot regional innovation policy with Chinese characteristics, with important theoretical significance.

Youth Justice at a Crossroads: Twenty-First Century Progressive Reforms and Lessons to Inform the Path Forward

Youth Justice at a Crossroads: Twenty-First Century Progressive Reforms and Lessons to Inform the Path Forward

Instruments of Power. The affective power of sound design in American music education

Music education in the United States has increasingly focused upon student creativity and practices such as improvisation. While such practices and changes are often conceptualized as flexible, inclusive reforms about making kinds of children, historically the curriculum has little to do with music and is instead concerned with taming uncertainty in the governing of child. We examine the Orff-Schulwerk pedagogy in the teaching of music, thought of as a progressive reform which emphasized improvisation and creativity. Exploring briefly Orff-Schulwerk’s production in the Weimar Republic as it travels and translated into the post-war United States, we consider the curriculum as formed through psychological research about rationality, choice, and creativity. The focus is on the system of reasoning embodied in the curriculum as generating principles about desired kind of persons in a stable, secure future related to salvation narratives- principles different in the Weimar Republic and US. The shifting design of people in Orff-Schulwerk curriculum and classroom instruments for learning of sound are, we argue, practices in governing of the body and soul. The fabricating and mapping in the music curriculum is about kinds of populations required as evidence of the progressive desires that simultaneously distributes differences.

The consumer welfare standard and avoiding the dangers of polarized debate in the USA

The Biden Administration is seeking to redefine US antitrust policy that it views as largely responsible for historical underenforcement of antitrust laws in the USA.1 To achieve this, President Biden appointed progressive reformers to leadership positions2 and lawmakers are proposing amendments to the antitrust laws.3 These reforms could be described as a battle for the very soul of antitrust though such policy shifts in antitrust enforcement are not unprecedented.4 Arguably a victor of a previous antitrust policy battle was the Chicago School with its core underlying assumption that markets self-correct.5 Allied to that view was its emphasis on economic theory and analytical methods that rely heavily on economic analysis, especially the consumer welfare standard (CWS). A complete overhaul of US antitrust enforcement policy has yet to take place, but the current leadership of the US antitrust agencies have not held back in their criticism of the Chicago School with what they describe as its ‘focus on “consumer welfare”’ that is ‘warping America’s antimonopoly regime’ and ‘largely blinded enforcers to many of the harms caused by undue market power, including on workers, suppliers, innovators and independent entrepreneurs’.6 While the Chicago School’s influence was profound, focusing solely on the Chicago School does ignore the influence of other scholarship, including the modern Harvard School, and other influential scholars.7 This current ‘obsession’ with the Chicago School without a broader discussion of the nuanced views of many other scholars is polarizing the debate, including over the use of the CWS.8

The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell

Reviewed by: The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell Peter J. Kastor The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920. By Ballard C. Campbell. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. x, 365. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-3256-5; cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-0-7006-3225-8.) In The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920, Ballard C. Campbell attempts nothing less than a grand narrative of how Americans governed themselves in the era before 1920. That is no simple feat. Add to this the fact that he discusses not only the federal government but also state governments, all the while navigating tumultuous changes in governance and politics, and the degree of difficulty (to borrow that familiar phrase from Olympic scoring) increases considerably. Campbell accomplishes his goals with clarity, elegance, and authority. Where this book struggles is equally informative, revealing some of the fundamental challenges in telling the story of statebuilding. Two particular concerns (or two paradoxes, as the title suggests) animate this story. The first is a governmental structure that must wield power in order to achieve its goals despite a political culture with deep anxieties about centralized power. The second is federalism itself, a system created by the Constitution that afforded new powers to the national government while nonetheless preserving important policy-making roles to the states. Tracing the long arc of this narrative of two paradoxes, Campbell has constructed a book divided into two parts, but he really describes three eras of statebuilding. Part 1 discusses the British colonial roots of governance, the crucible of the American Revolution, and the struggle to build effective governance structures under the Constitution. Part 2 shows how that system was transformed by the Civil War, a conflict that refashioned the relationship [End Page 338] between state and federal powers while also granting the federal government new and expansive capacities. This section concludes with a description of the birth of the “modern” state as Progressive reform, bureaucratic theory, and the demands of modernization extended what the Civil War had begun. “Modern” belongs in quotations here because the term is indicative of the difficulties facing Campbell. He is quick to push back against scholars of the twentieth century who have claimed that there was no true “state” in the United States until the emergence of bureaucratic management and social welfare systems. In doing so, he makes a powerful case for seeing early statebuilding on its own terms. If Campbell resists the impulse to normalize the state, he does normalize its locations and its purposes. Most of his examples of the organization and services of states and localities come from the cities and states of the Northeast. Not surprisingly, New York and Boston loom large. In the end, this book generally treats the state as an engine of progress. Enslavement appears most significantly in the context of the federal government’s effort to end the institution during the Civil War, and its struggle with the authority of states during Reconstruction. And yet states and the federal government had a much longer tradition of working together to secure racial supremacy. Campbell acknowledges this history in passing references to Native Americans, but he does not explore the ways that state capacity (whether the invention of uniformed police forces in southern cities, the elaborate civil-military administration of federal territories, or the complex state-level requirements of Jim Crow) expanded to pursue specific racial objectives. Writing in prose that is sophisticated but remains accessible, Campbell eschews the risk of deploying either the jargon or the narrow debates that too often encumber the discussion of statebuilding. The result is a book that situates statebuilding front and center in the American experience, with a clarity of argument that is both thought-provoking and compelling. Peter J. Kastor Washington University in St. Louis Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Moved by Another Life: Altered Sentience and Historical Poiesis in the Peyote Craze

Abstract This article follows the transsensory pathways opened by peyote, a mood-altering entheogen, as it diffused among Native peoples living under and along the edges of colonial occupation around the turn of the twentieth century. It traces that movement through the pulsions of temporal and sensorial animacy created in the episodic narration of The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), the life story of a Ho-Chunk man named Sam Blowsnake. Apprehended by settler governance as a “craze,” anti-assimilationist currents of the Peyote movement met with intensifying attempts to constrain the biochemical flux of “intoxication” through Native bodies. Modern campaigns against “peyote worship” mounted by government agents, progressive reformers, and sensationalist press in the early twentieth century exploited scripts of revulsion and prurient fascination to target the border-crossing “mind poison” for prohibition. Just beneath the scenes of psychotoxicity and sexual disorder projected by the antinarcotic imaginary of the craze, this article posits, there ran an ongoing struggle over the restrictive capacitation of property and personhood within the settler-capitalist regime of allotment. Against the norms enforced by that policy, in peyote meetings the alteration of sentience could unbind the day-to-day reproduction of property-bearing personhood. Lines of collective transport opening from the passage of ecstasy thus composed a historical moment in refusal of allotment drives for schizochronic individuation.

“The Hidden Life”: Ellen Gates Starr, Vida Dutton Scudder, and Catholic Socialist Progressivism

Ellen Gates Starr and Vida Dutton Scudder are not the best-known names of the Progressive Era. Yet they were at the forefront of progressive reform in the 1880s through the 1910s, and they helped to create the ideas and institutions that defined the settlement house movement. Their prominent historical role demands that we pay serious attention to their alternative visions of progressivism. Starr and Scudder were more politically radical, and more religiously traditional, than many of their peers. Each woman integrated a radical embrace of social transformation with High Church Christian cosmology, creating a Catholic socialist progressivism that contrasts to both other settlement workers and the male leaders of Christian socialism. This article explicates Starr's and Scudder's belief systems and argues for their importance to the history of progressive reform and to the intellectual history of American social change. Although each thinker had her own emphasis—Starr foregrounded art, while Scudder focused on uniting Marxism with Catholicism—Starr, Scudder, and their friendship represent a lost destiny of the progressive movement: a worker-led movement grounded in religious faith.

Reimagining Democracy: The Socialist Origins of the Initiative and Referendum in the United States

AbstractThe initiative and referendum are commonly characterized as quintessentially Populist or Progressive reforms, but transatlantic socialism deserves pride of place in the intellectual history of direct legislation in the United States. A decade and a half before the People’s Party famously commended the idea of direct legislation at its 1892 nominating convention in Omaha, Nebraska, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) made the demand for direct legislation a plank in its first party platform. That demand was shaped by the 1875 Gotha Program formulated by the Socialist Workers Party of Germany and informed by socialist debates during the First International and the pioneering work of Moritz Rittinghausen. The diffusion of these ideas among Gilded Age labor radicals is a crucial and underappreciated part of the story of the origins of the initiative and referendum in the United States. That socialists’ pioneering role in the origins of the initiative and referendum in the United States has largely been slighted is particularly ironic since the individual arguably most responsible for securing the direct legislation resolution at Omaha was among the nation’s most successful radical labor organizers and a committed socialist, Joseph R. Buchanan.

The Golden Age of Pragmatic Socialism: Wisconsin Socialists at the State Level, 1919–37

AbstractThroughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Socialists in Wisconsin experienced a “golden age” of political successes in the state legislature. Whereas the 1920s are commonly seen as a period of socialist decline, Wisconsin Socialists entered the decade with a renewed sense of optimism. Following World War I, the Wisconsin Democratic Party collapsed as a viable political option and the Wisconsin Socialist Party found itself the second most powerful party behind the Republican Party. Wisconsin Socialists took a pragmatic approach to legislative debates and allied with progressive Republicans to defeat conservative opposition. Socialists were vital to progressive reform prior to World War I; however, the Socialist-Progressive alliance reached its full potential in the 1920s. From 1919–31, the Wisconsin legislature passed 295 Socialist-authored pieces of legislation ranging from labor demands, public utilities, and criminal justice reform. Many of the proposals resulted from negotiations between the Socialist and Progressive caucuses. The success of the Wisconsin Socialists—and their alliance with progressive Republicans—suggests that at least in some places the Progressive Era extended into the 1920s.

Colonial internationalism and the governmentality of empire, 1893–1982

Florian Wagner's new book, Colonial internationalism and the governmentality of empire, 1893–1982, is a valuable contribution to imperial and colonial historiography. It traces the rise and lasting influence of the International Colonial Institute (ICI), which was founded in Brussels in 1893 and remained active until 1982. As Wagner convincingly argues, the ICI became the most influential colonial think tank of the twentieth century. According to the author, this influence was derived from ICI's transfer of knowledge and practices across European empires and in different colonial localities in Africa and Asia (other imperial regions, such as the Pacific and the Caribbean, are omitted from the research). Such knowledge-sharing was often dressed up with diplomatic language, progressive reformism or scientific pretexts, but in practice it entrenched, legitimized and prevented the reform of colonialism, undermining radical claims for independence. This was often done under the cover of ‘indigenous’ laws, knowledge or institutions and in ways that diminished the influence of nation-states. Thus, the ICI helped to embed the racist subjugation and impoverishment of the global South, for the economic and political betterment of the (mostly white) ICI members.

The Demise of the AMA's Mission to Improve Public Health.

Much has been written about the deplorable state of American health care, but rarely with the wealth of historical and political information packed into Peter Swenson's Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine (2021). In this meticulously researched and comprehensive study of the role of organized medicine, particularly the American Medical Association (AMA) and affiliated state and county medical societies, Swenson provides detailed insight into the AMA's political evolution from a force advocating progressive reforms to a protective guild backed by powerful economic and ideological interests. Swenson addresses the conflicts leading to and arising from these movements, always with an eye on the profession's failure over the last century to fulfill its implicit social contract. Swenson describes the American medical disorder without fear or favor, including a public health system in disarray, defective government regulation of drugs, unchecked and concealed commercial influence on medical research, publications, and clinical guidelines. Swenson's hope is clear: that a progressively reformed AMA-combined with a broad coalition of concerned citizens and legislators-will lead the medical profession back to its rightful mission.

Abortion Reform in Colombia: From Total Prohibition to Decriminalization up to Week Twenty-Four

On February 21, 2022, the Colombian Constitutional Court decriminalized abortion up to the twenty-fourth week of gestation and clarified that the grounds under which abortion had been allowed since 2006 should continue to apply in the remaining weeks of pregnancy. This decision, more than any other, is the material manifestation of the strategic efforts of a broad sector of Colombian feminism grouped under the slogan Causa Justa (Just Cause). This article briefly presents the history of feminist mobilization around abortion in Colombia, emphasizing its contributions for thinking about progressive reform in highly conservative environments: the importance of taking advantage of political opportunities, the appropriation of legal reform, and incremental change. Three different moments are discussed: political mobilization and the construction of meaning (1979–2004), progressive legal mobilization and appropriation of incremental reform (2004–2018), and feminist legal mobilization (2018–present).

David Herzberg. White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America.

David Herzberg’s White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America is an important book for casting a well-studied slice of history in a new light. The 1914 Harrison Act and the establishment of the narcotics enforcement regime it spawned have generated a large and impressive historiography. Thanks to scholars such as David Musto, David Courtwright, Caroline Acker, and Rufus King, we know how a confluence of racist xenophobia, progressive reformism, and moralism led to the criminalization of “narcotic” drugs like opium, morphine, and heroin, and how the Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ Harry Anslinger harnessed these forces to make himself drug czar of the United States for the middle third of the twentieth century. This classic era of narcotic control from the 1920s to the 1960s created a criminalized, racialized black market in dangerous drugs responsible for great social and health harm to African Americans and other disadvantaged groups, and after a brief hiatus in the 1970s these harms have been redoubled. There is also a strong and growing literature on the pharmaceutical industry as a player in American social history, particularly in its role in shaping perceptions of health, disease, and proper medical care. Herzberg introduces the concept of a “white market” in drugs—the flip side of the black market cocreated by the narcotics control regime—to bridge this divide and draw the two literatures together into a unified and coherent view of US drug politics over the past century.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Linda Mahood Welcome to the first issue of the sixteenth volume of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Please allow me to thank book review editors Adriana Benzaquen and Hugh Morrison for the additional work they have done to keep the books moving during the restrictions of the pandemic. Reviewing new research on the changing conceptions of children over place and time is important work for the JHCY. In this issue, in very different ways, the articles examine expert intervention in childhood and family life through various techniques of power, institutional intervention, health and welfare policy, and how children experience the processes that govern their lives. In "Caring for Children with Infectious Diseases: Children's Experiences of Fever Hospitals and Sanatoria in Scotland," Andrew Kendrick recalls that diseases were a significant cause of death in infants and children until the early decades of the twentieth century. Smallpox, tuberculosis, typhus, whooping cough, cholera, and measles were rife and epidemics continued to be a regular occurrence. Without effective treatments, infant and child mortality rates were high. According to Kendrick, despite attention to the medical care of children, there was limited concern for their wider social, emotional, and educational needs in Scottish specialty hospitals, sanatoria, convalescent homes for children with disabilities, and lock hospitals for girls with syphilis. Some young patients had very happy memories of their time in hospital, while others had difficult and tragic memories, and still others were lonely for their parents and siblings and found the regimes of hospitals harsh and rigid. Historians of carceral institutions for children note the link between physical and moral contagions. In "Survived and Punished: Incest Victims' Treatment in Progressive-Era Chicago," Grace Argo argues that progressive reformers' treatment of incest victims shows how the child protection systems removed incest survivors from abusive homes and classified them as "sex delinquent" or "feebleminded." Argo argues that incest survivors were victimized twice—first by the crime and second by institutionalization in a girl's reformatory. Viewing [End Page 1] incest survivors as morally and mentally deficient enabled caseworkers to differentiate "redeemable" incest victims from "irredeemable" ones. Argo uses Nirmala Erevelles's theory of the co-construction of deviance and disability to argue that girls were pathologized by the school's doctors, psychologists, administrators, and staff. This framework helps us understand how incest victims came to be understood as both mentally and morally defective by the adults responsible for their protection, as well as to appreciate the impact this pathologizing had on abused girls' lives. The regulation of children's bodies has long been a feature of the history of childhood. In "Athlete and Auxologist: James Tanner's Interest in Physique and his Role in Establishing the Short Stature of Children as a Medical Classification," Aishwarya Ramachandran and Patricia Vertinsky look at the work of James Tanner, who was a central figure in the twentieth century in measuring and treating children considered shorter than optimal for a satisfactory life. The attitudes of medical professionals affirmed and promoted conceptions of "normal" and "abnormal" childhood development. The authors contend that Tanner's studies and charts of children's growth and the quest for the perfect physique was behind his early involvement in promoting human growth hormone for small, non-athletic children. The socialization of children and youth to be bearers of community values has preoccupied of adults in positions of authority. In "Empire, Colonialism, and Place-Attachment in Young Minds: Quebec Students' Imaginative Travels in the Age of the New Imperialism," Catherine Larochelle argues that pre-World War I students in Quebec schools were provided with the geographic knowledge and emotional place-attachment necessary to promote and consolidate settler-colonialism. Larochelle shows how geography lessons imparted imperial, missionary, and literary knowledge to young people, who integrated and appropriated this geographical imagination. Through the voices of Quebec students, Larochelle shows how an attachment to the territory legitimized settler colonialism and imaginary voyages that (re)produced empire and its hierarchies. In "Teenagers in Development: The Economic and Cultural Power of Brazilian Youth in the 1950s and '60s," Anne M. Daniels argues that Brazil experienced rapid economic growth and modernization under a policy of "developmentalism" that...

Using the Bioethical Principles of Solidarity and Subsidiarity to Advance Intersectional Feminism and Disability Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa

Gender is a social-cultural characteristic that links roles, identities and opportunities to the aspect of being male or female, while gender equity refers to the process of being fair to men and women in the treatment and access to opportunities. In sub-Saharan Africa, gender inequity among women persists and is worse for women with disabilities as they face additional barriers to accessing basic services such as education, housing, healthcare, mobility, employment and empowerment opportunities. Despite progressive reforms that mandate the participation of women, particularly women with disabilities at international and country levels, this group of women continue to face barriers to basic rights and participation. This opinion piece discusses the bioethical principles of solidarity and subsidiarity in advancing intersectional feminism and disability rights in sub-Saharan Africa. By definition, solidarity is the global coordination of a cause to protect human dignity based on the reality of our interconnectedness and quest for mutual flourishing. On the other hand, subsidiarity is the decentralization of decision-making processes among multiple stakeholders to empower populations with the greatest need. Hence, the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity are progressive rights-based approaches that may be used to tackle structural inequalities and promote social protection systems for gender and disability. As such, sub-Saharan Africa stands to benefit from such frameworks to address forms of systemic oppression and facilitate respect for the rights and dignity of vulnerable populations such as women with disabilities. The rights of women with disabilities cannot be achieved in isolation as they are linked to other ethical principles of respect for difference, accessibility, and equality of opportunity. Therefore, if well implemented, acts of solidarity and subsidiarity transcend individual goals to advance collective action for intersectional and inclusive frameworks that meet the needs of women with disabilities in their complexities and diversity.

Right to Information Vis A Vis National Security

RTI Act 2005 is the welfare legislation and one of the most progressive reforms in recent years, which enhance the ambit of Fundamental Rights available to citizens under Part III of the Indian Constitution. RTI Act is considered an advancement of the Right to freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a). Various judicial pronouncements held that Right under Article 19(1)(a) includes the Right to know where citizens can acquire information from public authorities. Democracy and RTI are interrelated, ensuring good governance, transparency, and government accountability towards its citizens. Previously Government was immune from answering its action. People electing democratic Government had no idea about policy matters, their progress, and implementation. That led to various instances of corruption, nepotism, and favouritism. Thus, the Right to know through RTI Act, 2005 is a tool in the hands of the citizens, which ensures “participatory democracy” and reasoned exercise of the Right to vote during elections. However, RTI Act is not absolute, and there are certain exceptions where the public cannot obtain information. A few instances are Sec 8 information disclosure, which relates to India’s sovereignty and integrity, etc. Sec 9, where information pertains to infringement of copyright subsisting in a person other than State, and Sec 24, which says the provisions of RTI Act will not apply to the intelligence and the security organizations. Nevertheless, RTI has played a vital role in empowering citizens and increasing their active role in meaningful democracy.

American Progressivism and the U.S. Supreme Court Jurisprudence: Chinese Exclusion Cases – the Origins of the Doctrine of Consular Non-Reviewability

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the American reform movements tried to match American ideals with the challenges of the times. Progressive attitudes highlighted the necessity of reforms. The Chinese issue, often risen in the public dialogue, was the subject of deliberation of the Supreme Court, the Congress, and the federal executive branch of government. Chae Chan Ping v. United States and subsequent cases established the doctrine of consular noneviewability referring to immigration law and delineating the scope of judicial review for decisions concerning the admission of immigrants to the United States. They also strengthened the plenary power doctrine. We may ask if the Supreme Court judgments were in conformity with the ideas of American Progressivism. Unfortunately, the Chinese Exclusion Cases were not compatible with the visions of progressive reformers and reflected anti-Chinese sentiment rather than an aspiration for reforms.