State Reform Research Articles

Paradoxes of democratization: social-liberal reformism, education and citizenship in West Germany after 1968

ABSTRACT Historians largely agree that the social-liberal reforms in the Federal Republic of Germany constituted a major contribution to transforming the country into a more participatory democracy around 1970. Responding to the demands of protesting youth, so this narrative goes, the coalition between the Social Democratic Party and the Free Democratic Party engaged in a flurry of reforms all aimed at equalizing access to an active and engaged democratic citizenship. By taking a closer look at how these social-liberal reformers addressed young people through school reforms, this article instead emphasizes the paradoxical legacy of these reforms, which has thus far been neglected in the historiography. This article thus probes the connection among the federal, regional and local initiatives to use schools to engage young people in the democratic process, with a particular focus on the markedly different reforms in the West German state of North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) and in West Berlin. Through these reforms, policymakers and experts not only attempted to offer youth more opportunities for active participation, but also to control carefully how they made use of their citizenship. Moreover, these educational reforms exposed the fissures inherent in a class-based and multi-ethnic West German democracy. Although social-liberal reformers intended to equalize access to democratic citizenship, they nonetheless also reified cultural and political hierarchies between the middle and lower classes, as well as between ethnic Germans and immigrant children. Ultimately, these endeavours shaped West German democracy largely through their unintended consequences. While in NRW, these reforms contributed to the rise of a liberal-conservative opposition, in West Berlin, these policies gave rise to a Left-alternative movement that each defined democratic citizenship in their own ways.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church in the Context of State Reformation

Abstract There was a historical and political intimacy between the Ethiopian Tewahido Orthodox Church (EOTC) and the Ethiopian state until their relationship was profoundly modified after the 1974 Revolution and the secular rupture connected to that. This was followed by political reforms by successive governments, which have had a leveling effect on the religious field. The country's religious minorities—Muslims and Protestants—have been engaged in recognition politics progressively attaining rights on par with the EOTC. This rebalancing is perceived to have come at the expense of the EOTC—from the decoupling of the Ethiopian nation from Orthodoxy, a continuous decline in the number of members of the Church, to a feeling of being persecuted and the siege mentality connected to that. While responding to these external challenges, the EOTC has also experienced internal rifts that pose existential threats not only to maintain its historically constituted hegemony but also continue to exist as a united church. This contribution critically appraises the political journey of the EOTC in the long longue durée and with a relational lens, i.e., from its trajectory from being at the center of the Ethiopian state and an established religion, to the various external and internal challenges the Church has faced in the context of the process of state reformation and how it has sought to regain and maintain its hegemony, or at least negotiate its decline through the deployment of various strategies.

Saving the Black Child: Dozier School for Boys and the Racialization of Juvenile Justice

Collective memories are often contested, negotiated, revised, created, and recreated, due to being the products of multiple groups with competing and conflicting interests. This study examines the public memorialization of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a state reform school in Marianna, Florida, and the silencing of the Black youth as multiple groups, specifically the White House Boys, seek to be the central voice of the school's past. Black youth inmates were vulnerable to the racial inequities of the juvenile justice system, particularly in the early years of the institution. This study argues that their inferior position during their time at Dozier and the racial sentiment that persists resulted in their invisibility in the current public memory-making process. This study further explores the counter-memory practices of former Black inmates of Dozier as they created new platforms for their racialized experiences.

Adaptive practices of healthcare workers under the reforms

The theory of high modernism and the concept ‘metis’ by J. Scott identify one of the reasons for unsuccessful state reform in various areas: when preparing changes, local practical experience is often neglected, but the success of the reform as a whole may depend exactly on such knowledge. The system ignores the possible strategies of workers’ resistance to the coming changes, many of which are unconscious. The reforms in the field of healthcare, including in Russia, have shown that doctors remain the most vulnerable group affected by changes. A side effect of the ongoing reforms is the development by the professional community of doctors of certain adaptive practices aimed at adaptation to changes with the least losses for the individual and professional activity. To identify the adaptive practices of medical workers in response to the reforms and their consequences, the authors examined the available data and conducted interviews with doctors of various specialties. As a result, adaptive practices of doctors in their professional activities were systematized, and their classification was proposed: deviant/non-deviant and active/passive. Active adaptive practices prevail and are implemented in three subsystems: doctor-administration, doctor-doctor and doctor-patient. Most doctors tend to accept changes that involve adding new practices rather than changes removing traditional practices. All respondents positively assessed new technologies, but negatively assessed rigid standards that limit their professional freedom. The development of adaptive practices depends on various factors - gender, age, length of service, specialization, position. Such practices help doctors to keep the habitual way of professional life and to adapt to new working conditions.

Правый режим в Гондурасе: от стабилизации к краху (2017-2021)

The author of the article examines the evolution of political confrontation in Honduras during the second presidential mandate of Juan Orlando Hernandez. He analyzes the causes and process of the growth of protest moods in society. He proves that Honduras experienced several protest waves, which eventually led to the erosion of the electoral base of the right-wing regime. The author also focuses on such a destabilizing factor as the problem of corruption, which traditionally plays a significant role in the internal political life of Honduras. He examines the main state reforms implemented by the government, in particular, the reform of electoral legislation, and touches upon aspects related to the functioning of the armed forces and their socio-political activity. In particular, he shows the role of the Honduran military in the force scenarios for the prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a significant increase in dissatisfaction with the policy of the authorities. The author proves that the actions of the authorities led to a rise in public sentiment in support of alternative political forces, which eventually came to power following the 2021 elections.

Reformulación de la reforma estatal para garantizar la resiliencia en un mundo impredecible

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the common belief that government institutions are incapable of adaptating. But it also reveals that, despite substantial gains in poverty reduction since the 1990s and countless versions of “state reform”, the Latin America and Caribbean region remains in crisis. This presentation will address the need to “recast” state reform to build resilient communities. It focuses on the need to rethink the effort to implement the 2030 Agenda, as well as the contributions of evidence-based decision-making systems. Given the desire for citizens to play an influential role in governance and state reform, three conditions are discussed that would make citizen participation and engagement prevalent. Finally, it argues for engaging universities as engines of growth and development in support of effective institutions and sustainable communities.

Social Injustice

Social Injustice

Social investment as a conceptual framework for analysing well-being returns and reforms in 21st century welfare states

AbstractWelfare provision is often conceived through the lens of decommodification and analysed in (re)distributive terms. This article argues that a distributive approach does not sufficiently capture the complexity of 21st century welfare state dynamics. It proposes re-conceptualizing provision as a mix of three policy functions: raising and maintaining human capital stock; easing the flow of gendered life-course and labour-market transitions; guaranteeing social safety-net buffers. This analytical perspective allows theorizing life-course multiplier effects and policy (non-)complementarities, both at the level of individual objective and subjective well-being and in terms of aggregate employment, poverty and fiscal sustainability. This perspective also enables us to extend the temporal horizon of welfare politics beyond short-term electoral logics for explaining welfare reform. The article underscores how methodological pluralism remains key for understanding contemporary welfare states, and for grasping welfare outcomes and institutional change in a research endeavour that involves both generalization and contextualization.

The new public management and implications on teaching work in the public sector

The objective of this text is to analyze the State Reform and the implementation of the New Public Management (NPM) and its implications in the field of education, especially in the teaching work in the public sector. The restructuring of education from the 1990s onwards, in the context of the NPM, imposes on teaching work principles and values arising from the productive society of capital, with determinations from the private sector. The text stems from extensive research carried out at the Stricto Sensu Postgraduate level. Data were collected in a municipality in the state of Mato Grosso, in the municipal and state network.

The German Trade Shock and the Rise of the Neo-Welfare State in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

We study the international origins of the neo-welfare state in Britain during the era of globalization before World War I. We introduce a new mechanism linking trade to the expansion of the state. In addition to increasing assessments of the volatility of employment in a market economy, trade shocks changed beliefs about the deservingness of the poor. Employing a shift-share measure of local exposure to German imports, we show that rising imports caused worse labor market outcomes from 1880 to 1910. Import competition led to a decrease in support for the Conservative Party in national elections after 1900, when the Liberal Party supported welfare state reforms. We further show that rising imports increased the use in local newspapers of scientific terms like “unemployment” relative to pejorative terms like “vagrancy” to describe the poor. Political responses to globalization helped shape voter support for the modern British welfare state at its inception.

The Political Work of “Culture” in Struggles to Reform the Mexican State

This article addresses the question of how state officials promote reform and generate buy-in absent sanctioning power. We examine how, in such cases, reformers deploy culture as a “category of practice” to articulate political projects, direct resources and energies, and make certain reform efforts possible. Drawing on participant observation and 120 in-depth interviews, we examine culture-talk and culture-work within efforts aimed at implementing monitoring and evaluation policies in Mexico. We find culture-talk helps reformers account for failure and set their reform efforts apart from competing proposals, while culture-work seduces cooperation and ensures reformers access to different parts of the state. We argue that when mobilized against the challenges reformers face, culture narratives and practices have important political effects, contributing to the legitimation, expanding jurisdiction, and organizational survival of reform niches in Mexico. Our argument illuminates the cultural dimensions of political reform and the performative power of state reform actors.

Promoting Techno-Scientific Biomedical Communication in Russia: Pro-government Non-profit Organizations

The rapidly expanding e-health market tends to reinvent the roles of science, entrepreneurship, and state. However, the results of such reinvention remain unclear. This study investigates the decade-long history (2011–2021) of the promotion of techno-scientific biomedical communication by pro-government non-profit organizations in Russia. In 2021, the World Bank pointed out that digital technologies have played a critical role in the pandemic in Russia and Russia's economic recovery is gathering pace. Thus, Russia tends to correspond to many other emerging health markets. We compare texts from non-profit organizations' websites and Facebook accounts with official state actions and the national mass media health agenda. The instruments that were used for text mining were topic modeling with latent Dirichlet allocation and an algorithm for keyphrase relationship visualization. The results revealed that promotion started no later than 2011 as a general private initiative in health. Throughout the state reforms and geopolitical crisis of 2014, in 2017–2019 digitalization was finally chosen as a model for the healthcare system. Simultaneously, the idea of digital reform for the health system was disseminated by the mass media. The pandemic drew attention to this communication, but it did not create significant change. Pro-government non-profit organizations continue to promote new directions for biomedical communication in Russia.

Social policy responses and social development during and after the unequal pandemic

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has had daunting economic and social impacts on many aspects of human life, but these impacts have been unequally distributed, with the brunt of health and labour market risks falling on socio-economically disadvantaged individuals and families. We argue that the welfare state could help mitigate such social risks and facilitate social solidarity. Moreover, NGOs (and social groups) play a prominent and supplemental role in developing welfare states in the face of the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic potentially raises an opportunity to rethink the current structures of the capitalist economy and the welfare state, and result in more ambitious reforms in East and Southeast Asian welfare states.

Application of the experience of the public administration reform of the Central European states for the decentralization process development in Ukraine

Application of the experience of the public administration reform of the Central European states for the decentralization process development in Ukraine

Визуальная репрезентация морской тематики в художественной культуре России ХVIII–XIX вв.

Тhe meaning of visual representation includes perception of information through the visual image. This form of information delivery to the general public was known in pagan cultures and asserted itself in Christianity. Since the late 20th century the concept of visualization united in itself not only religious and artistic images, but also the vision of mass culture. The performed research places emphasis on the establishment and the development of visual representation in Russia’s art culture of the ХVIII-XIX centuries. During the reign of Peter the Great, in a succession of state reforms and due to the influence of samples of European art, a transformation of national art culture occured. In this context, maritime art is viewed as one of the visual representation forms. The seascape, as a separate genre of painting, originates in the Dutch landscape. The first marinas were brought by Peter the 1st to decorate palaces and country residences. The victory in the Battle of Chesme (1770) and the joining of Crimea to the Russian Empire prompted Catherine the 2nd to invite J. P. Hackert to perpetuate the glory of Russian weapons. The artist became the first marine painter on Russian soil and performed a series of twelve paintings. The flourishing of the national seascape in Russia took place in the 19th century. The first who took the post of artist at the Ministry of the Sea was I.K. Aivazovsky. Since then the seascape acquired special significance and perpetuates the sea victories of Russia. A subtle metaphysical meaning is present in some romantic landscapes by I.K. Aivazovsky. Sea battle paintings acquired clear realistic features in the painting of A.P. Bogolyubov. The artists are concerned not only with the image of the sea, but also with the architecture of the ship, which forms a separate painting genre: the ship portrait genre. The image of the ship in the paintings of the XIX-XX centuries combines the lines of scripture and poetry, focusing the attention of the viewer on a deep semantic reading of the landscape.

Spiritual and moral lessons of Dostoevsky in the era of transformation of modern states and the world order

The subject of the study is the literary and spiritual heritage of F. Dostoevsky.The article is aimed at analyzing the need for spiritual and moral reform of modern states and the world order.The research methodology includes historical and legal analysis with an interdisciplinary approach, abstraction and mental modeling, ascent from the abstract to the concrete.The main results, scope of application. Dostoevsky brilliantly showed that the basis of society is love, that love implies freedom because it has divine-human nature. For the modern reorganization of the world, it is important to see the innermost essence of human being in freedom according to Dostoevsky. Individual status and freedom cannot be sacrificed to technology, the public needs, or the interests of the digital revolution. It is good when society relies, as Dostoevsky taught, on the Law of Christ, which becomes the inner nature of man, on the spiritual and moral traditions of the people, is built on the dignity and freedom of the individual, kindness and compassion. The freedom of the individual is the basis and principle of life of both the individual and any people. The basis of a common life should be love between individuals, and not external laws or the interests of society as such in order for the complicity of the individual in the life of society not to diminish individual dignity. At the same time, Dostoevsky consistently points out the irrationality of the nature of the individual, the impossibility of comprehending its meaning and place in society and the state by means of logical calculations only. Dostoevsky showed the futility of efforts to find an ethical criterion for the structure of a person's fate outside of religion. Even true knowledge can only be spiritual, it is identified with faith. Church membership, belonging to the Church, directly opposes egoism, which is sinful according to Dostoevsky. In terms of the development of the modern state and law these postulates imply the importance of this constitutionalization of spiritual and moral principles and institutions in the moral state, creation of constitutional bodies of spiritual and moral supervision over public power. And finally, in nation-building, it is important that its foundation remains reasonable. Following a tradition that embodies the cooperation of God and man presupposes a careful attitude to historical memory, the ability to renew within the framework of preserving the whole past.Conclusions. Any approach to states and the world order must be based on the principle of the divine-human nature of the individual, signifying his immutability and inviolability. Reflections on the spiritual and moral features of Russia, revealed by Dostoevsky, have a universal meaning and are especially important for the development of modern states and the world order.

How School Finance Reforms Affect the Local Policy Landscape and Funding of Schools: A Case Study of the Transformation of the Swedish Model, 1989–1992

This article examines a specific localisation issue concerning a municipal comprehensive school in the city of Västerås, Sweden, that was brought about by two state reforms between 1989 and 1992: a) the decentralisation of the education system, and b) the introduction of school vouchers. The municipal school in question closed for the academic year 1991/1992, then re-emerged as an independent school one year later. My case study illustrates how, in historical perspective, financial reforms can affect the provision and funding of local schools in the political landscape of public–private partnerships. Documents from city archives and local newspaper accounts of the extensive debate form the basis of the analysis. A multiple streams framework is used to conceptualise the relationship between problems, policies, and politics. Policy entrepreneurs and time-specific windows of opportunities are identified as crucial to the historical understanding of how the multiple streams were coupled in the local policy landscape for the funding of schools.

Contested Social Impact Bonds: welfare conventions, conflicts and compromises in five European Active-Labor Market Programs

Over the past decade Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) have attracted much public policy and management research interest and debate. This article draws on the Welfare Conventions Approach to explore the diversity of five SIB-financed Active Labor Market Programs in four European countries using comparative case study methods. We identify a tension between the requirement to align civic and financial interests in SIB-financed programs alongside a drive to reform public sector procurement in a more entrepreneurial direction. We suggest that the diversity of SIBs emanates from the political struggles in implementation processes stemming from a plurality of welfare conventions that actors need to align and compromise. SIBs are built within historically grown “institutional contexts” that are themselves on the move over decades of welfare state reform, and processes of marketization – and thus far from homogenous.

The State of the UBI Debate: Mapping the Arguments for and against UBI

Abstract This article provides a map of the UBI debate, structured into the main themes that guide and group the arguments on both sides. It finds that UBI’s supporters and opponents both draw on core principles of justice and freedom, focusing on need and poverty, discrimination and inequality, growth, social opportunity, individuality, and self-development. From an economic perspective, they both appeal to business concerns about efficiency, risk, flexibility, and consumption, as well as labour interests on work fulfilment, working conditions, remuneration, and bargaining. Likewise, they focus on political questions around welfare state reforms, redistribution, taxation and funding sources, democratic citizenship, and the prospects for cross-party policy coalitions. By providing an overview of the thematic pillars of the UBI debate, this article helps researchers and activists locate and orient themselves within the wider spectrum of opinion on UBI.

The Political Economy of Rentier States: Understanding Barriers on ‎Economic Reform and Integration in GCC States

The GCC states’ high dependence on the hydrocarbon sector does not reflect a sustainable ‎economy. Therefore, it is demanded that those states reform the economic system that has long ‎been preserved and accelerate economic integration in the region to reduce ‎oil dependence. This article aims to analyze the hindrances to the economic reform ‎program and the intention to achieve economic integration within the rentier state in the Arab ‎Gulf states. This article uses a qualitative method through an explanatory and descriptive ‎approach to elaborate on the issues. This study indicates that a comprehensive economic ‎reform in GCC countries is hard to implement due to the existing political structure and socio-‎cultural conditions. Were to reform the economic system totally, rulers would have a dilemma regarding the regime's sustainability. Meanwhile, the move towards economic integration within the GCC countries remains unachievable due to such unresolved issues as mistrust among member countries, powerless GCC’s structural organization, and the lack of ‎interdependency-complex in pursuing wealth and prosperity