Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Political parties are often portrayed as having a limited ability to influence policy-making. This paper examines the policy capacity of political parties in Canada in relation to their ability to propose distinct policies of their own choosing and design to the electorate and in relation to the concept of the electoral mandate. It demonstrates that decisions as to what to include in election policy platforms are shaped to some degree by existing institutional arrangements and the policy environment, but that the key factor influencing policy content is the strategic actions and decisions of parties themselves. In particular, parties have established the key boundaries of policy debate in Canada and have altered the focus of electoral policy debate through tactical considerations, by what they perceive as the appropriate course of events or by attempting to position themselves in such a way so as to appeal to the broader electorate, including through the use of “wedge” politics.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In already completed papers (Zuckerman, Dasoviæ, Fitzgerald, and Brynin 2002 and Zuckerman, Fitzgerald and Dasoviæ 2002), we show that partisanship is bounded –most everyone never supports one or the other of the major parties prefers its main rival at varying rates. Decisions about partisanship reflect the logic of appropriate behavior, which is torn between processes of social conformity and individualization, and the principles of out-group homogeneity. In this paper, we demonstrate that those who are just entering the electorate also display the characteristics of bounded partisanship. As would follow from studies of social networks and political socialization, the partisan preferences of their parents strongly influence the characteristics of bounded partisanship among the young. As would follow from the logic of appropriate behavior, young persons do not automatically and routinely follow the partisan examples of their parents. For them too, political interest and reinforcing social contexts facilitate the recognition of appropriate behavior. At the same time, our analysis provides very little evidence of young persons taking partisan stances that depart from those of their parents. In the established democracies of Britain and Germany the partisanship of the young tends to follow that of their parents.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In political science, rational and bounded learning are commonly studied as two opposing explanations of policy choice. In this paper, I use a rational learning approach to advance conclusions about bounded learning, showing that the two concepts need not necessarily be incompatible. By examining the decision of a set of developing countries to open up their trade regimes and a rational learning model, I show that countries are particularly influenced by the choices of neighbouring countries and by particularly successful policy experiences. These are two typical contentions of the bounded learning literature. I also take advantage of the discussion on rational vs. bounded learning to explore more general issues regarding the diffusion of policy innovations.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: It is difficult to overstate the extent to which America’s mental-health policy in the post-bellum era has been solely concerned with the needs of white communities. Intellectual precept, as well as institutional provision, were equally responsible for discriminating against the treatment of African American clients. For decades the vast majority of mental-health officials subscribed to the belief that non-white—or to use the common parlance, “non-classical”—clients did not have the “ego suitability” to benefit from such therapies. Even today such asymmetries are reflected in the striking lack of black psychiatrists registered with the discipline’s principal guild, the American Psychiatric Association. And traditional narratives of mental-health care have, therefore, been content to absent black people from such histories.
But, in much the same way that the literature on settlement houses ignored race because of its failure to consider the work carried out in African American community centers, so the same is true of histories of psychiatry. In churches, social clubs, sororities, and other institutions across America’s black communities, the post-war period witnessed a concerted interest in psychological testing and the provision of mental-illness therapies. As well as the better-known institutions like Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic or the Clarks’ Northside Center, both of which opened in 1946, a number of other community associations began to discuss the necessity for providing their constituencies with such programs in this period. Focusing principally on the work of the James Weldon Johnson Community Center in East Harlem, this paper will consider, quite mechanically, the types of therapies and the reasons given for them that such organizations began offering from the early 1950s.
This was not a project that simply affected black Americans however. For these efforts were part of a broader transformation of American psychiatric knowledge, a transformation which turned psychiatrists into political commentators, and a discipline previously animated by the pathologies of individual into one more concerned with those of society.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Analyzing, from a relational perspective, how the India-Pakistan conflict has been sustained, this paper veers from traditional conceptions of ethics as part of the analytical framework and suggests that we relocate ethical concerns in international relations research to the realm of empirics. Specifically, I focus on partition literature to present a genealogy of bounding practices that highlights the role the imagination of difference in 1947 (when India and Pakistan came into existence as independent nations) plays in legitimizing conflictual relations between India and Pakistan today. A genealogical tracing of these legitimations highlights how past deployments become the moral-practical ingredients for present actions. Simply, how a social phenomenon like the India-Pakistan conflict is made meaning-full depends on the specific ways in which people make sense of how it has been imagined in the past; these narrations of previous exercises in meaning-making form the ethical guidelines that influence the character of social actions in which our realities are socially (re)constructed. Shifting our consideration of ethics in this manner provides us with three distinct advantages over existing scholarship. First, it allows us to understand how the conflict between these two nuclear rivals is embedded both morally and practically in everyday life. Second, by shifting ethical concerns from the realm of how things should be to understanding how ethics shape social reality, reification is avoided and agency is preserved. Finally, the Weberian distinction between scholarship and politics can be preserved by recasting ethics as part of the empirical component of ones? research instead of its overarching goal.