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Legislation

About: Legislation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 62664 publications have been published within this topic receiving 585188 citations. The topic is also known as: law & act.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For instance, this article found that policy makers had very distinct ideas about the nature of the sex offender problem in terms of who was responsible, who was in need of protection, and the degree to which legislative responses would address the issue.
Abstract: To date, scholars have simply inferred the beliefs underlying sex offender laws from the passage and content of the legislation. Few researchers have directly spoken to legislators to determine their opinions of the sex offender problem. This study seeks to determine the perceptions of sex offenders and sex offending in the 1990s that drove the need for sex offender reform in Illinois and the degree to which these perceptions influenced the content of the laws. The findings suggest that policy makers had very distinct ideas about the nature of the sex offender problem in terms of who was responsible, who was in need of protection, and the degree to which legislative responses would address the issue. There was congruence between these personal perceptions and the content of sex offender laws. The results shed light on the degree to which public officials' personal perceptions influence the passage and content of legislation.

213 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a report is made on the provisions and effects of U.S. minimum wage laws, referring almost entirely to teenage youths, and the discussion involves employment, the business cycle, job distribution, school attendance, and policy interactions.
Abstract: : A report is made on the provisions and effects of U.S. minimum wage laws, referring almost entirely to teenage youths. The discussion involves employment, the business cycle, job distribution, school attendance, and policy interactions.

212 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The National Congregations Study as mentioned in this paper found that more than one-third of religious organizations are potentially open to pursuing government funds to support social service activities and that liberal and moderate congregations are much more likely than conservative congregations to pursue charitable-choice opportunities.
Abstract: The Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 welfare reform legislation requires states that contract with nonprofit organizations for delivery of social services to include religious organizations as eligible contractees. This legislation altered the conditions under which religious organizations can provide publicly funded social services. I use data from the National Congregations Study, a 1998 survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,236 religious congregations, to address two questions: To what extent will congregations seek government support for social service activity? Which subsets of congregations are most likely to take advantage of these new opportunities? Univariate statistics show that more than one-third of congregations are potentially open to pursuing government funds to support social service activities. Multivariate analyses show that liberal and moderate congregations are much more likely than conservative congregations to pursue charitable-choice opportunities, and predominantly African American congregations are particularly likely to move in this direction. These results are consistent with sociological theory and research, but they are surprising in the context of the national politics of charitable choice

212 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For example, this article pointed out that European judges are increasingly willing to regulate the conduct of political activity itself by constructing and enforcing standards of acceptable behavior for interest groups, political parties, and both elected and appointed officials.
Abstract: I INTRODUCTION Since World War II, there has been a profound shift in power away from legislatures and toward courts and other legal institutions around the world. This shift, which has been called "judicialization," (1) has become more or less global in its reach, as evidenced by the fact that it is as marked in Europe, and especially recently in Eastern Europe, as it is in the United States. The spectacles of Italian judges undermining Italy's postwar system of musical cabinets, or of newly energized French judges hounding prime ministers and presidents, are only the most visible aspects of these developments. One could also point to the role, and recent success, of judges in seeking to arrest and prosecute dictators and military leaders. Additionally, our own United States Supreme Court's intervention into electoral politics in Bush v. Gore (2) was yet another manifestation of this trend. One can distinguish at least three ways in which courts have taken on new and important roles relative to legislatures. First, courts have been increasingly able and willing to limit and regulate the exercise of parliamentary authority by imposing substantive limits on the power of legislative institutions. Second, courts have increasingly become places where substantive policy is made. Third, judges have been increasingly willing to regulate the conduct of political activity itself--whether practiced in or around legislatures, agencies, or the electorate--by constructing and enforcing standards of acceptable behavior for interest groups, political parties, and both elected and appointed officials. But judicialization is not simply limited to the increasingly important, pervasive, and direct roles that courts play in making policy. The fact that courts frequently intervene in policy-making processes also means that other political actors, as well as groups seeking political action, have reason to take the possibility of judicial reaction into account. Proposals need to be framed in a way to ensure that legislation will neither be struck down nor interpreted in Undersirable ways. In order to achieve such a result, part of the policy debate over new legislation must aim at anticipating the response of legal institutions. So, we see a global application of one aspect of the phenomenon that de Tocqueville noted about American politics years ago: the transformation of political questions into legal ones. (3) This means that legal/constitutional considerations and rhetoric assume new and sometimes decisive importance in ordinary legislative policy-making. One aspect of judicialization can be observed in the widespread adoption of institutions and practices of constitutional adjudication, even in places with legal institutions and traditions that had long been inhospitable to this process. True, the modes of constitutional adjudication adopted in Europe and elsewhere do not precisely follow the U.S. model. Ordinary European judges are not permitted to strike down legislation; that authority is confined to specialized constitutional courts located outside the judicial system. Nevertheless, many of these new European constitutional courts have been at least as willing to invalidate and modify parliamentary legislation as the U.S. Supreme Court has been--even in its most activist periods. (4) Moreover, the existence of constitutional courts has, in effect, pressed ordinary judges to take account of constitutional issues in their everyday judicial activities. For example, European judges regularly interpret legislative statutes and administrative ordinances in view of the constitution and decide which issues need to be referred to the constitutional court. (5) Moreover, the rise of constitutional adjudication has transformed the landscape of parliamentary politics by forcing legislators to take constitutional considerations into account when crafting legislative schemes. …

212 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: GORDON, Linda, PITIED BUT NOT ENTITLED: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 as mentioned in this paper argues that there is a gendered (or "two channel") welfare state with origins in the nineteenth century, agrees with Barbara Nelson and Theda Skocpol that women activists helped shape it before they won political rights, but is critical of SkocPol's emphasis on the agency of state managers.
Abstract: GORDON, Linda, PITIED BUT NOT ENTITLED: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935. New York: Free Press, 1994, 433 pp., $22.95 hardcover Reviewed by: HEATHER JON MARONEY * Gordon's multifactor historical analysis of the development of policy on female-headed households in the United States of America starts with a contemporary question: why is "welfare" (Aid to Dependent Children), designed by feminists, so bad for women and children? The study contributes to two debates: first, about the nature, mode and timing of the US welfare state; and second, about the utility of neo-institutionalist as opposed to society-centred perspectives to explain its origins. Gordon argues that there is a gendered (or "two channel") welfare state with origins in the nineteenth century, agrees with Barbara Nelson and Theda Skocpol that women activists helped shape it before they won political rights, but is critical of Skocpol's emphasis on the agency of state managers. She responds to the neo-institutionlist challenge with a detailed analysis of the influence of US state actors and political forms on the tortuous passage of legislation through the multi-layered Congressional committee structure, but still persuasively demonstrates that a whole range of actors in social movements and from class and race positions were crucial in its development. Gordon's work is engaged history. It asks readers to think critically about a two tier system which sharpens existing inequalities. The US has a privileged stream that provides universal, higher, federally administered benefits understood as rights or earned benefits (like contributory old age pensions) for social groups who are already better off (workers wit stable jobs, men, middle and business classes, and whites). In addition, a range of "welfare" provisions benefit the better off (tax deductions for education, interest on mortgages or children, corporate tax breaks) or everyone (parks, garbage collection or sewage collection and disposal). In contrast, the poorest groups, where single mothers, blacks and hispanics are over-represented, are part of a stigmatized stream of means and morals tested, state or locally administered, lower benefits that are seen to be unearned and undeserved and so easy targets for right wing cost-cutting and moralistic attack. Gordon pushes the issue of agency by inquiring about responsibility for historical actions. Mother's aid campaigns by white and to a lesser extent by black women were so influential that the 1935 Social Security Act, which still shapes provisions, simply added mothers' aid to new federal programmes. What, then, in the ideological stances, analysis and political position of welfare system designers led to its inadequacies? Most important was maternalist feminists' insistence on women's special qualities as mothers, in a "breadwinner-dependent wife" family, which bought into organized labour's demand for a "family wage" and sometimes conflicted with campaigns for better jobs and wages for women. …

211 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
202410
20235,313
202212,046
20211,728
20202,190
20192,226