Risky Subjects, Subjects at Risk: HPV Vaccination and the Neoliberal Turn in Public Health

This thesis utilizes the example of Gardasil to better understand the dynamics of power at play in discourses of health in the United States, and to identify the neoliberal tenors of some contemporary public health strategies. A neoliberal turn in public health, while not all encompassing, has resulted in distorted and limited conceptions of health that rely on consumerism and notions of personal responsibility. With the example of Gardasil, Merck has deployed age-old tropes that pre-date, and are strengthened by, this neoliberal turn. These tropes--of women and girls as simultaneously at-risk and risky subjects, of young women\u27s bodies in need of state protection, and of immigrants as sources of contagion--strategically displace the focus from the actual risk factors and causes of HPV-related deaths in the U.S. and contribute to an understanding of health as a private issue, privileging consumerism over prevention, and profit over public health

When does a group of citizens influence policy? Evidence from senior citizen participation in city politics

When does a group of citizens influence public policy? Mainstream American politics research emphasizes the importance of the group’s presence in the electorate, while other scholars argue that group cohesiveness, organization, and nonvoting political activity are potentially more important. These two strands of the literature have largely developed in parallel, in part because they tend to employ different empirical methods. In this article, I attempt to bridge the divide between them and test these ideas within the same empirical framework, using senior citizens and senior-friendly transportation policy as a test case. My results show that senior voting does not unconditionally predict policies friendlier to seniors. Instead, I find that city policies are friendlier to seniors when seniors are a more cohesive, meaningful group and when they engage in activities other than voting. Moreover, when seniors are a cohesive group, their share of the electorate does matter for policy outcomes

Looking for influence in all the wrong places: How studying subnational policy can revive research on interest groups

The American politics literature on representation focuses on voters and elected officials, but a growing group of political scientists are arguing that more should be done to study interest groups. Yet there already is a large literature on interest groups, and it has struggled to show evidence of interest group influence. I argue here that the interest group lit-erature’s near-exclusive focus on the federal government has hindered its progress: basic questions have gone unasked, important interest groups have gone underappreciated, and the amount of influence has been underestimated. By studying US subnational policy making, scholars would discover different constellations of interest groups, and they would find that the variation in subnational governments allows for empirical designs that are better able to detect interest group influence when it exists. The payoffs of a subnational focus would be substantial—both for our understanding of interest groups and for the study of political representation

Bread Givers

Sunday, May 22, 2016, 2:00-3:30pm Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska Facilitated by Dr. Audrey Thacker, Department of English, CSUN Anzia Yezierska\u27s best-known novel, Bread Givers, received a glowing review in the New York Times on September 13, 1925. Bread Givers enables us to see our life more clearly, to test its values, to reckon up what it is that our aims and achievements may mean. It has a raw, uncontrollable poetry and a powerful, sweeping design, the Times wrote. Yezierska, dubbed the Cinderella of the Sweatshop by the popular press, wrote Bread Givers about the daughter of an immigrant family who struggles against her Orthodox father\u27s rigid idea of Jewish womanhood.https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/jewishbookgroup/1007/thumbnail.jp

The Politics of Pensions

For decades, America’s state and local governments have promised their workers increasingly generous pensions but failed to fully fund them, producing a fiscal problem of staggering proportions. In this paper, we examine the politics of public pensions. While it might seem obvious that the pension problem is due to Democrats and unions pushing for generous pensions over Republican resistance, we develop a theory—rooted in voters, interest groups, and myopic politicians—to argue that, during normal times, we should expect both parties to support generous (and underfunded) pensions, and thus to be responsible for the larger problem. It is only after the onset of the Great Recession, which disrupted normalcy by expanding the scope of conflict, that we should expect partisan conflict. Using a new dataset of state legislators’ votes on hundreds of pension bills passed between 1999 and 2011, we carry out an empirical analysis that supports these expectations