Patrik Marier
Biographic Data
| ID | 284339 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrik Marier |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrik |
| FAMILY NAME | Marier |
| SIGNATURE | MARIER P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Concordia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4551-6716 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 247 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Urban Poverty in the Everyday Lives of Older People: A Qualitative Study Protocol
Social conditions and pressures associated with city living cause particular challenges for older people given fixed incomes, life course needs (e.g., living alone, mobility issues, need for care), and reductions to essential public supports. The proposed study explores older people’s everyday experiences of poverty and low income in the urban contexts of Toronto and Montreal, Canada’s two largest cities. In Canada, a country where federal, provi…
Subnational Comparative Policy Analysis: Institutions, Methodology, and Research Agenda
National Intentions and Local Welfare Markets: A Comparative Analysis of Market Tools to Support Older Adults in France and Québec
This homecare policy study compares the creation and enactment of a managed market (Quebec) and a consumer-driven market (France) in urban and rural areas. Market tools are ill-suited for rural environments, as policymakers have an urban setting in mind. Consequently, market tool preferences have modest relevance in rural settings, with implementers facing multiple hurdles to develop and sustain markets. This comparative study demonstrates that t…
When hidden politics become visible: Administrative burden experiences of older adults and professionals in home care
In the context of constraining services and support within public home care, this contribution analyses how older adults and home care workers experience and navigate administrative burdens. Relying on focus groups, interviews, and a survey conducted in the province of Québec (Canada), we demonstrate that older adults face an increasing number of administrative burdens designed to alter, delay, and restrict access to public services while homecar…
Participation sociale des aînés faisant face à des dynamiques de marginalisation et d’exclusion: Étude de cas auprès de divers acteurs du milieu communautaire de loisir
Certains aînés font face à une stigmatisation qui limite leur participation à des loisirs au sein de la communauté. Les milieux de loisir sont encore trop peu outillés pour soutenir la participation des aînés faisant face à des enjeux liés à des conditions « invisibles » tels que des atteintes neurocognitives, une déficience intellectuelle ou une problématique de santé mentale. Une recherche-action vise à accompagner ces milieux dans la compréhen…
The Right and the (Provincial) Welfare State: The Case of the Coalition Avenir Québec Government
In this article, we study how political parties located on the right of the political spectrum adapt to changing electoral and political constraints. Drawing on the concept of policy feedback, we turn to the politics of social policy in the province of Quebec to show that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), a right-wing party, embraced a more centrist strategy than the preferences of its electoral base would suggest. The CAQ has rejected the auste…
Participatory Evaluation of a Direct Payment Program for Equity in Dementia Care in Nova Scotia, Canada: A Study Protocol
Nova Scotia's Supportive Care Program (SCP) is an individualized funding program that provides funds for people living with dementia (PLWD) or acquired brain injuries to purchase basic home care services such as personal care, respite, cleaning and cooking. The SCP has the potential to address the Quintuple Aim of enhancing care experience, improving population health, reducing costs, improving provider experience and improving health equity, yet…
Recognizing precarity? A comparative analysis of governmental documents in provincial and federal administrations
With an aging population, have federal and provincial governments acknowledged the diversity of the policy needs of older adults? This contribution analyzes administrative and policy documents across ministries to study the frequency and the depth of engagement involving older adults with a disability, older immigrants, and those living in poverty. Precarity received marginal treatment with very limited discussions combining aging in relation to …
The politics of senior bureaucratic turnover in the Westminster tradition: Trust and the choice between internal and external appointments
The extent to which new governments appoint and dismiss senior public servants is widely claimed to be influenced by their country’s underlying administrative tradition. This is particularly the case within the Westminster tradition where such turnover is limited in nature, with most appointees coming from within the ranks of the public service. This article challenges the assertion that turnover in the Westminster tradition is homogeneously inte…
Do Assessment Tools Shape Policy Preferences? Analysing Policy Framing Effects on Older Adults' Conceptualisation of Autonomy
The concept of autonomy is essential in the practice and study of gerontology and in long-term care policies. For older adults with expanding care needs, scores from tightly specified assessment instruments, which aim to measure the autonomy of service users, usually determine access to social services. These instruments emphasise functional independence in the performance of activities of daily living. In an effort to broaden the understanding o…
Aging in Place With a Spouse in Need: Neighborhood Cohesion and Older Adult Spouses’ Physical and Mental Health
This study examines the association of perceived neighborhood cohesion (NC) with older adults’ health and the buffering effects of NC against the negative effects of spousal caregiving on health. Data of 3329 community-living older adults living with a spouse in need of care from the Health and Retirement Study were collected at two time-points. Multiple regression analyses were computed for each of the four health outcomes. For men, NC predicted…
Ageism and Covid-19: What does our society’s response say about us?
The goal of this commentary is to highlight the ageism that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 20 international researchers in the field of ageing have contributed to this document. This commentary discusses how older people are misrepresented and undervalued in the current public discourse surrounding the pandemic. It points to issues in documenting the deaths of older adults, the lack of preparation for such a crisis in long-term ca…
Resistance, Innovation, and Improvisation: Comparing the Responses of Nursing Home Workers to the Covid-19 Pandemic in Canada and the United States
Comparing the situation of workers in nursing homes in two Canadian provinces and two states in the USA, this study draws on narrative accounts from frontline workers and finds that despite variation in the severity of the outbreaks they experienced, nursing home workers in each jurisdiction demonstrated three types of responses to pandemic policy changes that are theorized as resistance, innovation, and improvisation. Data for the study was comp…
Awaiting Long-Term Care Services in a Rapidly Changing Environment: Voices from Older Chinese Adults
Three competing interpretations of policy problems: Tame and wicked problems through the lenses of population aging
This contribution presents competing lenses of population aging as policy problems and it compares their impact on the treatment of policy problems. Three lenses are analysed: intergenerational, biomedical and social gerontological. The intergenerational lens treats population aging as a new form of class conflict along age groups. The social gerontological lens claims that population aging is first and foremost a social issue and it stands in op…
Precarity in late life: Understanding new forms of risk and insecurity
Compassionate Canadians and conflictual Americans? Portrayals of ageism in liberal and conservative media
Building upon earlier studies on ageism in the media and the polarised ageism framework, this contribution compares the prevalence of three forms of ageism – intergenerational, compassionate and new ageism – in four Canadian and American newspapers. The analysis has three objectives. First, it adapts the polarised ageism framework to a comparative case study to assess its usefulness beyond Canada. Second, it analyses which form of ageism occurs m…
Devine intervention? Lessons in systemic retrenchment from Canada’s most generous welfare state
This article tackles the importance of systemic retrenchment in welfare state research by focusing on two core elements neglected in the literature: the civil service and governmental revenues. Saskatchewan has possessed key ingredients associated with generous welfare states: a dominant left-wing party, a supportive bureaucracy and important non-visible fiscal revenues. According to the comparative welfare state literature, this is also an excel…
The politics of policy adoption: A saga on the difficulties of enacting policy diffusion or transfer across industrialized countries
Technocracy or transformation? Mapping women's policy agencies and orienting gender (in)equality in the Canadian provinces
Canadian gender equality policy has taken a “technocratic turn” that favours bureaucratic expertise to monitor and measure (in)equality rather than participatory and consultative mechanisms. While the processes and impacts of this shift are well documented at the federal level, less is known at the provincial level. This article takes stock of provincial gender equality mechanisms, demonstrating variations in women's policy agencies (WPAs) across…
Does it Matter Who Works at the Center? A Comparative Policy Analysis of Executive Styles
This article develops the concept of executive style to explore how variations in the relationships between politicians, career civil servants, and political appointees affect the types of policy outputs. A comparative analysis of home care policies in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia finds that the former’s civil service executive style – where professional civil servants work in close partnership with politicians in all phases of the policy proces…
From quacks to professionals: The importance of changing social constructions in the policy-making process
The social construction of target populations (SCTP) approach assumes that policies are constructed to benefit (or punish) specific groups of citizens based on their relative power and social construction. This contribution tackles one of the most sustained critiques of the SCTP literature, namely, how a group can alter its social construction and power. Stated differently, how does a group move from being constructed as dependent or deviant to c…
How Should We Administer Population Aging? A Canadian Comparison
This article presents a comparative analysis of four Canadian provinces (Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Saskatchewan) with different administrative responses to population aging. The way in which population aging is tackled administratively matters greatly because it drives the type of policy responses being proposed and implemented
A Swedish Welfare State in North America? The Creation and Expansion of the Saskatchewan Welfare State, 1944–1982
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Who pays the piper calls the tune? Comparing C anada's and the E uropean U nion's expansionary roles in pensions
Both C anada and the E uropean U nion ( EU ) have been active in developing pension policies despite the lack of formal mandates to do so. While the C anadian government used its fiscal powers to expand its role in pension programs when pension emerged as a policy issue, the EU has been strongly limited by its lack of resources, institutional complexities, and the maturity of public pension programs in its member states. The EU experience generat…
Executive Authority, the Personal Vote, and Budget Discipline in Latin American and Caribbean Countries
Recent scholarship on budgeting in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries indicates that political institutions impact the level of budget discipline. Building upon this previous research, we argue that the principal problem that must be addressed in both the government and the legislature to insure strong fiscal discipline is the common pool resource (CPR) problem. At the cabinet level, the CPR problem arises because ministers consider the…
Precarity in late life: Understanding new forms of risk and insecurity
Where Did the Bureaucrats Go? Role and Influence of the Public Bureaucracy in the Swedish and French Pension Reform Debate
This article has two key objectives. First, despite having been considered as a key element to favor the expansion and elaboration of the welfare state in industrial countries, bureaucrats have been largely ignored by the “New” Politics of the Welfare State. This article demonstrates that bureaucrats still matter in times of retrenchment, because they can facilitate or obstruct various phases of the policy process. The degree of independence of t…
The power of institutionalized learning: The Uses and Practices of Commissions to Generate Policy Change
This article analyses the conditions under which commissions succeed in influencing policy change. The paper tackles three questions: What do governments gain by establishing a commission? What are the tools employed by commissions in order to make their recommendations and ensure that their output will have political significance? And how do commissions influence policy outcomes? Five different types of influence are introduced and tested by foc…
Empowering Epistemic Communities: Specialised Politicians, Policy Experts and Policy Reform
A handful of Swedish parliamentarians, assisted by experts within the civil service, generated one of the most discussed pension reforms since the Chilean reform of the 1980s. This article argues that they formed a successful epistemic community. The group shared similar pension values, a commitment to finding a long-term solution, and a devotion to improving the pension system. The inclusion of politicians within epistemic communities is essenti…
Protest Avoidance: Labor Mobilization and Social Policy Reform in France
Students of public policy and social mobilization alike should pay more attention to the political strategies of protest avoidance. Distinct from traditional blame-avoidance strategies, protest avoidance occurs when elected officials, facing direct and nearly inescapable blame, attempt to reduce the scope of social mobilization triggered by unpopular reforms. In recent decades, successive French governments have introduced major, unpopular reform…
Technocracy or transformation? Mapping women's policy agencies and orienting gender (in)equality in the Canadian provinces
Canadian gender equality policy has taken a “technocratic turn” that favours bureaucratic expertise to monitor and measure (in)equality rather than participatory and consultative mechanisms. While the processes and impacts of this shift are well documented at the federal level, less is known at the provincial level. This article takes stock of provincial gender equality mechanisms, demonstrating variations in women's policy agencies (WPAs) across…
The New Politics of Old Age Policy
The New Politics of Old Age Policy , Robert H. Hudson, ed., Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. 309. The New Politics of Old Age Policy presents a collection of essays devoted to the policy and political challenges related to population aging in the United States. This book will be of particular interest for those seeking analyses of Social Security and health policies (especially Medicare and Medicaid). With the exception of a fe…
Resistance, Innovation, and Improvisation: Comparing the Responses of Nursing Home Workers to the Covid-19 Pandemic in Canada and the United States
Comparing the situation of workers in nursing homes in two Canadian provinces and two states in the USA, this study draws on narrative accounts from frontline workers and finds that despite variation in the severity of the outbreaks they experienced, nursing home workers in each jurisdiction demonstrated three types of responses to pandemic policy changes that are theorized as resistance, innovation, and improvisation. Data for the study was comp…
Affirming, Transforming, or Neglecting Gender? Conceptualizing Gender in the Pension Reform Process
This article analyzes the gender visions adopted by policy actors in pension reform debates. Based on the work of Fraser ( Fraser, N. 1994 . “After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State.” Political Theory 22 : 591–618; Fraser, N. 1995 . “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age.” New Left Review 212:68–93), four gendered visions of public pensions are introduced and then applied to pension r…
The politics of senior bureaucratic turnover in the Westminster tradition: Trust and the choice between internal and external appointments
The extent to which new governments appoint and dismiss senior public servants is widely claimed to be influenced by their country’s underlying administrative tradition. This is particularly the case within the Westminster tradition where such turnover is limited in nature, with most appointees coming from within the ranks of the public service. This article challenges the assertion that turnover in the Westminster tradition is homogeneously inte…
Compassionate Canadians and conflictual Americans? Portrayals of ageism in liberal and conservative media
Building upon earlier studies on ageism in the media and the polarised ageism framework, this contribution compares the prevalence of three forms of ageism – intergenerational, compassionate and new ageism – in four Canadian and American newspapers. The analysis has three objectives. First, it adapts the polarised ageism framework to a comparative case study to assess its usefulness beyond Canada. Second, it analyses which form of ageism occurs m…
Does it Matter Who Works at the Center? A Comparative Policy Analysis of Executive Styles
This article develops the concept of executive style to explore how variations in the relationships between politicians, career civil servants, and political appointees affect the types of policy outputs. A comparative analysis of home care policies in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia finds that the former’s civil service executive style – where professional civil servants work in close partnership with politicians in all phases of the policy proces…
From quacks to professionals: The importance of changing social constructions in the policy-making process
The social construction of target populations (SCTP) approach assumes that policies are constructed to benefit (or punish) specific groups of citizens based on their relative power and social construction. This contribution tackles one of the most sustained critiques of the SCTP literature, namely, how a group can alter its social construction and power. Stated differently, how does a group move from being constructed as dependent or deviant to c…
The Impact of Gender and Immigration on Pension Outcomes in Canada
This paper analyzes Canadian retirement incomes by focusing on the dynamics of gender and immigration. We demonstrate that elderly women living alone and post-1970 immigrants are more likely to rely on the means-tested component of Canada's pension system, the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), which is an indication of their restricted capacity to maintain an autonomous household. The strong reliance of the Canadian pension system on both publi…
Welfare Retrenchment as Social Justice: Pension Reform in Mexico
This article analyses critically the applicability of current theories of welfare state retrenchment to the 2004 public pension reform in Mexico, with the 1995 reform acting as a complementary case. In particular, this article contributes to the literature by analysing the reasons for which a potentially unpopular reform was successfully enacted. Available evidence suggests that - contrary to the existing literature's assertions - Mexican politic…
The Right and the (Provincial) Welfare State: The Case of the Coalition Avenir Québec Government
In this article, we study how political parties located on the right of the political spectrum adapt to changing electoral and political constraints. Drawing on the concept of policy feedback, we turn to the politics of social policy in the province of Quebec to show that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), a right-wing party, embraced a more centrist strategy than the preferences of its electoral base would suggest. The CAQ has rejected the auste…
A Swedish Welfare State in North America? The Creation and Expansion of the Saskatchewan Welfare State, 1944–1982
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Who pays the piper calls the tune? Comparing C anada's and the E uropean U nion's expansionary roles in pensions
Both C anada and the E uropean U nion ( EU ) have been active in developing pension policies despite the lack of formal mandates to do so. While the C anadian government used its fiscal powers to expand its role in pension programs when pension emerged as a policy issue, the EU has been strongly limited by its lack of resources, institutional complexities, and the maturity of public pension programs in its member states. The EU experience generat…
National Intentions and Local Welfare Markets: A Comparative Analysis of Market Tools to Support Older Adults in France and Québec
This homecare policy study compares the creation and enactment of a managed market (Quebec) and a consumer-driven market (France) in urban and rural areas. Market tools are ill-suited for rural environments, as policymakers have an urban setting in mind. Consequently, market tool preferences have modest relevance in rural settings, with implementers facing multiple hurdles to develop and sustain markets. This comparative study demonstrates that t…
When hidden politics become visible: Administrative burden experiences of older adults and professionals in home care
In the context of constraining services and support within public home care, this contribution analyses how older adults and home care workers experience and navigate administrative burdens. Relying on focus groups, interviews, and a survey conducted in the province of Québec (Canada), we demonstrate that older adults face an increasing number of administrative burdens designed to alter, delay, and restrict access to public services while homecar…
Awaiting Long-Term Care Services in a Rapidly Changing Environment: Voices from Older Chinese Adults
The politics of policy adoption: A saga on the difficulties of enacting policy diffusion or transfer across industrialized countries
The Changing Conception of Pension Rights in Canada, Mexico and the United States
Relying on four conceptualizations of the welfare state (universalism, redistribution, state capacity, and intergenerational equity), this article presents an overview of recent pension reforms in Canada, Mexico and the United States. Each country has introduced important reforms in the past 25 years and is currently engaged in debates to make other adjustments. The state is reducing its financial and programmatic commitment towards current and f…
Subnational Comparative Policy Analysis: Institutions, Methodology, and Research Agenda
Executive Authority, the Personal Vote, and Budget Discipline in Latin American and Caribbean Countries
Recent scholarship on budgeting in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries indicates that political institutions impact the level of budget discipline. Building upon this previous research, we argue that the principal problem that must be addressed in both the government and the legislature to insure strong fiscal discipline is the common pool resource (CPR) problem. At the cabinet level, the CPR problem arises because ministers consider the…
Social-démocratie et mouvements ouvriers: La Fin De l'Histoire
Social-démocratie et mouvements ouvriers : la fin de l'histoire?, Serge Denis, Montréal : Les éditions Boréal, 2003, 226p.Peu importe le pays, la relation entre le mouvement ouvrier et les partis sociaux-démocrates est en crise. Ces derniers ont cessé de promouvoir les revendications du mouvement ouvrier et ont coupé les ponts avec leur base. Ce constat est au cœur de ce livre qui débute avec le fameux “ winter of discontent ” britannique de 1978…
Executive Authority, the Personal Vote, and Budget Discipline in Latin American and Caribbean Countries
Recent scholarship on budgeting in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries indicates that political institutions impact the level of budget discipline. Building upon this previous research, we argue that the principal problem that must be addressed in both the government and the legislature to insure strong fiscal discipline is the common pool resource (CPR) problem. At the cabinet level, the CPR problem arises because ministers consider the…
Where Did the Bureaucrats Go? Role and Influence of the Public Bureaucracy in the Swedish and French Pension Reform Debate
This article has two key objectives. First, despite having been considered as a key element to favor the expansion and elaboration of the welfare state in industrial countries, bureaucrats have been largely ignored by the “New” Politics of the Welfare State. This article demonstrates that bureaucrats still matter in times of retrenchment, because they can facilitate or obstruct various phases of the policy process. The degree of independence of t…
Unions and pension reforms in Mexico: The impact of democratic governance
In the fall of2004, the Mexican Congress promulgated an important piece of legislation, which reformed the pension system of the employees of the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS). As a result of these changes, from August 2004, new IMSS employees will be enrolled into a mandatory contributive private pension plan. This retirement benefits package is largely based upon the existing pension scheme for private sector workers, which stemme…
Protest Avoidance: Labor Mobilization and Social Policy Reform in France
Students of public policy and social mobilization alike should pay more attention to the political strategies of protest avoidance. Distinct from traditional blame-avoidance strategies, protest avoidance occurs when elected officials, facing direct and nearly inescapable blame, attempt to reduce the scope of social mobilization triggered by unpopular reforms. In recent decades, successive French governments have introduced major, unpopular reform…
Affirming, Transforming, or Neglecting Gender? Conceptualizing Gender in the Pension Reform Process
This article analyzes the gender visions adopted by policy actors in pension reform debates. Based on the work of Fraser ( Fraser, N. 1994 . “After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State.” Political Theory 22 : 591–618; Fraser, N. 1995 . “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age.” New Left Review 212:68–93), four gendered visions of public pensions are introduced and then applied to pension r…
The New Politics of Old Age Policy
The New Politics of Old Age Policy , Robert H. Hudson, ed., Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. 309. The New Politics of Old Age Policy presents a collection of essays devoted to the policy and political challenges related to population aging in the United States. This book will be of particular interest for those seeking analyses of Social Security and health policies (especially Medicare and Medicaid). With the exception of a fe…
Welfare Retrenchment as Social Justice: Pension Reform in Mexico
This article analyses critically the applicability of current theories of welfare state retrenchment to the 2004 public pension reform in Mexico, with the 1995 reform acting as a complementary case. In particular, this article contributes to the literature by analysing the reasons for which a potentially unpopular reform was successfully enacted. Available evidence suggests that - contrary to the existing literature's assertions - Mexican politic…
Introduction: Adapting Public Policies for an Ageing Society
The Impact of Gender and Immigration on Pension Outcomes in Canada
This paper analyzes Canadian retirement incomes by focusing on the dynamics of gender and immigration. We demonstrate that elderly women living alone and post-1970 immigrants are more likely to rely on the means-tested component of Canada's pension system, the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), which is an indication of their restricted capacity to maintain an autonomous household. The strong reliance of the Canadian pension system on both publi…
The Changing Conception of Pension Rights in Canada, Mexico and the United States
Relying on four conceptualizations of the welfare state (universalism, redistribution, state capacity, and intergenerational equity), this article presents an overview of recent pension reforms in Canada, Mexico and the United States. Each country has introduced important reforms in the past 25 years and is currently engaged in debates to make other adjustments. The state is reducing its financial and programmatic commitment towards current and f…
Empowering Epistemic Communities: Specialised Politicians, Policy Experts and Policy Reform
A handful of Swedish parliamentarians, assisted by experts within the civil service, generated one of the most discussed pension reforms since the Chilean reform of the 1980s. This article argues that they formed a successful epistemic community. The group shared similar pension values, a commitment to finding a long-term solution, and a devotion to improving the pension system. The inclusion of politicians within epistemic communities is essenti…
The power of institutionalized learning: The Uses and Practices of Commissions to Generate Policy Change
This article analyses the conditions under which commissions succeed in influencing policy change. The paper tackles three questions: What do governments gain by establishing a commission? What are the tools employed by commissions in order to make their recommendations and ensure that their output will have political significance? And how do commissions influence policy outcomes? Five different types of influence are introduced and tested by foc…
Squeezing social partners to embrace reforms: The case of private earnings-related pension schemes
How do changes to public schemes and ongoing economic difficulties impact private earnings-related pension schemes (PERPS) governed by social partners? The decreasing generosity of public schemes does put strong pressure onto social partners to improve their PERPS; however, PERPS face challenges of their own related to their integration within the pension system and their financing mechanisms. Based on a comparative analysis of Finland, France, t…
How Should We Administer Population Aging? A Canadian Comparison
This article presents a comparative analysis of four Canadian provinces (Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Saskatchewan) with different administrative responses to population aging. The way in which population aging is tackled administratively matters greatly because it drives the type of policy responses being proposed and implemented
A Swedish Welfare State in North America? The Creation and Expansion of the Saskatchewan Welfare State, 1944–1982
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Who pays the piper calls the tune? Comparing C anada's and the E uropean U nion's expansionary roles in pensions
Both C anada and the E uropean U nion ( EU ) have been active in developing pension policies despite the lack of formal mandates to do so. While the C anadian government used its fiscal powers to expand its role in pension programs when pension emerged as a policy issue, the EU has been strongly limited by its lack of resources, institutional complexities, and the maturity of public pension programs in its member states. The EU experience generat…
From quacks to professionals: The importance of changing social constructions in the policy-making process
The social construction of target populations (SCTP) approach assumes that policies are constructed to benefit (or punish) specific groups of citizens based on their relative power and social construction. This contribution tackles one of the most sustained critiques of the SCTP literature, namely, how a group can alter its social construction and power. Stated differently, how does a group move from being constructed as dependent or deviant to c…
Does it Matter Who Works at the Center? A Comparative Policy Analysis of Executive Styles
This article develops the concept of executive style to explore how variations in the relationships between politicians, career civil servants, and political appointees affect the types of policy outputs. A comparative analysis of home care policies in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia finds that the former’s civil service executive style – where professional civil servants work in close partnership with politicians in all phases of the policy proces…
Devine intervention? Lessons in systemic retrenchment from Canada’s most generous welfare state
This article tackles the importance of systemic retrenchment in welfare state research by focusing on two core elements neglected in the literature: the civil service and governmental revenues. Saskatchewan has possessed key ingredients associated with generous welfare states: a dominant left-wing party, a supportive bureaucracy and important non-visible fiscal revenues. According to the comparative welfare state literature, this is also an excel…
The politics of policy adoption: A saga on the difficulties of enacting policy diffusion or transfer across industrialized countries
Technocracy or transformation? Mapping women's policy agencies and orienting gender (in)equality in the Canadian provinces
Canadian gender equality policy has taken a “technocratic turn” that favours bureaucratic expertise to monitor and measure (in)equality rather than participatory and consultative mechanisms. While the processes and impacts of this shift are well documented at the federal level, less is known at the provincial level. This article takes stock of provincial gender equality mechanisms, demonstrating variations in women's policy agencies (WPAs) across…
Awaiting Long-Term Care Services in a Rapidly Changing Environment: Voices from Older Chinese Adults
Three competing interpretations of policy problems: Tame and wicked problems through the lenses of population aging
This contribution presents competing lenses of population aging as policy problems and it compares their impact on the treatment of policy problems. Three lenses are analysed: intergenerational, biomedical and social gerontological. The intergenerational lens treats population aging as a new form of class conflict along age groups. The social gerontological lens claims that population aging is first and foremost a social issue and it stands in op…
Political science (36 works) · Politics (23 works) · Economics (22 works) · Law (22 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (22 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Public Administration (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Public Administration (14 works) · Business (12 works)