Featured Book and Research Projects

Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Fiscal Redistribution and Territorial Politics in Four Federal Systems (SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2008-2011 [in collaboration with André Lecours, Concordia University])

Grounded in historical institutionalism and the related scholarship on ideas and public policy, this project explores the politics of horizontal fiscal redistribution in four federal systems: Australia, Canada, Spain, and Switzerland. The project raises two major questions: Why does the territorial redistribution of financial resources become a major political issue in some federal states while it remains much less controversial in others? When there is strong politicization, how does it occur? Our four cases exhibit a strong contrast between two political outcomes. On the one hand, fiscal redistribution between regions is highly contentious in Spain, where regions like Catalonia question the legitimacy of territorial redistribution, and in Canada, where some provinces (most notably Alberta, Québec and Newfoundland) have questioned patterns of equalization. On the other hand, in Australia and Switzerland, territorial transfers have proven much less controversial. To explain this contrast in outcomes, the project explores the role of ideas and institutions in the political construction of territorial interests surrounding horizontal fiscal redistribution.

Reshaping American Social Policy? Conservative Ideas and Institutional Change (under contract with Georgetown University Press for inclusion in the “American Governance and Public Policy” series [in collaboration with Alex Waddan, Leicester University]

The direction of American social policy has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Much of the apparatus of the welfare state survived the Reagan era but, through the 1990s and into the new millennium, there has been a continuing debate about the sustainability of modern federal social policy. To some extent, this has been fuelled by relatively quantifiable factors like technological and demographic changes that have escalated the costs of providing benefits and services. However, in addition to these concrete pressures, there has been a sustained ideological offensive by conservatives who question not only the feasibility but also the underlying principles of the modern American welfare state. Hence, there has been an ongoing effort to advance conservative values and policy solutions in the social welfare arena. The main objective of this book is to trace the ideological development and the political application of key conservative social policy ideas since the Reagan era, with a focus on the presidency of George W. Bush.

Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research [volume edited in collaboration with Robert H. Cox, University of Oklahoma]

Despite the recent proliferation of work on ideas and politics in the above-mentioned disciplines and sub-fields, no systematic effort has ever been made to assess the state of research in this growing field and to formulate a critical synthesis of the available social science scholarship on the politics of ideas. This book is an attempt to put scattered pieces of knowledge together and offer social scientists a general overview of the theoretical and empirical issues raised by the ever-expanding social science literature on ideas and politics. Ranging across several fields of political science and sociology, the book documents the most central themes in the burgeoning literature on ideas and politics while offering critical analyses that could guide future social science research. Questions posed include: how do ideas matter, is there a common theoretical basis for the study of ideas in politics, and what are the empirical puzzles that can be resolved by examining different types of ideas?

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