University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Government and Public Administration

Narratives are a very important part of public policy negotiations and deliberations. Public policy research has shown that policy narratives are manipulated to fit the motives of the creators and enforcers of that narrative (Stone, 2002). The creators and enforcers of these narratives use symbols, language, and other techniques to ensure that the narrative survives and dominates the political and social environment by becoming the favored policy prescription (Stone, 2002; Miller, 2012; Jones & McBeth, 2010; Schneider & Ingram, 1993). This study employs a qualitative content analysis to trace the genealogy of the following narratives that make up the “Stand Your Ground” discourse from 2005-2013: (1) Prosecutorial Discretion Narrative, (2) Vigilante Justice Narrative, (3) Race Narrative, and (4) Law-abiding Citizen Narrative. The “Stand Your Ground” discourse is used to test what this dissertation terms the “institutionalized policy narrative” thesis which states, Policymakers and policy advocates use policy narratives which consist of powerful symbols, politically motivated language, and ideographs to both shape and respond to public opinions by appealing to both the heart and intellect of the public. Once a winning narrative becomes institutionalized it is nearly impossible to replace that winning narrative even in the wake of a powerful new emerging narrative. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

陳淑雯. / 論文(哲學碩士)--香港中文大學, 1998. / 參考文獻: leaves 199-215. / 中英文摘要. / Chen Shuwen. / Chapter 第一章 --- 導言 --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- 前言 --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- 研究背´景´ؤؤ政治與課程 --- p.2 / Chapter 1.3 --- 研究立足´點´ؤؤ課程社會學的觀點 --- p.5 / Chapter 1.4 --- 研究意義 --- p.7 / Chapter 第二章 --- 研究理論 --- p.8 / Chapter 2.1 --- 政治與課程 --- p.8 / Chapter 2.2 --- 共產政權的認受性與課程 --- p.19 / Chapter 2.3 --- 殖民政權的認受性與課程 --- p.31 / Chapter 第三章 --- 研究設計 --- p.44 / Chapter 3.1 --- 研究問題 --- p.44 / Chapter 3.2 --- 研究對象 --- p.44 / Chapter 3.3 --- 研究方´法´ؤؤ定性研究法 --- p.48 / Chapter 3.4 --- 分析主題 --- p.51 / Chapter 3.5 --- 研究限制 --- p.53 / Chapter 第四章 --- 中、港課程的意識型´態´ؤؤ歷史觀 --- p.54 / Chapter 4.1 --- 歷史的進´程´ؤؤ線性與循環史觀 --- p.54 / Chapter 4.2 --- 推動歷史發展的原動力 --- p.61 / Chapter 4.3 --- 歷史論述的價値基準 --- p.68 / Chapter 4.4 --- 中、港課程的歷史觀與政權管治的意識型態 --- p.73 / Chapter 第五章 --- 中、港課程的意識型´態´ؤؤ民族與國家感情 --- p.76 / Chapter 5.1 --- 民族感情 --- p.76 / Chapter 5.2 --- 國家感情 --- p.90 / Chapter 5.3 --- 中、港課程的民族、國家感情與政權管治的意識型態 --- p.97 / Chapter 第六章 --- 中、港課程的意識型´態´ؤؤ「優良」的品德 --- p.103 / Chapter 6.1 --- 品德敎育的形式 --- p.103 / Chapter 6.2 --- 品德敎育的内容 --- p.107 / Chapter 6.3 --- 中、港課程的品德敎育與政權管治的意識型態 --- p.117 / Chapter 第七章 --- 中、港課程意識型態控制的機制 --- p.122 / Chapter 7.1 --- 制度層´面´ؤؤ由《課程綱要》編訂到敎科書審定 --- p.123 / Chapter 7.2 --- 人的層面 --- p.135 / Chapter 7.3 --- 小結 --- p.140 / Chapter 第八章 --- 中、港課程的政治社會化特色 --- p.142 / Chapter 8.1 --- 政治與課´程´ؤؤ不同政權的政治社會化的特色 --- p.142 / Chapter 8.2 --- 未完的討論 --- p.148 / Chapter 8.3 --- 對歷史課程改革的啓示 --- p.150 / 附表 --- p.153 / 附錄中文參考書目 --- p.199 / 英文參考書目 --- p.209

熊躍根. / 論文(博士)--香港中文大學社會工作學部, 1998. / 參考文獻: p. 192-213. / 中英文摘要. / Available also through the Internet via Dissertations & theses @ Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Xiong Yuegen. / Lun wen (Bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue she hui gong zuo xue bu, 1998. / Can kao wen xian: p. 192-213. / Zhong Ying wen zhai yao.

This dissertation recounts how community groups in postwar New York City tapped into growing government engagement with urban problems, which culminated in President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 declaration of "unconditional war on poverty." Focusing on the discourse among grassroots activists, social reformers, and city officials, I argue that the War on Poverty has been misunderstood by scholars inattentive to the rich exchange of ideas that occurred at street level. I show how local policy innovations flowed upward and influenced elites -- intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats -- before being projected back downward and adapted anew. Viewing the War on Poverty from the ground up not only provides a fresh perspective on its well-documented failures; it also turns up hidden successes. My narrative unfolds in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the drive to end poverty dovetailed with a vibrant civil-rights movement. A majority-black area of roughly 400,000 people, Bed-Stuy housed a mix of desperately poor tenants and upwardly mobile homeowners. I emphasize the policy role played by members of the area's middle class, especially women, who acted as brokers between politicians and the poor people whose empowerment the War on Poverty ostensibly promoted. In the 1950s, activists in Bed-Stuy partnered with the municipal government of Robert F. Wagner, Jr., to tackle pressing issues -- juvenile delinquency, deteriorated housing, capital flight -- through experimental social-work techniques and a new model of neighborhood-based planning. Such partnerships laid the groundwork for the federal Community Action Program, the centerpiece of the War on Poverty. Though Bed-Stuy's official Community Action Agency ultimately succumbed to mismanagement, bureaucratization, and internal strife, it did spawn several social-uplift and educational programs that helped to empower local residents, especially black women. By the late 1960s, Bed-Stuy's poverty warriors were searching for new ways of institutionalizing the federal antipoverty commitment and gaining a measure of community control. They found one answer in an alliance with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who helped launch the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the country's first Community Development Corporation. Restoration drew unprecedented federal funds and soon pioneered influential strategies of brownstone revitalization and local business development. As it evolved in the 1970s, Restoration reflected the dual goals of employing low-income residents and retaining Bed-Stuy's middle class -- a difficult balancing act, especially in a moment of accelerating disinvestment, mounting crime, and waning political will. Nevertheless, Restoration provided a model that community groups nationwide would follow into the 1980s and beyond.

Between a Promise and a Trench examines how science is constituted as a strategic practice and site through which citizens make claims about racial democracy in Guyana. It shows how government policymaking around climate adaptation--which drew upon the recommendations of outside actors, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations (UN), and various NGOs and international scientific networks-- profoundly disrupted the country's delicate racial-ethnic balance. A contribution to the burgeoning anthropology on the social and political impact of climate change, the dissertation also speaks to current debates over race and citizenship, the complex relationship between expertise and democracy, and the competing post-colonial claims of Indo-, Afro-, and Amerindian Guyanese to land and self-determination. The dissertation is based on seventeen months of fieldwork and archival research conducted between, 2009-11 in coastal Guyana. It brings together three conflicting perspectives: of engineers, who drew upon datasets and models about flooding and construction of canals around IPCC and UN climate data; the state officials, who sought to reduce vulnerability to flood hazards through land evictions; and of Indo-, Afro-, and Amerindian Guyanese farmers and squatters who were evicted as a result of post-2005 engineering projects. I use the concept "politics of vulnerability" to describe how states assume that citizens experience vulnerability to climate change based on their "ethnic-political status," thereby making the extension of democratic rights contingent on citizens providing cultural knowledge to the state to manage climate change. The dissertation attends to the consequences of the canals, including collapsed housing, failed civic science programs, and erratic water allocation. In response to these failures, citizens charge that state engineering repositions environmental hazards around existing social welfare inequities between racial-ethnic communities. During my time in Guyana, I tracked these responses at four distinct sites. 1) I observed engineers at work in the field produce and interpret "datasets" and "models" about flooding and construction of canals around IPCC and UN climate data. 2) I gathered residents' "unofficial" stories about vulnerability to floods through interviews and participant observations of everyday life in two coastal villages, Sophia (a racially mixed urban squatter community) and Mahaica (a predominately Indo-Guyanese cash crop community), where people were evicted due to the post-2005 engineering projects. 3) I analyzed "official" data generated through civic science projects and fieldwork in Mahaica and Sophia by engineers, state officials, and scientists that addressed vulnerability to flood hazards and its relationship to land evictions and property rights. 4) I conducted archival research in Guyana's National Archives on documents relating to colonial-era canals (1920s-60s) that inform the current projects. Although there is a growing ethnographic literature on climate change, a critical anthropology of vulnerability has yet to emerge. This dissertation offers two key interventions in this emerging field. First, I argue that in applied contexts, the validity of climate science is structured by the ways in which governments hinge climate adaptation projects to address varying national racial-ethnic populations. Second, I argue that governments cultivate institutions of social welfare that encourage "racial-ethnic" niche markets to manage vulnerability to climate change to soothe citizens' fears of state failure and environmental insecurity in the everyday. In such contexts, experiences of vulnerability become privatized, informing a consumer-oriented practice of racial democracy.

This dissertation explores historical processes and daily practices of indigenization within the context of British Columbia's model for delegating Aboriginal agencies for child and family services. This research draws from historical data, examining the ways in which contemporary indigenization within Aboriginal child welfare is shaped by Canada's colonial past- most notably, the historical relationship between the Indian Residential School System and Aboriginal child welfare in Canada. Grounded in indigenous methodologies, research practice, and critical theory, this dissertation queries indigenization within the Pacific Aboriginal Child Welfare Association (PACWA). This dissertation explores the complexity of the urban setting in which PACWA operates, providing case studies of daily practices of indigenization within the association, considering the roles of Aboriginal Elders and Knowledge Keepers throughout this process, and arguing for the need to reframe urban Aboriginal child welfare in Canada. This dissertation asserts that Indigenization at PACWA is making significant differences in the lives of children and families involved in Aboriginal child welfare and that Aboriginal families continue to have their children removed at alarming rates most often because they are living in the aftermath of colonization, amidst contemporary conditions that continue to marginalize Aboriginal peoples. Indigenization is a process that can and is being achieved within the context of child welfare in British Columbia today. It is a process connected to Aboriginal sovereignty, self-government, identity and mainstream-Aboriginal relations. It is also a process that is making significant impacts in the lives of those connected to Aboriginal child welfare (Aboriginal and otherwise), while simultaneously being challenged by the structural inequalities and political eddies that continue to marginalize urban Aboriginal peoples. This research demonstrates that successful indigenization practice, at the level of large organizations such as PACWA, requires that various levels of Canadian government view them as true partners in a project of decolonization and indigenization. This requires a recognition and honouring of history and diversity of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, validated by means of mutual respect and sharing power.

Scholars of American politics often assume World War II liberalized white racial attitudes and prompted a liberal shift in the federal government's position on civil rights. This conjecture is generally premised on the existence of an ideological tension between a war against Nazism and the maintenance of white supremacy at home, particularly the southern system of Jim Crow. A possible relationship between the war and civil rights was also suggested by a range of contemporaneous voices, including academics like Gunnar Myrdal and civil rights activists like Walter White and A. Philip Randolph. However, while intuitively plausible, this relationship is generally not well-verified empirically. Using both survey and archival evidence, I argue the war's impact on white racial attitudes is more limited than is often claimed, but that the war shaped and constrained the executive branch's civil rights agenda in ways institutional scholars have generally ignored. The evidence is presented in two parts: First, I demonstrate that for whites in the mass public, while there is some evidence of slight liberalization on issues of racial prejudice, this does not extend to policies addressing racial inequities. White opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation actually increased during the war, especially in the South. There is some evidence of racial moderation among white veterans, relative to their counterparts who did not serve. However, the range of issues is limited in scope. Second, the war had both compelling and constraining impacts on the Roosevelt and Truman administrations' actions on civil rights. The war increased the probability of any change at all occurring, but in doing so it focused the civil rights agenda on issues of military segregation and defense industry discrimination, rather than a more general anti-segregation and job discrimination agenda. In summary, World War II had myriad impacts on America's racial order. It did not broadly liberalize white attitudes, but its effect on the White House was a precursor to the form of "Cold War civil rights" that would emerge in the 1950s.

Does authoritarian regime provide social protection to its people? What is the purpose of social welfare provision in an authoritarian regime? How is social welfare policy designed and enforced in the authoritarian and multilevel governance setting? Who gets what, when and how from the social welfare provision in an authoritarian regime? My dissertation investigates these questions through a detailed study of Chinese social health insurance from 1998 to 2010. I argue and empirically show that the Chinese social health insurance system is characterized by a nationwide stratification pattern as well as systematic regional differences in generosity and coverage of welfare benefits. I argue that the distribution of Chinese social welfare benefits is a strategic choice of the central leadership who intends to maintain particularly privileged provisions for the elites whom are considered important for social stability while pursuing broad and modest social welfare provisions for the masses. Provisions of the welfare benefits are put in practice, however, through an interaction between the central leaders who care most about regime stability and the local leaders who confront distinct constraints in local circumstances such as fiscal stringency and social risk. The dynamics of central-local interactions stands at the core of the politics of social welfare provision, and helps explain the remarkable subnational variation in social welfare under China's authoritarian yet decentralized system. This dissertation attempts to contribute to the studies of authoritarianism, decentralization and social welfare in the following aspects. First, in specifying the rationale, conditions and policy results of the interaction between Chinese central and local leaders in social welfare provision, the dissertation sheds light on how political leaders in an authoritarian regime with multilevel governance structure respond to social needs. The analysis of subnational politicians' incentive structure and policy choices in social welfare provision, which are missing in most extant studies of authoritarianism and social welfare, demonstrates an "indirect accountability" built into the Chinese social welfare provision. This "indirect accountability", evidenced by local leaders' proactive accommodation of social and local needs through social policies, may partially account for the puzzling resilience and flexibility of Chinese authoritarian regime. Second, the dissertation demonstrates that social welfare expansion, in some cases, is not a result of democracy but of resilient authoritarianism. Social welfare is one tool employed by authoritarian leaders to maintain regime stability. The political motivation for social welfare provision is different in non-democracies--it is more directly from top-down pressure of maintaining order rather than from bottom-up demands as in democracies--but this does not mean that non-democracies provide less social welfare than democracies do. Furthermore, the dissertation highlights the multidimensionality of social welfare policy and the trade-offs that politicians face in distributing welfare benefits. It suggests that politicians, no matter in democracies or non-democracies, face similar policy trade-offs (e.g. coverage versus generosity) in social welfare provision and that they make policy choices on the different dimensions of social welfare -coverage, generosity and stratification- according to the specific institutional and socioeconomic constraints they encounter. It is the combination of these different choices that constitute the variation of social welfare provision observed cross countries and within countries.

Over the past decade, cities have passed an unprecedented number of laws seeking to drive undocumented immigrants from their jurisdictions. At the same time, however, large numbers of cities have passed policies seeking to incorporate recent immigrants into local civic and social life, regardless of immigration status. What explains why similar cities have responded so differently? Quantitative analysis tests the explanatory power of theories of political opportunity structure, labor market competition, demographic changes represented as threats, and the exclusionary tendencies of homeowners in predicting the passage of exclusionary and inclusionary ordinances in cities nationwide. The predictors of the passage of exclusionary ordinances are consistent with the salience of political opportunity structure, demographic changes represented as threats, and the exclusionary tendencies of homeowners. The predictors of the passage of inclusionary ordinances are most consistent with theories of political opportunity structure and the relative absence of the exclusionary tendencies of homeowners in cities with lower levels of owner-occupied housing. Case studies in two sets of paired cities that passed diverging ordinances examine the social and political processes on the ground. This qualitative research finds that residents in exclusionary cities expressed anxieties over the effects of demographic change on home values and neighborhood character. Diverging processes of framing and mobilization emerge as central to the development of local collective identities that include or exclude new immigrant residents. Network analysis of the connections between local civil society organizations in each of the four case study cities identifies the architecture of local civil society networks as a significant factor correlated with the divergent responses to demographic change. The networks in exclusionary cities score highly on measures of density, clustering, and closure, suggest that the network is broken into cliques and that local elites are isolated both from recent immigrants and from non-elite, native-born residents. The high levels of network closure facilitate the creation of rigid group boundaries, the high levels of clustering reinforce pre-existing beliefs within those groups, and the network density aids in the enforcement of sanctions against those who deviate from group norms. By contrast, the networks in inclusionary cities are characterized by multiple organizational bridges between immigrant and native-born communities that facilitate the creation of relationships necessary to craft inclusive policies and a sense that local resources can grow with the population. The research suggests that the local laws seeking to drive out undocumented immigrants are an example of a broader category of exclusionary property laws. The linked social and spatial processes involved in the enactment and enforcement of these laws are one way in which categorical inequalities, such as socio-economic disparities by race, ethnicity, immigration status, or gender become embedded in place.