How Policy Shapes Politics: Rights, Courts, Litigation, and the Struggle Over Injury Compensation
Jeb Barnes and Thomas F. Burke
Abstract
The “global rise of judicial power” has been called one of the most significant developments in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century politics. This book examines the political consequences of “judicialization”—the growing reliance on courts, rights and litigation in public policy—by analyzing the field of injury compensation, in which judicialized and bureaucratized programs operate side-by-side. The study mixes quantitative data on a wide range of injury compensation policies with three in-depth historical studies tracing political struggles over Social Security Disability Insurance, ... More
The “global rise of judicial power” has been called one of the most significant developments in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century politics. This book examines the political consequences of “judicialization”—the growing reliance on courts, rights and litigation in public policy—by analyzing the field of injury compensation, in which judicialized and bureaucratized programs operate side-by-side. The study mixes quantitative data on a wide range of injury compensation policies with three in-depth historical studies tracing political struggles over Social Security Disability Insurance, asbestos litigation, and the obscure but fascinating issue of injuries purportedly caused by vaccines. The book finds that while social insurance programs that compensate for injury tend to bring interests together and narrow the scope of political conflict, the use of litigation individualizes politics, dividing social interests from another. By organizing issues as disputes between parties, litigation creates divisions between victims and villains, and winners and losers, and those divisions in turn shape politics, creating a fractious, chaotic struggle.
Keywords:
rights,
litigation,
courts,
politics,
judicialization
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199756117 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199756117.001.0001 |
