Welfare Hot Buttons: Women, Work, and Social Policy Reform

In: Canadian journal of political science: CJPS = Revue canadienne de science politique, Volume 37, Issue 4, p. 1032-1033

Abstract

Welfare Hot Buttons: Women, Work, and Social Policy Reform, Sylvia
Bashevkin, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, pp. viii, 188.Welfare Hot Buttons raises important, and in some ways
uncomfortable, questions. Its major argument, in comparing social policy
reform in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, is that the
conservative leaders (Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Margaret Thatcher,
John Major, Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell) were, in their social policy
reforms, less punitive, less restrictive and less obsessed with paid work
than their post-conservative successors (Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jean
Chrétien). This raises important questions about the importance of
elections and of elected politicians. There were real expectations that,
to take the Canadian example, electing Chrétien's Liberals was
a major shift away from Mulroney's Conservatives yet, as Sylvia
Bashevkin shows, this was not true in the vital policy area of social
policy reform.