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LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATE APPLICATIONS



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LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATE APPLICATIONS

Some of the implications of this author’s work for Lincoln-Douglas debates have already been outlined in previous sections. Here I would like to give a more broad discussion of the application of Skocpol’s work to this activity. This particular theorist’s work is a great tool for debaters because she takes the time to analyze situations from a viewpoint that allows the reader to examine historical examples, which LD tends to draw upon, tied together with values and political context as well as factors such as class, to explain events. Her work provides a mechanism for examining proposals made in the form of policy action as well as those that are created more as social changes.


Skocpol’s work is useful for any Lincoln Douglas debater who finds themselves in a debate about domestic or foreign social policies. She takes great care in pointing out the roots of social policy as well as explaining work done in a variety of fields and showing what other scholars have contributed to the research. She also does a beautiful job of answering those theories that she chooses to disagree with. In Skocpol’s book a debater will not only find a framework through which to construct a case, they will find useful examples and explanations that support the arguments they choose to make. Additionally, reading Skocpol’s work will assist debaters in understanding perspectives that may be used to answer their case and providing them the tools necessary for refuting such arguments.
The final reason that debaters may find Skocpol’s work accessible is that she does not merely offer an explanation of why things are the way that they are nor does she stop after a thorough criticism of a particular structure. Instead, her criticisms and explanations end with plans for practical actions that could bring about desired change. No matter what subject a debater may access this author’s work to find she will end her discussion with a workable solution to the problems laid out in the discussion. Following her structure will allow debaters not only to have a political theory on which to base their arguments but it will provide a logical structure that culminates in a workable mechanism for change that should make sense to the critic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barker, Kristin Kay, “Federal Maternal Policy and gender Politics: Comparative Insights,” JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY, July 31, 1997, p.183.


Dubrow, Gail Lee, “Impersonal at best: tales from the tenure track,” OFF OUR BACKS, May 31, 1982,

p. 28.
Halliday, Terrance C. “Review Section Symposium: Lawyers and Politics and Civic Professionalism: Legal Elites and Cause Lawyers,” LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY, Fall, 1999.


Kornbluth, Felicia A., “The New Literature on Gender and the Welfare State: The U.S. Case,” FEMINIST STUDIES, April 30, 1996, p.171.
Ritter, Gretchen, and Nicole Mellow, “The State of Gender Studies in Political Science,” THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, September 2000.
Skocpol, Theda and Stanley B. Greenberg, THE NEW MAJORITY, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Skocpol, Theda, THE MISSING MIDDLE, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.
Skocpol, Theda, PROTECTING SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS: THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF SOCIAL POLICY IN THE UNITED STATES, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Skocpol, Theda, STATES & SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FRANCE, RUSSIA & CHINA, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Wineman, Steven, THE POLITICS OF HUMAN SERVICES, Boston: South End Press, 1984.

SKOCPOL’S THEORY OF THE STATE IS GOOD



1. Skocpol CAN accounts for institutional factors BEARING ON politicS

Kristin Kay Barker, Professor of Sociology, “Federal Maternal Policy and gender Politics: Comparative Insights,” JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY, July 31, 1997, p.183.

Skocpol's larger theoretical agenda is to substantiate her framework -- a polity-centered perspective -- for accounting for the trajectory of social provisions. Given the enormity of her undertaking, resulting in over 500 pages of text, I will necessarily condense her account. Simply stated, in her polity-centered perspective (much as in her earlier state-centered model), the history of social policy is understood by situating it "within a broader, organizationally grounded analysis of American political development"(526). In other words, governmental institutions, bureaucrats, political parties and officials, electoral rules, and policy feedback loom large. Together, these institutionalized forces create policy opportunities and barriers.

2. Skocpol’s explains states policies' relationship to sexism well

Felicia A. Kornbluth, “The New Literature on Gender and the Welfare State: The U.S. Case,” FEMINIST STUDIES, April 30, 1996, p.171.

To this already weakened edifice of Marxian theory, historical sociologist Theda Skocpol delivered a series of blows that threatened to bring it tumbling down. "[C]apitalism in general has no politics," she argued in 1980, "only (extremely flexible) outer limits.... [S]tate structures and party organizations have (to a very significant degree) independent histories." 13 Skocpol and her colleagues redirected the focus of study, from whether and how economic elites could determine political outcomes, to the emergence of particular government policies from particular governments. 14 In Skocpol's vision, the shape of a government in itself-which she takes as mostly invariant over time, that is, the United States possesses a decentralized, weakly bureaucratic "Tudor polity," whereas historic monarchies like Sweden and France have strong central states-has enormous weight in shaping public policy. The negotiations and conflicts among politicians, bureaucrats, and elite interest groups account for much of the remainder. In her newest work, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, Skocpol introduces the term "structured polity" to describe the mix of political autonomy and social constraints that operate to produce social policy. However, just as the neo-Marxists admitted the "relative autonomy" of politics while loading the dice in favor of "determination in the last instance" by economic power, Skocpol pushes social determinants out of her study so far as to load the dice in favor of autonomous state actors.
Neither neo-Marxists nor Skocpolians offered a model that entirely works for feminist students of welfare. However, the emphasis of both models on determination and autonomy, in combination with the postmodern suspicion of theories that make social life sum up into a neat coherent whole, has helped in describing the complex historical relationships between masculine power and government policy. Although not always explicitly, the literature under review profiles both the tight links between sexism and state policies, and the random walk that such policies often take along their autonomous historical paths.

3. INCLUDING gender in political studies improves the analytic framework

Gretchen Ritter, Associate professor of American Politics at University of Texas at Austin and Nicole Mellow, a graduate student in the same department, “The State of Gender Studies in Political Science,” THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, September 2000.

Research on policy in a historical context tends to be preoccupied with broad theoretical questions that are of concern to feminist and other political theorists. There is a tradition of research in the area of social welfare exemplified by scholars such as Theda Skocpol and Gwendolyn Mink that has influenced not only scholarship on American political development but interdisciplinary feminist scholarship as well. In Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1992), Skocpol asserts that the early development of American social policy was shaped by a social feminist movement that advocated for the establishment of a maternalist welfare state. In The Wages of Motherhood (1995), Mink follows the development of this welfare state through the New Deal and argues that it was not only gendered but also racialized in ways that lowered the civic status of poor women and nonwhites. This type of policy and law research offers one of the most promising venues for integrating gender in such a way as to both critique and reformulate standard theories and interpretations of AP. Gender is being used not just to add women to a fixed political picture. Rather, it provides an analytic concept for understanding the nature of political relations and state institutions.



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