Patrik Marier

Concordia University · Department of Political Science

The social construction of target populations (SCTP) approach assumes that policies are constructed to benefit (or punish) specific groups of citizens based on their relative power and social construction. This contribution tackles one of the most sustained critiques of the SCTP literature, namely, how a group can alter its social construction and...

The rise and transformation of the welfare state has been at the center of many scholarly debates. As a result of its generous welfare state, Sweden is often the key case, if not the benchmark, in comparative analysis. This has influenced theory on the growth of the welfare state. Multiple explanations feature causal relationships inspired by Swede...

Le vieillissement de la population et les politiques publiques vise à éclairer les débats concernant les enjeux liés aux importants changements démographiques. En présentant un ouvrage diversifié, tant par son approche multidisciplinaire que par ses méthodes, ce volume s’illustre par ses contributions dans plusieurs champs des politiques publiques,...

Introduction Population ageing directs the attention of policy makers to older people. Policy makers increasingly have to ponder what today's older people need and how existing institutions can adapt in order to accommodate an ageing population. However, when doing so, policy makers cannot focus on older age alone. After all, experiences during one...

How do changes to public schemes and ongoing economic difficulties impact private earnings-related pension schemes (PERPS) governed by social partners? The decreasing generosity of public schemes does put strong pressure onto social partners to improve their PERPS; however, PERPS face challenges of their own related to their integration within the...

Background and Objectives Coordination of governmental action is crowded with policies and programs that are highly interdependent, sometimes operating in silos if not contradicting each other. These dilemmas, or administrative quagmires, are heightened for older adults in general, but they are particularly problematic for marginalized older adults...

This article explores how the biomedicalisation of ageing permeates the fields of public administration and public policy. We posit that the biomedicalisation of ageing policies depends strongly on: (1) the institutionalisation of ageing policy, both with regard to ministerial responsibility for programmes targeting older adults and the constructio...

In the context of constraining services and support within public home care, this contribution analyses how older adults and home care workers experience and navigate administrative burdens. Relying on focus groups, interviews, and a survey conducted in the province of Québec (Canada), we demonstrate that older adults face an increasing number of a...

Using Gingrich’s (2011) typology of welfare markets, this contribution studies the selection and enactment of market tools in two different jurisdictions (France and Quebec). Quebec represents a classic example of a managed market with regional health authorities (CISSS/CIUSSS) seeking the lower the cost of long-term care by contracting services to...

Nova Scotia's Supportive Care Program (SCP) is an individualized funding program that provides funds for people living with dementia (PLWD) or acquired brain injuries to purchase basic home care services such as personal care, respite, cleaning and cooking. The SCP has the potential to address the Quintuple Aim of enhancing care experience, improvi...

Research on LGBTQ older adults reveals persistent accessibility problems with health and social services specific to this segment of the population as well as the need to develop inclusive approaches to remove accessibility barriers. In Quebec, governmental measures (such as public policy, action plans and reports) have prioritized actions to impro...

In this article, we study how political parties located on the right of the political spectrum adapt to changing electoral and political constraints. Drawing on the concept of policy feedback, we turn to the politics of social policy in the province of Quebec to show that the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), a right-wing party, embraced a more centri...

This book offers 22 in-depth case studies of public policies and programs of both provincial and federal governments in Canada that have been markedly successful. Using a common analytical framework, each case study describes the history and evolution of the policy, and assesses the extent of its programmatic, process, political, and long-term succ...

This book offers 22 in-depth case studies of public policies and programs of both provincial and federal governments in Canada that have been markedly successful. Using a common analytical framework, each case study describes the history and evolution of the policy, and assesses the extent of its programmatic, process, political, and long-term succ...

With an aging population, have federal and provincial governments acknowledged the diversity of the policy needs of older adults? This contribution analyzes administrative and policy documents across ministries to study the frequency and the depth of engagement involving older adults with a disability, older immigrants, and those living in poverty....

This contribution has two key objectives. First, inspired by earlier studies in comparative welfare state and in (social) gerontology, we develop a conceptualization of autonomy that is rooted in its social dimensions. This concept is then deployed to assess its policy considerations within the field of home care, both with regards to access and ge...

This policy analysis reviews three popular proposals with significant political endorsement to enhance long-term care (LTC), here defined broadly to include residential care facilities, home care, and community care, in the wake of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis: national standards, provincial autonomy, and de-privatization. The proposal...

Population aging is one of the most pressing issues facing governments and society today. With implications for health care, the economy, and an assortment of other policy areas, confronting this complex reality is increasingly urgent and never more so in the age of COVID-19. In The Four Lenses of Population Aging, Patrik Marier looks at how Canada...

The concept of autonomy is essential in the practice and study of gerontology and in long-term care policies. For older adults with expanding care needs, scores from tightly specified assessment instruments, which aim to measure the autonomy of service users, usually determine access to social services. These instruments emphasise functional indepe...

Comparing the situation of workers in nursing homes in two Canadian provinces and two states in the USA, this study draws on narrative accounts from frontline workers and finds that despite variation in the severity of the outbreaks they experienced, nursing home workers in each jurisdiction demonstrated three types of responses to pandemic policy...

Policy makers, practitioners, and scholars are increasingly examining the types of care services (formal vs. informal) offered to older adults. This study evaluates predictors of these adults’ preferences for care types in Québec, Canada, based on a province-wide survey inserted in a magazine of the largest seniors’ club in Canada (FADOQ). More tha...

This study examines the association of perceived neighborhood cohesion (NC) with older adults’ health and the buffering effects of NC against the negative effects of spousal caregiving on health. Data of 3329 community-living older adults living with a spouse in need of care from the Health and Retirement Study were collected at two time-points. Mu...

A grey tsunami is sweeping the land, wreaking social and financial havoc in its wake. Sound familiar? This myth about aging, along with twenty-eight others, is the focus of Getting Wise about Getting Old, which paints a far more accurate and nuanced portrait of old age. In it, experts debunk myths and persistent stereotypes about aging on a broad a...

The extent to which new governments appoint and dismiss senior public servants is widely claimed to be influenced by their country’s underlying administrative tradition. This is particularly the case within the Westminster tradition where such turnover is limited in nature, with most appointees coming from within the ranks of the public service. Th...

Older people are especially vulnerable to COVID-19, including and especially people living in long-term care facilities. In this Perspective, we discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on long-term care policy in Canada. More specifically, we use the example of recent developments in Quebec, where a tragedy in a specific facility is acting as a...

The goal of this commentary is to highlight the ageism that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 20 international researchers in the field of aging have contributed to this document. This commentary discusses how older people are misrepresented and undervalued in the current public discourse surrounding the pandemic. It points to issues i...

The goal of this commentary is to highlight the ageism that has emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 20 international researchers in the field of ageing have contributed to this document. This commentary discusses how older people are misrepresented and undervalued in the current public discourse surrounding the pandemic. It points to issues...

Background and objective: The concept of precarity holds the potential to understand insecurities and risks experienced by older people in the contemporary social, economic, political and cultural context. This study maps existing conceptualizations of precarity in relation to aging and later life, identifies key themes, and considers the use of p...

Le vieillissement de la population est souvent traité, dans les discours politiques et médiatiques, comme une catastrophe démographique, un lourd fardeau social ou financier pour la société. Le vieillissement de la population et la vieillesse restent encore aujourd'hui fréquemment associés à des représentations négatives, à des idées toutes faites...

In light of rapid socio-economic transformations combined with a growing ageing population, Chinese authorities have embarked on multiple initiatives to improve their long-term care (LTC) policies. As in Western countries, many of these new strategies involve the deployment of measures to facilitate ageing within one’s community. Relying on intervi...

Population aging and longevity in the context of declining social commitments, raises concerns about disadvantage and widening inequality in late life. This paper explores the concept of precarity as a means to understand new and sustained forms of risk and insecurity that affect late life. The article begins with a review of the definition and use...

While studies of policy diffusion and policy transfer have focused largely on industrialized countries, it is the exact opposite when it comes to pension policies where the focus remains on national elements such as institutions and partisanship. Focusing on a case with a high degree of programmatic similarities, this contribution fills this gap by...

This contribution presents competing lenses of population aging as policy problems and it compares their impact on the treatment of policy problems. Three lenses are analysed: intergenerational, biomedical and social gerontological. The intergenerational lens treats population aging as a new form of class conflict along age groups. The social geron...

numéro 79 de la revue Lien social et Politiques : "Les territoires du vieillissement

en Canadian gender equality policy has taken a “technocratic turn” that favours bureaucratic expertise to monitor and measure (in)equality rather than participatory and consultative mechanisms. While the processes and impacts of this shift are well documented at the federal level, less is known at the provincial level. This article takes stock of p...

This contribution analyses the importance given to gender in articles related to caregiving for older adults in five francophone newspapers (Le Soir, Le Devoir, Figaro, Libération and La Presse) across three countries (Belgium, France and Canada). Out of the 254 articles in our sample, less than a fifth (49) made any mention of gender. A closer ana...

Building upon earlier studies on ageism in the media and the polarised ageism framework, this contribution compares the prevalence of three forms of ageism – intergenerational, compassionate and new ageism – in four Canadian and American newspapers. The analysis has three objectives. First, it adapts the polarised ageism framework to a comparative...

This article tackles the importance of systemic retrenchment in welfare state research by focusing on two core elements neglected in the literature: the civil service and governmental revenues. Saskatchewan has possessed key ingredients associated with generous welfare states: a dominant left-wing party, a supportive bureaucracy and important non-v...

Cet article vise à sensibiliser les proches aidants, les familles, les intervenants, les chercheurs et les gestionnaires concernant les composantes de la réalité québécoise en termes de soutien à domicile et les enjeux liés à l’offre de services aux proches aidants. Les lois canadiennes et provinciales qui encadrent le soutien aux proches aidants l...

This article develops the concept of executive style to explore how variations in the relationships between politicians, career civil servants, and political appointees affect the types of policy outputs. A comparative analysis of home care policies in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia finds that the former’s civil service executive style – where profe...

Populations around the globe age. For Western countries, this demographic shift is one of the biggest current challenges, challenging individual life plans, family arrangements, market structures, care provisions, and the financial basis of pension schemes. This volume uses the life-course perspective to investigate causes and effects of population...

Available on the CREGES website @ http://www.creges.ca/site/fr/partage-des-savoirs/les-cahiers-du-creges

L'allongement de la durée de vie et le poids démographique croissant des personnes âgées au sein des sociétés occidentales ont constitué la vieillesse et le vieillissement comme des problèmes politiques et sociaux majeurs. Les regards sociologiques sur la diversité de la vieillesse et du vieillissement rassemblés dans cet ouvrage partagent une pers...

Both Canada and the European Union (EU) have been active in developing pension policies despite the lack of formal mandates to do so. While the Canadian government used its fiscal powers to expand its role in pension programs when pension emerged as a policy issue, the EU has been strongly limited by its lack of resources, institutional complexitie...

This article presents a comparative analysis of four Canadian provinces (Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Saskatchewan) with different administrative responses to population aging. The way in which population aging is tackled administratively matters greatly because it drives the type of policy responses being proposed and implem...

This article analyses the conditions under which commissions succeed in influencing policy change. The paper tackles three questions: What do governments gain by establishing a commission? What are the tools employed by commissions in order to make their recommendations and ensure that their output will have political significance? And how do commi...

Relying on four conceptualizations of the welfare state (universalism, redistribution, state capacity, and intergenerational equity), this article presents an overview of recent pension reforms in Canada, Mexico and the United States. Each country has introduced important reforms in the past 25 years and is currently engaged in debates to make othe...

A handful of Swedish parliamentarians, assisted by experts within the civil service, generated one of the most discussed pension reforms since the Chilean reform of the 1980s. This article argues that they formed a successful epistemic community. The group shared similar pension values, a commitment to finding a long-term solution, and a devotion t...

Population ageing and slower economic growth have raised serious questions about the willingness and ability of governments to maintain current social policies. Within this new reality, discussions on the future of public pensions have been predominant in political debates across Europe. This book explains why certain countries have been able to ra...

This paper analyzes Canadian retirement incomes by focusing on the dynamics of gender and immigration. We demonstrate that elderly women living alone and post-1970 immigrants are more likely to rely on the means-tested component of Canada's pension system, the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), which is an indication of their restricted capacity t...

The history of pension policies is particularly interesting when it comes to the public-private mix. Originally, most states sought to encourage the establishment of voluntary pension plans while supporting some forms of pension schemes for their own employees. When private solutions failed to extend coverage and benefits to most citizens, states b...

This article analyses critically the applicability of current theories of welfare state retrenchment to the 2004 public pension reform in Mexico, with the 1995 reform acting as a complementary case. In particular, this article contributes to the literature by analysing the reasons for which a potentially unpopular reform was successfully enacted. A...

This article analyzes the gender visions adopted by policy actors in pension reform debates. Based on the work of Fraser ( Fraser, N. 1994 . “After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State.” Political Theory 22 : 591–618; Fraser, N. 1995 . “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age.” New Left Revi...

Students of public policy and social mobilization alike should pay more attention to the political strategies of protest avoidance. Distinct from traditional blame-avoidance strategies, protest avoidance occurs when elected officials, facing direct and nearly inescapable blame, attempt to reduce the scope of social mobilization triggered by unpopul...

In the fall of2004, the Mexican Congress promulgated an important piece of legislation, which reformed the pension system of the employees of the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS). As a result of these changes, from August 2004, new IMSS employees will be enrolled into a mandatory contributive private pension plan. This retirement benefit...

This article has two key objectives. First, despite having been considered as a key element to favor the expansion and elaboration of the welfare state in industrial countries, bureaucrats have been largely ignored by the “New” Politics of the Welfare State. This article demonstrates that bureaucrats still matter in times of retrenchment, because t...

Recent scholarship on budgeting in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries indicates that political institutions impact the level of budget discipline. Building upon this previous research, we argue that the principal problem that must be addressed in both the government and the legislature to insure strong fiscal discipline is the common pool...

According to Paul Pierson and R. Kent Weaver, the "new politics of the welfare state" is about escaping the popular blame generated by cutbacks affecting a significant portion of the population. Although the concept of blame avoidance helps to explain the political logic of welfare state retrenchment, one can argue that a careful analysis of social...

This dissertation seeks to answer the question: what impedes/drives policy change? This objective is sought by analyzing the policy process behind recent pension reforms in four European countries (Belgium, France, Sweden and the UK). Despite similar pressures, policy responses have been quite varied. The UK and, to a lesser extent, Sweden have int...

This paper has two specific aims. First, it seeks to demonstrate that senior civil servants still play an important role in reforming the welfare state. Second, this paper challenges the notions that politicians, and more particularly Ministers, are simply conveying messages or simplified policy analysis to the electorates. Ironically, the literatu...