Governmental Illegitimacy and Incompetency in Canada and Other Liberal Nations: Implications for Hea

Abstract

Prepare an essay that addresses the following questions:Read the article: Governmental Illegitimacy and Incompetency in Canada and Other Liberal Nations: Implications for Health.

-Summarize how the authors define legitimacy and incompetency of governments? Do these ideas seem relevant when considering the determinants of the health of Canadians? How so? 

-Provide evidence from chapters 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, and 15 that would support the authors’ view that Canadians government are illegitimate and incompetent. 

-What might be the value of using terms such as illegitimate and incompetent to discuss these kinds of health issues?

Q: What might be the drawbacks?

Do Not Use Any Quotations.Use your own words.

The welfare state literature on developing nations is concerned with how governmental illegitimacy and incompetency are the sources of inequality, exploitation, exclusion, and domination of significant proportions of their citizenry. These dimensions clearly contribute to the problematic health outcomes in these nations. In contrast, developed nations are assumed to grapple with less contentious issues of stratification, decommodification, and the relative role of the state, market, and family in providing economic and social security, also important pathways to health.

There is an explicit assumption that governing authorities in developed nations are legitimate and competent such that their citizens are not systematically subjected to inequality, exploitation, exclusion, and domination by elites. In this article, we argue that these concepts should also be the focus of welfare state analysis in developed liberal welfare states such as Canada. Such an analysis would expose how public policy is increasingly being made in the service of powerful economic elites rather than the majority, thereby threatening health. It would also serve to identify means of responding to these developments.

In one important conceptualization with implications for health, the political economies – or form of the welfare state – of wealthy Western nations cluster into 3 welfare regimes: the social democratic, conservative, and liberal, to which others add a fourth, the Latin.2,3 The social democratic welfare state is distinguished by its strong commitments to state provision of citizen economic and social security – a concept related to equitable provision of economic and social resources – while the liberal welfare state generally relies on the economic marketplace to distribute, usually inequitably, economic and social resources. 

Analysis of the Legitimacy and Competency of Canadian Governing Authorities In liberal welfare states such as Canada, it is assumed governing authorities legitimately and competently act to provide economic and social security to the overall citizenry. Consistent with this assumption, researchers and advocates believe governments can be persuaded to implement the public policies necessary for health.They provide governments with information on the adverse effects of the inequitable distribution of resources with the expectation authorities will respond.

Yet the profound levels of stratification, lack of decommodification, and the provision of minimal supports and benefits to Canadians and others in liberal welfare states question this assumption.Instead, their enacting of public policies that benefit economic elites, such as retrenchment of government spending that leads to reduction of benefits and supports and reductions in marginal tax rates to the detriment of the majority, questions their magnanimity as well as legitimacy and competency.These governments instead contribute to inequality, exploitation, exclusion, and domination of significant proportions of the citizenry.