Why has the United States of America not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child? The veto fulcrum as a new health policy analysis framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) enshrines health as a human right among other rights for children, fulfilled by each member state legally endorsing its principles through ratification of the Convention. Only the United States of America of all of the UN state parties has not ratified the CRC. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to determine the reason(s) the CRC has not been ratified by the USA. METHOD: Method design involved a mapping literature search and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in the fields of global health, child rights, health policy, and US law. Implementing the health policy triangle systematized themes into content, context, processes, and actors as opposition or proponents of ratification. RESULTS: While most published opinions favour ratification of the CRC, critically, the literature focuses on pros and cons of ratification, rather than reasons why the US has not ratified. Interview informants expanded themes revealing a status quo of non-ratification which has become increasingly challenging to overcome. Drawing on veto player theory to explain the status quo and introducing a new policy analysis framework of a veto fulcrum reveals that within the process of ratification, single powerful actors at a veto fulcrum have made undemocratic decisions, obstructing CRC ratification. CONCLUSION: This research has forged a new policy framework, the veto fulcrum, which examines political systems where political actors as veto players have extraordinary power to make executive decisions against public opinion, and against good health policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.093 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".