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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Central government > Central government policies
This collection of 79 oral histories offers a remarkable window into public housing's past in Chicago through the voices of its former residents and staff. Public housing was once a paradise of good housing, positive community, and careful management--a past that offers a blueprint for public housing's future. As John Hope Franklin suggested, Fuerst has given us something about which to ponder quite seriously. Fuerst offers a collection of 79 oral histories of former public housing residents and staff in Chicago. The voices remember a time between 1938 and 1960 when public housing offered low-income families desirable and attractive housing, a strong sense of community, and a supportive environment for children and families. Public housing also served as an engine of upward mobility into the middle class and beyond, particularly for African Americans. Repeatedly and emphatically, former residents describe positive experiences, communal feeling, and real gain from project life. They attribute much of this success to careful management by the prograM's early administrators, several of whom are interviewed. The remarkable and surprising stories told--about project life, about family and work, about race and community--offer a window into a time that has largely been forgotten, as the more recent decline of public housing has overshadowed the history of success documented here. Yet this past must be remembered, because the policies in place when public housing was paradise offer a path for revitalizing a much-needed program. As John Hope Franklin points out, Fuerst has given us someting about which to ponder quite seriously. Or, as Studs Terkel notes, Fuerst, who was there from the moment of creation, has put together a marvelous book. It is a collage of memories from those who recall the beauty that was there and the something bleak that has been manufactured. This work is full of heroes, the tenants of public housing today. It should be must-reading, especially for young journalists who would seek the truth of what we patronizingly call 'the inner city.' An important resource for scholars, students, professionals, and interested readers concerned with urban life in America.
Anton Pannekoek discusses the viability of workers' councils as an effective means of administrating a socialist society, as contrasted to the centralized doctrines of state communism or state capitalism. Conceived as an alternative way to establish and sustain socialism, the workers councils have so far never been successfully established at a national scale. Part of the problem was disagreements among revolutionaries about their size and responsibilities; while Lenin supported the notion during the revolutionary period, the councils were phased out in favor of a centralized state, rather than diffused through the strata of society. Pannekoek draws on history for his ideas, noting the deficiencies of previous revolutions and the major objectives a future revolution should hold. The various tasks a state of worker's councils must accomplish, and the enemies that must be overcome - notably fascists, bourgeois elements and big business - are listed.
While the president is the commander in chief, the US Congress plays a critical and underappreciated role in civil-military relations - the relationship between the armed forces and the civilian leadership that commands it. This unique book edited by Colton C. Campbell and David P. Auerswald will help readers better understand the role of Congress in military affairs and national and international security policy. Contributors include the most experienced scholars in the field as well as practitioners and innovative new voices, all delving into the ways Congress attempts to direct the military. This book explores four tools in particular that play a key role in congressional action: the selection of military officers, delegation of authority to the military, oversight of the military branches, and the establishment of incentives - both positive and negative - to encourage appropriate military behavior. The contributors explore the obstacles and pressures faced by legislators including the necessity of balancing national concerns and local interests, partisan and intraparty differences, budgetary constraints, the military's traditional resistance to change, and an ongoing lack of foreign policy consensus at the national level. Yet, despite the considerable barriers, Congress influences policy on everything from closing bases to drone warfare to acquisitions. A groundbreaking study, Congress and Civil-Military Relations points the way forward in analyzing an overlooked yet fundamental government relationship.
In 1934, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier began a series of "congresses" with American Indians to discuss his proposed federal bill for granting self-government to tribal reservations. For the first time, the reservation Indian was asked for input in the structuring of American Indian relations with federal and state government and law. In The Indian Reorganization Act, Vine Deloria, Jr., has compiled the actual historical records of those congresses. Deloria makes available important documents of the premier years of reform in federal Indian policy as well as the bill itself. A version of Collier's act eventually passed Congress, but in a less far-reaching form. Nevertheless, a new concept of self-government had emerged, one that now defines the federal government's approach to American Indian policy and that has changed forever the way American Indians define themselves.
This book uses the case of the rise and fall of the Internet gambling industry to illustrate a new and comprehensive approach to understanding how public policy is made in the United States. The theory advanced is that different phases of the policy process are governed by three distinct political dynamics: constraint, momentum, and discretion. The book maps this CMD model of the policy process onto the case of Internet gambling, examining the full range political venues in which issues of public policy are acted upon. It argues that constraint rules the day in the early phases of the policy process, momentum builds in the middle, and discretion comes into play most prominently as the policy cycle concludes. This CMD model both draws attention to previously understudied elements of policymaking, and explores the dynamic and interrelated nature of these three phases of the policy process.
In this new edition of Beyond Machiavelli, Beryl Radin updates her popular overview of the field of policy analysis. Radin, winner of the John Gaus Award from the American Political Science Association, considers the critical issues that confront the policy analysis practitioner, changes in the field, including the globalization of policy analysis, and the dramatic changes in the policy environment. She examines schools and careers; the conflict between the imperatives of analysis and the world of politics; the analytic tools that have been used, created, or discarded over the past fifty years; the relationship between decision makers and analysts as the field has multiplied and spread; and the assumptions about the availability and appropriateness of information that can be used in the analytic task. Once found largely in the United States, policy analysis has become global, and Radin discusses the field's new paradigms, methodologies and concepts of success. This new edition considers changes in expertise, controversies in the field, today's career prospects, and the impact of 9/11 on the field. She profiles three additional policy analysis organizations and updates the profiles of the organizations in the first edition. Continuing the trajectory of the fictional characters from the first edition, Radin adds a character representing the new generation just entering the field. The book discusses the shifts in society's attitudes toward public action, the availability of resources to meet public needs, and the dimensions of policymaking. Written for students, faculty, and practitioners, the book concludes with a look at the possible dimensions of the policy analysis field and profession as it moves into the future.
With the goal of showing the effect of domestic factors on the performance of poverty alleviation strategies in Latin America, Tracy Beck Fenwick explores the origins and rise of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) in the region, and then traces the politics and evolution of specific programs in Brazil and Argentina. Utilizing extensive field research and empirical analysis, Fenwick analyzes how federalism affects the ability of a national government to deliver CCTs. One of Fenwick's key findings is that broad institutional, structural, and political variables are more important in the success or failure of CCTs than the technical design of programs. Contrary to the mainstream interpretations of Brazilian federalism, her analysis shows that municipalities have contributed to the relative success of Bolsa Familia and its ability to be implemented territory-wide. Avoiding Governors probes the contrast with Argentina, where the structural, political, and fiscal incentives for national-local policy cooperation have not been adequate, at least this far, to sustain a CCT program that is conditional on human capital investments. She thus challenges the virtue of what is considered to be a mainly majoritarian democratic system. By laying out the key factors that condition whether mayors either promote or undermine national policy objectives, Fenwick concludes that municipalities can either facilitate or block a national government's ability to deliver targeted social policy goods and to pursue a poverty alleviation strategy. By distinguishing municipalities as separate actors, she presents a dynamic intergovernmental relationship; indeed, she identifies a power struggle between multiple levels of government and their electorates, not just a dichotomously framed two-level game of national versus subnational.
In this edited volume, an array of scholars has examined recent policymaking efforts in selected areas of contemporary importance. Government at Work: Policymaking in the Twenty-First Century Congress provides chapter-length treatment to reveal the similarities and fundamentals of policy development while also illustrating the unique issues and obstacles found in each policy environment. This book's scope spans the entire policymaking process, exposing the readers to the interaction among all major power centers, ranging from interest groups, media, courts, Congress, the president, and the federal bureaucracy. It shows the dynamic nature of American policymaking system. The approach employed in this book treats events, such as Congress passing a law or the Supreme Court announcing a ruling, as important steps in the policy process rather than as merely ends unto themselves. This volume focuses on major legislation passed by Congress since the turn of the century. It features one case study per chapter, demonstrating how issues rise to the national agenda, pass through the congressional labyrinth to become public policies, are implemented by the federal bureaucracy, receive feedback from affected elements of the society, and ultimately evolve over the years.
In Asia and the Pacific, climate change is now a well-recognised risk to water security but responses to this risk are either under reported, or continue to be guided by the incremental or business as usual approaches. Water policy still tends to remain too narrow and fragmented, compared to the multi-sectoral and cross-scalar nature of risks to water security. What's more, current water security debates tend to be framed in discipline specific or academic ways, failing to understand decision making and problem-solving contexts within which policy actors and partitioners have to operate on a daily basis. Much of the efforts to date has focussed on assessing and predicting the risks in the context of increasing levels of uncertainty. There is still limited analysis of emerging practices of risks assessment and mitigation in different contexts in Asia and the Pacific. Going beyond the national scales and focussing on several socio-ecological zones, this book captures stories written by engaged scholars on recent attempts to develop cross-sectoral and cross-scaler solutions to assess and mitigate risks to water security across Asia and the Pacific. Identifying lessons from successes and failures, it highlights management and strategic lessons that water and climate leaders of Asia and the Pacific need to consider. This book showcases reflective and analytical thought pieces written by key actors in the climate and water spaces. Several critical socio-ecological zones are covered - from Pakistan in the west to pacific islands in the east. The chapters clearly identify strategies for improvement based on the analysis of emerging responses to climate risks to water security and gaps in current practices. The book will include an editorial introduction and a final synthesis chapter to ensure clear articulation of common themes and to highlight the overall messages of the book.
Newtown. Columbine. Virginia Tech. Tucson. Aurora. Gun violence on a massive scale has become a plague in our society, yet politicians seem more afraid of having a serious conversation about guns than they are of the next horrific shooting. Any attempt to change the status quo, whether to strengthen gun regulations or weaken them, is sure to degenerate into a hysteria that changes nothing. Our attitudes toward guns are utterly polarized, leaving basic questions unasked: How can we reconcile the individual right to own and use firearms with the right to be safe from gun violence? Is keeping guns out of the hands of as many law-abiding Americans as possible really the best way to keep them out of the hands of criminals? And do 30,000 of us really have to die by gunfire every year as the price of a freedom protected by the Constitution? In Living with Guns , Craig R. Whitney, former foreign correspondent and editor at the New York Times , seeks out answers. He re-examines why the right to bear arms was enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and how it came to be misunderstood. He looks to colonial times, surveying the degree to which guns were a part of everyday life. Finally, blending history and reportage, Whitney explores how twentieth-century turmoil and culture war led to today's climate of activism, partisanship, and stalemate, in a nation that contains an estimated 300 million guns- and probably at least 60 million gun owners. In the end, Whitney proposes a new way forward through our gun rights stalemate, showing how we can live with guns- and why, with so many of them around, we have no other choice.
Based on an extended agonistic pluralism perspective, this book offers a novel notion of a transnational public sphere that goes beyond the questions of whether a European public sphere exists or is possible and instead provides a solid understanding of its key features. This book offers an alternative concept of European integration based on the idea of integrative and constitutive conflicts. Not only an exploration of the emerging European public sphere, this groundbreaking book evaluates the outcomes of the EU polices aiming to create it as well as the trans-European networks' efforts to become a pan-European civil society. Expert contributors also explore the European public sphere's contribution to democracy and present enhanced empirical knowledge of the role of supranational institutions and pan-European networks in facilitating European integration, thus challenging the liberal intergovernmentalist, neo-functionalist and multi-level governance approaches. Integration, Diversity and the Making of a European Public Sphere will be of interest to scholars and upper level students of European studies, politics and public policy. Global, regional and national civil society organizations, think tanks and media corporations will also find value in this book. Contributors include: W. Dressler, D.N. Duru, M. Klicperova-Baker, J. Kostal, M. Mokre, M. Perez, R. Sata, H.G. Sicakkan, H.-J. Trenz, J.H. van de Beek, F. Vermeulen
This work profiles the appalling human rights record of modern Indonesia, against a history of the country. Brutal repression, the unjust legal system and corrupt nepotism are described, with attention to the independence struggles of the East Timorese and West Papuans. The historical survey includes the anti colonialist campaign, the role of Sukarno as first president, the Suharto decades, the 1998 appointment of Habibie as third president and the social chaos caused by economic collapse. It also describes also how the United States and Britain plotted anti Sukarno coups, supported 1960s massacres and protected the despotic Suharto regime.
Hungry for Revolution tells the story of how struggles over food fueled the rise and fall of Chile's Popular Unity coalition and one of Latin America's most expansive social welfare states. Reconstructing ties among workers, consumers, scientists, and the state, Joshua Frens-String explores how Chileans across generations sought to center food security as a right of citizenship. In so doing, he deftly untangles the relationship between two of twentieth-century Chile's most significant political and economic processes: the fight of an emergent urban working class to gain reliable access to nutrient-rich foodstuffs and the state's efforts to modernize its underproducing agricultural countryside.
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