From the first free elections in post-Soviet Russia in 1989 to the end of the Yeltsin period in 1999, Russia's parliament was the site of great political upheavals. Conflicts between communists and reformers generated constant turmoil, and twice parliamentary institutions broke down in violence. This book offers the first full account of the inaugural decade of Russia's parliament. Thomas F. Remington, a leading scholar of Russian politics, describes in unique detail the Gorbachev-era parliament of 1989-91, the interim parliament of 1990-93, and the current Federal Assembly.

Focusing particularly on the emergence of parliamentary parties and bicameralism, Remington explores how the organization of the Russian parliament changed, why some changes failed while others were accepted, and why the current parliament is more effective and viable than its predecessors. He links the story of parliamentary evolution in Russia to contemporary theories of institutional development and concludes that, notwithstanding the turbulence of Russia's first postcommunist decade, parliament has served as a stabilizing influence in Russian political life.

This comprehensive volume brings together the key articles on relations between business and government from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. The editors have selected works that explore the themes of business and the state, organizing the firm for political action, managing government affairs, lobbying models, business governance and regulation, comparative business - political systems and internationalization and transnational business regulation. With an original introduction by the editors, this volume is an essential resource for scholars, students and policy makers interested in political science, business studies and economics.

A one-of-a-kind introduction to the major issues and controversies dominating the heated debate over U.S. forest policy today. Forest Conservation Policy: A Reference Handbook chronicles the dramatic history, current status, and global influence of U.S. forest policy. Beginning with the foundations of early forest law during the colonial period through the rise of the Conservation Movement in the wake of 19th century massive forest exploitation, this reference also discusses the environmental challenges that have rewritten recent U.S. forest policy and explores future policy directions. What are the effects of forest destruction on biological diversity? Has the sustainable forest management movement been effective? Given the fact that individual landowners control the greatest share of U.S. forestland, how are forests on private lands regulated? Students and concerned citizens alike will discover answers to these and other critical questions regarding what is left of the nation's dwindling forests. Subject-indexed description of the major issues dominating the current debates over the future of forest policy Exhaustive references to government and nongovernment forestry organizations at both the national and regional levels

Leading the problems most critical to government decision makers worldwide are those that derive from privatization, democratization, and decentralization. Dr. Nagel and a panel of academics and practitioners help clarify the ways in which problems traceable to these trends are being handled -- and how they might be handled better -- in light of the goals, experiences, constraints, and other factors affecting participants in world governance. Among the many important features of the book is its interdisciplinary approach and the way it offers African, Asian, Latin American, European and North American viewpoints. It also combines the perspectives of liberal and conservative ideologies. Cross-national with concrete examples and broad concepts and principles carefully detailed, the book is an important source of background and insight. Nagel and the contributors make clear that privatizing can involve shifting from government to private operations, with or without government ownership and with or without liberal contract provisions to protect consumers, workers, or the environment. They show that democratization can include the expansion of political participation and can give minorities the legal right to convert the majority to their positions, possibly the technological and economic facilitators as well. They also investigate ways in which national or state governments can be involved as "high units" in decentralization processes, but show that decentralization can involve local governments, neighborhoods, businesses, or even individuals as the lower or "decentral units." Throughout, the book offers alternative positions and discusses their consequences from a variety of cross-nationaland interdisciplinary perspectives.

This is the only book the general reader will ever need in order to understand the workings of money, banking, and finance as a citizen and consumer. Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis makes the arcane world of finance easily understood in concrete terms. This is not simply a quick recap of the current crisis. It is a guide designed to develop a real and lasting understanding of money and finance—an understanding readers can use to come to their own conclusions regarding the 2008 meltdown and any further economic events. Financial Market Meltdown explains the nature and workings of money, credit, financial instruments, and markets, from the beginnings of integrated finance in Medieval Italy up to the panic of 2008. It then describes how the modern global financial ecology evolved through a series of historical accidents and how this limits what can actually be done to make the system "safe." Throughout, author Kevin Mellyn uses simple examples, analogies, and the "real" history of institutions to make abstract financial concepts concrete and comprehensible.

With the end of the 20th century, Dixon and Scheurell decided it was an opportune time to critically assess what governments have achieved with their plethora of public social welfare policies. While Marxist socialists, democratic socialists, social democrats, and reluctant collectivists were all eager, at various times, to construct their vision of the ideal society, the idea of state welfare was slow to take root. As Dixon and Scheurell point out, at the turn of the century, only a handful of industrializing countries were willing to grapple with the problems of poverty, inequality, and social exclusion. Two world wars and the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, sensitized many societies to the human, social, and even political costs of un-met social welfare needs. Thus, the milieu needed for the birth of state welfare came into existence, first in Western Europe, then in Australasia, followed by North and South America and, finally, in parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

The state welfare dream was that citizenship would guarantee every individual a secure lifestyle, with a minimum degree of insecurity, and the wherewithal to develop to the greatest possible extent as individuals and as members of society. It is, Dixon and Scheurell argue, the most significant set of social institutions developed in the 20th century. Admittedly, it is one that had within it the seeds of its own potential destruction--the vicious circle of growing welfare dependency, increasing state control, deepening poverty, and the emergence of an intractable underclass--that has legitimized calls for the individualization of the social. Undoubtedly, this collection of essays on key states, charting the rise and fall of state welfare, examines a monumental 20th century event and will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students involved with social welfare issues, as well as policy makers and concerned citizens.

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.

Romero examines the extent to which majority American opinion has shaped Congressional and Supreme Court responses to civil rights issues. She provides an institutionally oriented history of civil rights policy as well as an examination of the validity of the blueprint for our national government. In Romero's view, the design of the government, as articulated in "The Federalist," was meant to provide a balance between a facilitation of the majoritarian democratic process and protection of the rights of minorities. The struggle for civil rights reform represents perhaps the best modern test of whether the Founders' expectations were valid: Were the Founders correct in assuming that, in their respective consideration of minority rights, Congress would reflect majority preferences while the Supreme Court would remain insulated?

After analyzing the shape and direction of public opinion regarding civil rights, Romero examines the congressional record and the record of the Supreme Court. She concludes with a reassessment of the predictions of the Founders as applied to civil rights policy. Of particular interest to scholars and students involved with institutional policy making as well as civil rights issues.

Environmental policy is high on the political agenda in many countries. This book identifies the failures of the market mechanism in the face of environmental problems and shows how economic policy should be designed to overcome them. Special attention is paid to the possible benefits from a green tax reform.

The death penalty remains one of the most controversial issues in the United States. Its proponents claim many things in their defense of its continued application. For example, they claim that it deters crime, that death by lethal injection is painless and humane, that it is racially neutral, and that it provides "closure" to families of the victims. In this comprehensive review of the major death penalty issues, the authors systematically dismantle each one of these myths about capital punishment in a hard-hitting critique of how our social, political, and community leaders have used fear and myth (symbolic politics) to misrepresent the death penalty as a public policy issue. They successfully demonstrate how our political and community leaders have used myth and emotional appeals to misrepresent the facts about capital executions. Successive chapters address the following topics: the notion of community bonding, the expectation of effective crime fighting, the desire for equal justice, deterrence, the hope for fidelity to the Constitution, the claim of error-free justice, closure, retribution, cost-effectiveness, and the messianic desires of some politicians. In each of these areas the authors quote from death penalty advocates making these claims and then proceed to analyze and ultimately dismember the claimed advantages of the death penalty.

At the transition from the 20th to the 21st Century, land use planning and growth management have become two of the most controversial issues in state and local government policy. Primarily the province of local government until the 1970s, state governments have become increasingly involved in land use planning. In the 1990s Vice President Gore's promotion of "Smart Growth" has brought it into the national arena, while President Clinton has devoted considerable time to land use, land preservation, and urban development issues. Critically examining government land use policies and arguments supporting them, the contributors explore market alternatives to government land use planning. Despite the apparent popularity of government restrictions on land use, the scholars writing for this volume advocate a more market-based approach. Showing that the problems of sprawling development have been misunderstood and overstated, they argue that land use policy can be better improved through market mechanisms than by the central planning of land use bureaucracies.

The world of business is changing—fast. The prevailing model for creating wealth—which has its roots in the industrial revolution and which dominated the last century—no longer applies. Natural Capitalism introduces an alternative, a new paradigm. Praised by business and political leaders as well as economists and environmentalists around the globe, this groundbreaking book reveals how tomorrow's most successful global businesses will draw profit from their own environmental responsibility.

Policing and ecological crises - and all the inequalities, discrimination, and violence they entail - are pressing contemporary problems. Ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change threaten local communities and ecosystems, and, cumulatively, the planet as a whole. Police brutality, wars, paramilitarism, private security operations, and securitization more widely impact people - especially people of colour - and habitats. This edited collection explores their relationship, and investigates the numerous ways in which police, security, and military forces intersect with, reinforce, and facilitate ecological and climate catastrophe. Employing a case study-based approach, the book examines the relationships and entanglements between policing and ecosystems, revealing the intimate connection between political violence and ecological degradation.

Language policies in Southeast Asia have been shaped by the process of nation-building on the one hand and by political and economic considerations on the other. The early years of nation-building in Southeast Asia generated intensive language conflicts precisely because state policies privileged the idea of a monolingual nation and thus endeavoured to co-opt or even do away with troublesome ethnic identities. In recent years, language policies are increasingly influenced by pragmatic considerations, especially globalization and the awareness of a linkage between language and economic development, such that Southeast Asian states in varying degrees have become less insistent on promoting monolingual nationalism. This book evaluates the successes and drawbacks of language policies in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar, especially the ways in which these policies have often been resisted or contested. It is an invaluable primer on this linguistically complex region and a resource for scholars, policy-makers, civil society activists and NGOs in various parts of the world facing equally challenging ethnic/language issues.

Entrepreneurship is often cited as the single most important factor in economic development. Although this contention is limited mostly to the realm of private business activities, entrepreneurship is also present in governmental organizations. Public entrepreneurs, like their private counterparts, are agents of change.

This study hypothesizes that although public entrepreneurship requires availability of capital and presence of educated public and administrators, to be effective it demands also cultural values of 'individualism', 'need for achievement', and 'need for certainty'. Or, in other words, that culture and history matter. The hypothesis is tested in four historically and culturally distinctive regions in Poland. The research shows that despite forty-five years of communist rule stressing the uniformity of the "new socialist society," differences in the realm of cultural and political values remained. These, in turn, influenced other areas of public life. Almost immediately after the decentralization of local governments in 1991, some local governments showed more entrepreneurial spirit than others. At least part of these differences can be accounted by better socioeconomic situation of a region, but culture seems to be playing even a larger role in this entrepreneurial race.

Sandra M. Anglund examines the American national government's small business assistance policy from the passage of the Small Business Act of 1953 onward. She traces the heritage of the policy and shows how American core values, those often referred to as the American Creed, contributed to shaping that policy.

Anglund points out that the American national government is in the business of promoting small business. Government agencies help entrepreneurs develop small businesses through a wide range of programs providing financial assistance such as loans, government contract assistance including set-asides, and management and technical support. Unlike government programs for farmers and big businesses, which are usually invisible to the citizenry, small business aid programs are extremely and intentionally visible.

Congress declared the policy of aiding small business and launched the contemporary era of small business assistance programs in the Small Business Act of 1953. In this study, Anglund traces the heritage of the Small Business Act, probes influences on small business and enactments of the 1953-1997 period, and show how American core values, those often referred to as the American Creed, contributed to shaping small business policy and to the support it received. Scholars, students, and researchers involved with public policy, political culture, business politics and history, and economic development will find this study of particular interest.

Among the most intractable problems in the public sector is how to train effective administrators. Nagel and the contributors to this wide-ranging investigation show how worldwide the training problem is, and how critical is the need to solve it. Included here are discussions of, among other issues, how to motivate, reward, promote, and sanction new and experienced hires, and also how to deal with them fairly and productively in other ways. They explore ways to provide training courses in colleges, government agencies, and private sector training facilities, how to teach specific subjects, such as financial administration (including taxation, spending, budgeting), and how to develop and implement public policies that are effective, efficient, and equitable.

Interdisciplinary as well as cross-national, the book provides viewpoints from both academics and practitioners - people from political science, public administration, public policy and related disciplines. It also offers a combination of liberal and conservative ideological viewpoints, and reaches into Africa, Asia, East and West Europe, Latin America and North America for its viewpoints. Among the book's features are its stress on the importance of well-trained public administrators, its coverage of the controversial aspects of public administration training, and its success at integrating the substance of public policy with administrative procedures. The result is a major source of information for public administrators and policy makers already in government service and for students in academic programs preparing them for it.

This study identifies the mechanisms through which women can reach positions of power in public life. The study highlights the processes which may contribute new impulse to the vitality of the industrialized countries, introducing models characterized by flexibility and creativity both in enterprises and politics.

This handbook is unique in its consideration of social and cultural contributions to sustainable oceans management. It is also unique in its deconstruction of the hegemonic value attached to the oceans and in its analysis of discourses regarding what national governments in the Global South should prioritise in their oceans management strategy. Offering a historical perspective from the start, the handbook reflects on the confluence of (western) scientific discourse and colonialism, and the impact of this on indigenous conceptions of the oceans and on social identity. With regard to the latter, the authors are mindful of the nationalisation of island territories worldwide and the impact of this process on regional collaboration, cultural exchange and the valuation of the oceans. Focusing on global examples, the handbook offers a nuanced, region relevant, contemporary conceptualisation of blue heritage, discussing what will be required to achieve an inclusive oceans economy by 2063, the end goal date of the African Union's Agenda 2063. The analysis will be useful to established academics in the field of ocean studies, policymakers and practitioners engaged in research on the ocean economy, as well as graduate scholars in the ocean sciences.

Members come and go, reforms are attempted and abandoned, but congressional norms of seniority, specialization, and reciprocity adapt, survive, and continue to influence the course of American government. In the first major look at congressional normative behavior in 25 years, Choate argues these resilient folkways survive because members value the institutional stability and continuity they provide. Working from extensive on-the-record interviews with past and present House members, Choate's work is the first to study the unsettling effects on norms brought on by party switching.