This book examines developments in governance reform in Britain, with a particular focus on the period since 2010. We argue that the experiences of the past decade mean that public value-based ideas are required to inform governance reform for the coming years. This needs to be prioritised due to the twin challenges of managing the aftermath of Brexit and navigating through the recovery phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. The volume outlines key themes, issues and debates relevant to contemporary public sector reform including: modes of state governance, evidence-based policy-making debates, the challenges and possibilities of public sector innovation, accountability issues, and the implications of Brexit. The overall conclusion of the book is that the coming decade presents an opportunity for more paradigmatic changes to UK governance but, for this to happen, political leaders need to prioritise a 'reinventing government' agenda underpinned by public value-based thinking and approaches. This book will be of particular interest to students of politics and public administration and relevant for those with general research interests in British governance and public policy.

Managing Socialism challenges the theoretical underpinnings of Cuban Studies--the elite/mass perspective. It offers a major reinterpretation of the revolutionary process which focuses on the rise and fall of different types of social actors at the intermediate level of Cuban society. Frank Fitzgerald identifies intermediate level types: the prerevolutionary middle class; the old cadres who in the 1960s attained administrative positions with political credentials; and the new professionals who primarily since 1970 enter these same occupations on the basis of education. Fitzgerald focuses on the transitions from one type to the next and uncovers conflict/cooperation patterns between the three strata of Cuban society. His study offers new insight into the early exodus from Cuba, the problem of scarce skills, and Cuba's educational expansion. Managing Socialism's previously unexplored subject matter and its challenging theoretical approach make it required reading. Focusing on the relationship between social stratification and politics broadly conceived, Fitzgerald examines major changes at the intermediate level of Cuban society resulting from and in turn influencing the Cuban revolutionary process. Thereby dismissing the elite/mass perspective theory, Fitzgerald begins his analysis with an examination of factors leading to the scarcity and misallocation of skills in the 1960s. Leadership responses to this problem are then analyzed as important links to the crisis of 1970 and the emergence of new professionals. The post 1970 rectification process is explored and a study conducted of the decline of the old cadres and rise of the new professionals. A chapter is then given to the problem of bureaucratic centralism and typical patterns of conflict and cooperation between social types. A discussion of the 1986 rectification campaign and a summary of major findings conclude Fitzgerald's provocative work.

This text analyzes the changing nature of centre-province relations in China in a period of rapid economic change. It aims to show how leadership conflicts over the nature and scope of economic change gave rise to an incremental and reactive reform process. The resulting partially reformed economic system not only gave many provincial leaders the ability to ignore central economic commands, but the perceived consequences of reform also increased the desire of some local leaders to assert their independence.

As the relationship between the United States and Latin America becomes an important focus of world attention, The Politics of Colombia is a welcome study of this South American country. A comprehensive analysis of the international influences on Colombian politics, as well as of the country's policymaking processes, this book will introduce the reader to one of the more important, yet least known, countries of the hemisphere.

The balance of power is one of the most influential ideas in international relations, yet it has never been systemically and comprehensively examined in pre-modern or non-European contexts. This book redresses this imbalance. The authors present eight new case studies of balancing and balancing failure in pre-modern and non-European international systems. The collective, multidisciplinary and international research effort yields an inescapable conclusion: much of the conventional wisdom about the balance of power does not survive intact with non-European evidence.

A strong challenge against the present American system of law enforcement, this book contends that politics have prevented police from achieving their sworn mission. Although his analysis is based on established theory, the author uses his own research and experience as evidence of the failure of the criminal justice system. Police departments are revealed as examples of a bureaucracy that has lost sight of its purpose and only seeks to survive. This work will be of interest to those seeking a different and controversial view of criminal justice, police science, public administration, urban studies, and political science programs.

Coalitions are the commonest kind of democratic government, occurring frequently in most countries of Western Europe. It is usually assumed that political parties came together in a government coalition because they agree already, or can manage to reach an agreement, on the policy it should pursue. This book checks this idea out, in 12 countries of Western Europe plus Israel, using evidence from party election programmes and government programmes. It demonstrates that party policies do influence government programmes, but not to the extent they would if policy-agreement were the sole basis of coalition.

This book provides a wealth of empirical material to understand key aspects of EU governance including its plurality of actors and policy making modes and its functioning during crisis management. Authored by legal scholars and political scientists, it presents new research and insights on the role of EU agencies in the context of the Euro and migration crises. Specifically, the contributions assess why the crises have led to the creation of new EU agencies and what roles these agencies have performed since their inception; how the crisis, notably the migration crisis, has impacted on existing EU agencies; how EU agencies have shaped the policies during and after the crises; and, how the crisis has affected the accountability of EU agencies. This book is essential in understanding the intricacies of EU crisis management and the specific role of EU agencies therein, as well as EU governance more broadly. Chapter 9 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book critically surveys a decade of disasters in Otautahi Christchurch. It brings together a diverse range of authors, disciplinary approaches and topics, to reckon with the events that commenced with the 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence. Each contribution tackles its subject matter through the frame of Critical Disaster Studies (CDS). The events and the subsequent recovery provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from a series of concatenating urban disasters in order to prepare us for our future on an urban planet facing unprecedented environmental pressures. The book focuses on the production of vulnerability, the human dimensions of disaster, the Indigenous response to disasters and the practical lessons that can be drawn from them.

Introducing the institutional logics perspective to street-level analysis, this book examines how street-level workers deal with the institutional logics that guide their organization - whether they follow or challenge them. While doing so, the book develops a theoretical framework to study street-level workers' institutional agency within organizations from different institutional backgrounds. The book conceptualizes street-level workers as institutional entrepreneurs and presents an original process model to capture deinstitutionalization efforts in street-level discourse. This ordinal model accounts for embedded agency and institutional entrepreneurship as well as for more gradual moves towards deinstitutionalization through the hybridization of institutional logics. The author tests the model empirically using interview data and discusses how street-level workers diverge from the institutional logic of their organization in almost two thirds of their statements, indicating a tendency towards institutional entrepreneurship. The book finally combines two literature strands: institutionalism and implementation research, showing how street-level workers may be perceived as institutional entrepreneurs. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science, public policy, public administration, and organizational studies, as well as to practitioners and policy-makers interested in a better understanding of institutional entrepreneurs, street work, and the institutional logics perspective.

The United States and Canada share the longest border in the world, maintain one of the closest alliances, and are notably similar in many ways. Yet the two countries also have important differences, including sharply contrasting political institutions. In The United States and Canada, Paul J. Quirk has gathered a distinguished cast of contributors to present an integrated comparative examination of the political systems of the United States and Canada-with special attention to the effects of political institutions and their interaction with political values, geographic and demographic factors, and other influences. The volume explores the differences between the American presidential (or separation-of-powers) system and the Canadian parliamentary system-focusing on electoral and party systems, executive leadership and the legislative process, bureaucratic influence, and federalism. It proceeds to examine patterns of governance in a wide range of issue areas: economic policy; climate-change policy; healthcare policy; civil rights/integration and immigration; and abortion and gay rights. A sweeping comparative account, this volume serves as an authoritative guide for anyone interested in why the two countries differ and where they might be headed.

Integrated Marketing Communication: Celebrity and the American Political Process uses an integrated marketing communication perspective to examine the brand of the celebrity as it is brought into the American political system, primarily in the form of celebrity endorsements and branding, as candidates, causes, and movements use celebrities as a strategy to reach voters. Jennifer Brubaker posits that while the relationship between celebrities and political issues is hardly new, it has evolved into a significant connection-in the past, it was a novelty to see a politically active celebrity; today, it's becoming an expectation related to fame. Using integrated marketing communication and persuasion theory, Brubaker argues that establishing candidates' brand identity is a critical factor in determining whether they win or lose an election, and celebrity-politics relationships are a central tool in building a candidates' brand identity. Scholars of political science, communication, marketing, and history will find this book particularly useful.

Policy knowledge derived from data, information, and evidence is a powerful tool for contributing to policy discussions and debates, and for understanding and improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of government action. For decades, politicians, advocates, reformers, and researchers have simultaneously espoused this value, while also paradoxically lamenting the lack of impact of policy knowledge on decision making, and the failure of related reforms. This text explores this paradox, identifying the reliance on a proverb of using policy knowledge to supplant politics as a primary culprit for these perceived failures. The evidence in this book suggests that any consideration of the role of policy knowledge in decision making must be considered alongside, rather than in place of, considerations of the ideologies, interests, and institutional factors that shape political decisions. This contextually rich approach offers practical insights to understand the role of policy knowledge, and to better leverage it to support good governance decisions.

This book contains eight papers focusing on factors associated with the growth of government. There is a large literature in public economics, especially public choice, on the determinants of the growth of government. The papers in this volume focus on a number of arguments related to why government has grown in many developed countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapters focus on taxation, trade openness, technology, income changes, and tax compliance. The volume features prominent scholars such as Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, Casey Mulligan, Gordon Tullock, Randall Holcombe, and Tyler Cowen.

This book presents solutions to problems that are total and based on thinking about how and why humans have organized themselves. It discusses how to avoid the now well-documented Holocene Extinction, propelled by climate change, wars, resource depletion, desertification, degrading knowledge quality, famine, and deterioration of societies overall. It explains why we cannot respond effectively with hedonistic, incompetent, corrupt, and anarchistic "liberal democracy" and why neither personality cult regimes can suffice.  The book offers a model of an organic social structure embodying a collective consciousness of communitarianism and Platonic-style ethos. Putting an emphasis on the re-establishment of Classical Greek virtue, it offers solutions to resolve identity politics, alienation, and meritocracy. While doing so, the author opposes the "everyone is equal" ideology to govern the section of policymakers, instead circumscribing "rights" in terms of responsibilities, prioritizing education and training to carry forth the ethos of valuing truth above materialism, and developing Durkheim's social brain via a new discipline, "sociointelligence". The book goes on to explain how underpinning these elements is a comprehensive elucidation of often misunderstood words like "liberty", "freedom", "authoritarianism", and "democracy". All of these areas are arranged and combined in uniquely describing the organic society the author deems necessary to avoid human extinction. As a result, the book presents a “new organicity�, where the emerging transhumanism seeks to transcend hydrocarbon-based life with humanly-constructed life. This book will appeal to students, researchers, and scholars of political science, philosophy, and the social sciences interested in a better understanding of complexity, democratic theory, Holocene Extinction, organic thinking, and meritocratic societies. 

In Exit Strategies and State Building, fifteen of the world's best scholars and practitioners of peace building focus on relevant historical and contemporary cases to provide a comprehensive overview of this issue. The book identifies four basic types of international operations where state-building has been a major objective-colonial administrations, peacekeeping operations, international administrations, and military occupations. Editor Richard Caplan and his contributors cover a variety of topics, from broad-ranging studies of exit in many types of state-building operations, to focused studies on specific historical cases, to thematic analyses under frameworks such as economics and global international relations. By examining the major challenges associated with the conclusion of international state-building operations and the requirements for the maintenance of peace in the period following exit, this book provides a unique perspective on the realities of military and political intervention. Given the twenty-first century trend toward international intervention the world over , Exit Strategies and State Building sheds more light on what is not merely an academic issue, but a pressing global policy concern.

This edited volume addresses the accomplishments, prospects and challenges of regional integration processes on the African continent. Since regional integration is a process that ebbs and flows according to a wide range of variables such as changing political and economic conditions, implications and factors derived from the vagaries of migration and climate change, it is crucial to be cognizant with how these variables impact regional integration initiatives. The contributors discuss the debates on Pan-Africanism and linking it with ongoing discourses and policies on regional integration in Africa. Other aspects of the book contain some of the most important topic issues such as migration, border management and the sustainable development goals. This content offers readers fresh and innovative perspectives on various aspects of sustainable development and regional growth in Africa.

With recent advances and investment in artificial intelligence, are we on the verge of introducing virtual public servants? Governments around the world are rapidly deploying robots and virtual agents in healthcare, education, local government, social care, and criminal justice. These advances not only promise unprecedented levels of control and convenience at a reduced cost but also claim to connect, to empathise, and to build trust. This book documents how-after decades of designing out costly face to face transactions, investment in call centres, and incentivising citizens to self-service-the tech industry is promising to re-humanise our frontline public services. It breaks out of disciplinary silos and moves us on from the polarised hype vs. fear discussion on the future of work. It does so through in-depth Q-methodology interviews with a wide range of frontline public servants, from doctors to librarians, from social workers to school receptionists, and from police officers to call handlers. The first of its kind, this book should be of interest across the social sciences and to anyone concerned with how recent measures to digitise and automate our services are paving the way for the development of full-blown AI in frontline work.

This book examines changing Soviet and Russian press coverage of the United States from the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev through the presidency of Vladimir Putin. A new afterword focuses on recent developments in the Russian media and Russian press coverage of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Becker argues that due to the absence of a language to support the reform strategy, the Soviet press presented positive images of its chief ideological and military opponent, the United States, as a means of supporting political, social and economic reform. He suggests that the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a more self-confident Russia means that the symbolic and discursive significance of the United States for Russia has diminished.

The North Caucasus, specifically Chechnya and Ingushetia is a region that has experienced some of the deadliest and most protracted conflicts in Europe. Chechnya is currently a totalitarian enclave within the increasingly authoritarian Russian Federation, while Ingushetia still suffers from lingering political conflicts and chronic problems with the quality of governance. By examining the relationship between state and society, this book considers how state-building has unfolded in a region with highly complex social structures, a history of colonialism, Soviet authoritarianism, and later post-Soviet wars and trauma. Focusing on a systematic analysis of subnational state-building in post-Soviet Chechnya and Ingushetia and the role of teips (clans) in this process, this study responds to the widely accepted academic claim that governance and ethnic consolidation in the North Caucasus are shaped by the politics of teips and the belief that late and uneven modernization, and the survival of tribal structures have been accountable for systematic failures in state-building in the region. The research is based on over 200 interviews which the author carried out in Ingushetia and Chechnya, as well as interviews with Chechen exiled politicians in Europe. The book also features never-before-seen access to the archives of the Chechen Parliament during the period of de facto independence. Through research into the socio-anthropological analysis of the clans and how they function towards political systems, Sokirianskaia shows how the teips lost their traditional organizational structure and roles, becoming incapable of mobilizing for political action. She argues that while teip symbolism has remained politically relevant, and the bonds of kinship are highly important, they do not form the basis of politics and subnational state-building in Chechnya and Ingushetia. Consequently, subnational authoritarianism is not the result of the pre-existing social composition of the society, but a reflection of institutional rules imposed by Moscow.

The world is changing at a fast pace, so is the Government and Governance style. Humans are bound to go for Algorithmic strategies rather than manual or electronic ones in different domains. This book introduces the Algorithmic Government or Government by Algorithm, which refers to authorizing machines in the Public Sector for automated decision-making based on Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and other technologies. It is an emerging concept introduced globally and will be considered revolutionary in the future. The book covers concepts, applications, progress status, and potential use-cases of Algorithmic Government. This book serves as introductory material for the readers from technology, public policy, administration, and management fields.

Is Euroscepticism still suited to analyze the variegated nature of opposition to the EU? Starting from this question, this book critically reviews Euroscepticism, reconceptualizes it in terms of political opposition and discovers, disentangles and explains patterns of EU-opposition within the European Parliament (EP). Distinguishing between "what the EU does" and "what the EU is", the research elaborates an index of parties' positioning "measuring" it through the speeches that parties' deliver in the EP. The EP is the "perfect laboratory" where decisions concerning EU-policies are taken and the future EU-trajectories are shaped. Besides delineating a set of guidelines categorizing parties, the book concludes that their positioning varies along two main axes: the pro-anti-EU-system and the pro-anti-EU-establishment. From a normative perspective, the research argues for the growing importance of the "cumulation hypothesis": if criticism remains unheard within the European elitist construct, such criticism will transform itself into rejection.

This book seeks to consistently explain the role of ideas and institutions in policy outcomes, and addresses the problem of how resource nationalism causes a deficit of public accountability in oil producing countries from Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors present a causal mechanism linking ideas and policy outcomes through institutional arrangements, focusing on policy design to describe the role of instruments selection and combination in improving or reducing public accountability through agenda setting, policy formulation, cross-sectorial coordination and political interplays.

This book provides a governance perspective on China's digital authoritarianism by examining the political and institutional dynamics of the country's internet sector in a historical context. Using leading theories of authoritarian institutions, it discusses China's approach to the internet and methods of implementation in terms of party-state institutions and policy processes. This provides a much-needed 'inside out' perspective on digital authoritarianism that avoids the perception of China as some coherent and static monolith. The study also offers a powerful rationale for China's cyber sovereignty as an externalisation of its domestic internet governance framework and broader political-economic context. As China shifts from rule-taker to rule-maker in world politics, the Chinese Dream (zhongguo meng) is now going global. Beijing's digital authoritarian toolkit is being promoted and exported to other authoritarian regimes, making China a major driver of digital repression at the global level.