Henry Giroux continues his critique of the US political and popular culture 's influence on the lives of our children.

In his controversial new book, Giroux argues that the US is at war with young people. No longer seen as the future of a democratic society, youth are now derided by politicians looking for quick-fix solutions to crime and demonized by the popular media. This perception of fear and disdain is being translated into social policy . Instead of providing a decent education to young people, we offer them the increasing potential of being incarcerated. Instead of guaranteeing them decent health care, we serve them more standardized tests. There's a war on in the US these days, and Giroux sees our youth as the target.

This timely book describes and explains the American people's alleged hatred of their own branch of government, the U.S. Congress. Focus group sessions held across the country and a specially designed national survey indicate that much of the negativity is generated by popular perceptions of the processes of governing visible in Congress. But Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conclude that the public's unwitting desire to reform democracy out of a democratic legislature is a cure more dangerous than the disease.

This book details the policy subsystems - links among members of Congress, interest groups, program beneficiaries, and federal and subnational government agencies - that blanket the American political landscape. Robert Stein and Kenneth Bickers have constructed a new data-base detailing federal outlays to congressional districts for each federal program, and use it to examine four myths about the impact of policy subsystems on American government and democratic practice. These include the myth that policy subsystems are a major contributor to the federal deficit; that, once created, federal programs grow inexorably and rarely die; that, to garner support for their programs, subsystem actors seek to universalize the geographic scope of program benefits; and that the flow of program benefits to constituencies in congressional districts ensures the reelection of legislators. The authors conclude with an appraisal of proposals for reforming the American political system, including a balanced budget amendment, a presidential line-item veto, term limitations, campaign finance reform, and the reorganization of congressional committees.

This timely book describes and explains the American people's alleged hatred of their own branch of government, the US Congress. Intensive focus group sessions held across the country and a specially designed national survey indicate that much of the negativity is generated by popular perceptions of the processes of governing visible in Congress. John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that, although the public is deeply disturbed by debate, compromise, delicate pace, the presence of interest groups, and the professionalization of politics, many of these traits are actually endemic to modern democratic government. Congress is an enemy of the public partially because it is so public. Calls for reform, such as term limitations, reflect the public's desire to attack these disliked features. But the authors conclude, the public's unwitting desire to reform democracy out of a democratic legislature is a cure more dangerous than the disease.

The Politics of Evidence Based Policymaking identifies how to work with policymakers to maximize the use of scientific evidence. Policymakers cannot consider all evidence relevant to policy problems. They use two shortcuts: 'rational' ways to gather enough evidence, and 'irrational' decision-making, drawing on emotions, beliefs, and habits. Most scientific studies focus on the former. They identify uncertainty when policymakers have incomplete evidence, and try to solve it by improving the supply of information. They do not respond to ambiguity, or the potential for policymakers to understand problems in very different ways. A good strategy requires advocates to be persuasive: forming coalitions with like-minded actors, and accompanying evidence with simple stories to exploit the emotional or ideological biases of policymakers.

This book is the first study of the power of the Russian Parliament in the policy process from 1994-2001, within the context of executive-legislative relations. It challenges the widely held view that between 1994 and 2001 Russia had a presidential system with a strong, authoritarian leader who ruled by decree and a weak parliament which did not have much power.

The British, Irish, Russian, American, German, and Austrian contributors examine the intricate nature of the mass repression unleashed by the Stalinist leader of the USSR during 1937-38. The first part of the collection deals with annihilation policies against the Soviet elite and the Communist International. The second section of the volume looks at mass operations of the secret police (NKVD) against social outcasts, Poles and other 'hostile' ethnic groups. The final section comprises micro-studies about targeted victim groups among the general population.

The British, Irish, Russian, American, German and Austrian contributors examine the intricate nature of the mass repression unleashed by the Stalinist leader of the USSR during 1937 38. The first part of the collection deals with annihilation policies against the Soviet elite and the Communist International. The second section of the volume looks at mass operations of the secret police (NKVD) against social outcasts, Poles and other 'hostile' ethnic groups. The final section comprises micro studies about targeted victim groups among the general population. FRIDRIKH FIRSOV Researcher, History of the Comintern WLADISLAW HEDELER Researcher, History of the Karaganda Gulag Complex OLEG KHLEVNIUK Department of Public Administration, Moscow State University, Russia NATALIA MUSIENKO Lecturer, German Language NIKITA PETROV Vice-Chairman, Board of Memorial, the most prominent Russian organization dedicated to uncovering the crimes of Soviet Communism ARSENII ROGINSKII Chairman, Board of Memorial HANS SCHAFRANEK Freelance Historian, Vienna DAVID SHEARER Associate Professor of History, University of Delaware, USA BERTHOLD UNFRIED Lecturer, Cultural Studies, Vienna University ALEKSANDR VATLIN S

Using new archival material, Lawrence Tal examines how Jordan remained stable during the volatile period between 1955 and 1967. Tal asserts that Jordan's security was due primarily to the cohesion of its National Security Establishment, a ruling coalition of security and foreign policy professionals that included the monarchy, the political elite, and the military.

Selected Contents: 1. Precis2. Public Administration as Discipline and the Estrangement of Theory3. Ontology and Theory in Public Administration4. Critical Theory and Public Administration5. Evolutionary Critical Theory6. Evolutionary Critical Theory, Power, and Emancipation7. Evolutionary Critical Theory and the "Good Society"8. Evolutionary Critical Theory and Public Administration

This volume brings together the innovative ideas of 21 of America's leading governors and mayors expressed in their own words. The book features contributions carefully collected and selected over several years, including chapters by former Governors George Bush of Texas and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and Mayors Giuliani and Daley of New York and Chicago respectively.
The editors have cast these varied contributions within the framework of "the New Public Management," whose main elements are: (1) reverting to core functions; (2) devolving authority and decentralizing; (3) "rightsizing," or limiting the size and scope of government; (4) restoring civil society; (5) adopting market principles; (6) managing for results, satisfying citizens, and holding government accountable; (7) empowering employees, citizens, and communities; and (8) introducing e-government and modern technology.
Most of the chapters exemplify more than one of these elements. The most common theme of these officials is their use of market forces and principles to improve the conditions of their states and cities. Another common thread is empowering employees, citizens, and communities. Several officials describe their success in reforming education and others to their technological innovations and achievements; others describe their fundamental and thoroughgoing management reforms.
States and cities-small and large-are represented here, and their leaders illustrate and illuminate the kinds of forward thinking that can profitably be adopted elsewhere to achieve similar success. This book is intended to help make that happen.

This volume brings together the innovative ideas of 21 of America's leading governors and mayors expressed in their own words. The book features contributions carefully collected and selected over several years, including chapters by former Governors George Bush of Texas and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and Mayors Giuliani and Daley of New York and Chicago respectively.
The editors have cast these varied contributions within the framework of "the New Public Management," whose main elements are: (1) reverting to core functions; (2) devolving authority and decentralizing; (3) "rightsizing," or limiting the size and scope of government; (4) restoring civil society; (5) adopting market principles; (6) managing for results, satisfying citizens, and holding government accountable; (7) empowering employees, citizens, and communities; and (8) introducing e-government and modern technology.

Political scandals have always demonstrated the capacity of our executive officials for self-inflicted injuries, and the Clinton administration was no exception. Unilateral warmaking, claims of executive privilege and immunity, and last-minute pardons all tested the limits of presidential power, while the excesses of the Special Prosecutor cast doubts on available remedies. For eight years, Republicans and Democrats engaged in guerrilla warfare aimed at destroying the careers and lives of their adversaries while tests of presidential power were resolved by the courts, resulting in a reshaping of the scope and power of the presidency itself.

This book examines the many controversial and important battles that led to the shrinking of the presidency under the law during the Clinton administration. Located at the intersection of law and politics, it helps readers understand the dramatic changes that took place in the relationship of presidential power to the law during the Clinton years and shows how one president's actions--and congressional and legal reactions to them--have altered presidential prerogatives in ways that his successors cannot ignore.

"The Presidency and the Law" offers an assessment of changes in constitutional and legal understanding of the American presidency, exploring such topics as war power, executive privilege, pardon power, impeachment, executive immunity, independent counsel, and campaign finance. In examining these collisions between president and the law, its distinguished contributors bring the lessons of Watergate and Iran-Contra into the Clinton era and contribute to a Madisonian view that presidents should not operate outside statutory and constitutional constraints.

While the essays offer several criticisms of that administration's exercise of power and its interpretation of constitutional provisions and law, many of the authors have been supportive of Clinton and his policy pursuits, and all seek to examine the potential impact of the Clinton administration without being predictive or legalistic. They offer instead commentary, analysis, and criticism that examine the legality and constitutionality of President Clinton's actions within a broader political and historical context.

The presidency is constitutionally weaker and politically more vulnerable than the office Bill Clinton assumed in 1993, and it remains to be seen what impact these changes will have on the presidency in the 21st century. This book points the way to assessing that impact, and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of our democracy.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2002, held in Aix-en-Provence, France, in September 2002.The 78 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. As the first publication dedicated to electronic government, this book presents the state of the art in the field. The papers are organized in topical sections on introduction and framework, digital Olympics 2008, knowledge management, requirements, business process reengineering, electronic service delivery, designing innovative applications, electronic democracy, information society technologies program, implementing e-government, legal issues, technical issues, and various topics.

In this compelling book Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski provide the first full account of legislative recruitment in Britain for twenty-five years. Their central concern is how and why some politicians succeed in moving into the highest offices of state, while others fail. The book examines the relative dearth of women, black and working-class Members of Parliament, and whether the evident social bias in the British political elite matters for political representation. Legislative recruitment concerns the critical step from lower levels (activists, local counsellors) to a parliamentary career. The authors draw evidence from the first systematic surveys of parliamentary candidates, Members of Parliament and party selectors, as well as detailed personal interviews. The study explores how and why people become politicians, and the consequences for parties, legislatures and representative government.

Democratic government has now been entrenched in Poland. An increasingly significant European actor, Poland presents problematic but also stimulating challenges to new NATO and EU associates. This authoritative overview examines in depth the constitutional and governmental framework in Poland since 1989 and its central political institutions, mechanisms, and actors. Sanford demonstrates how the governmental system evolved pragmatically during the 1990s to cope with modernization and consolidated viable independent statehood consensually around Poland's hardy constitutional values.

One of the key constitutional features of a parliamentary democracy is that the political executive, or cabinet, derives its mandate from - and is politically responsible to - the legislature. What makes a parliamentary democracy democratic is that, once a legislative election has been held, the new legislature has the power to dismiss the incumbent executive and replace it with a new one. Moreover, it sits essentially as a court, passing continual judgement on the record of the executive, and continuous sentence on its future prospects. That is how citizens, indirectly, choose and control their government. But the relationship between legislature and executive is not one-sided. The executive typically has the authority to recommend dissolution of parliament and is usually drawn from the parliament. Executive personnel, therefore, have intimate familiarity with parliamentary practices; and for their part, parliamentary personnel aspire to executive appointments. Surprisingly little is known about the constitutional relationship between legislature and executive in parliamentary regimes; the present volume seeks to remedy this.

Advances In Digital Government presents a collection of in-depth articles that addresses a representative cross-section of the matrix of issues involved in implementing digital government systems. These articles constitute a survey of both the technical and policy dimensions related to the design, planning and deployment of digital government systems. The research and development projects within the technical dimension represent a wide range of governmental functions, including the provisioning of health and human services, management of energy information, multi-agency integration, and criminal justice applications. The technical issues dealt with in these projects include database and ontology integration, distributed architectures, scalability, and security and privacy. The human factors research emphasizes compliance with access standards for the disabled and the policy articles contain both conceptual models for developing digital government systems as well as real management experiences and results in deploying them. Advances In Digital Government presents digital government issues from the perspectives of different communities and societies. This geographic and social diversity illuminates a unique array of policy and social perspectives, exposing practitioners to new and useful ways of thinking about digital government.

Worldwide, the urge is being felt to pave the way towards the introduction of an electronic government. Many countries recognise the potential of digital aids in providing information and services to citizens, organisations and companies. Recent developments have put pressure on the legislature to provide an adequate legal framework for electronic administrative communication. Thus, various countries have started to draft provisions in their administrative law in order to remove legal impediments that hamper electronic services from public administrations. Written by specialists from different countries, E-Government and its Implications for Administrative Law provides an overview and analysis of such legislative developments in France, Germany, Norway and the United States. What approach has been taken in these countries? What specific provisions have been formulated to facilitate electronic administrative communication and at what level? What requirements are introduced to gain sufficient trust in electronic service delivery? In providing an in-depth analysis of the legislative projects in the various countries, this book gives a glance at the differences in policy making as well as the lessons that can be learned for future regulatory projects to amend administrative law for the digital era. This is Volume 1 in the Information Technology and Law (IT&Law) Series

Between 1865 and 1920, Congress passed laws to regulate obscenity, sexuality, divorce, gambling, and prizefighting. It forced Mormons to abandon polygamy, attacked interstate prostitution, made narcotics contraband, and stopped the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Gaines Foster explores the force behind this unprecedented federal regulation of personal morality - a combined Christian lobby. Foster analyzes the fears of appetite and avarice that led organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the National Reform Association to call for moral legislation and examines the efforts and interconnections of the men and women who lobbied for it. His account underscores the crucial role white southerners played in the rise of moral reform after 1890. With emancipation, white southerners no longer needed to protect slavery from federal intervention, and they seized on moral legislation as a tool for controlling African Americans. Enriching our understanding of the aftermath of the Civil War and the expansion of national power, Moral Reconstruction also offers valuable insight into the link between historical and contemporary efforts to legislate morality.

This volume commemorates the opening of the Lee H. Hamilton Congressional Papers at Indiana University. The papers are a selection made by his staff from the approximately 3,500 cartons of records generated from 1965 to 1999 during Hamiltons 34-year tenure in the House of Representatives. The collection richly documents Hamiltons emphasis on constituent relations, his continuous concern for the constitutional role of Congress and its proper functioning, and the development of his leadership in U.S. foreign policy. The Hamilton collections document not only his distinguished congressional career but his commitment to, and work in support of, the belief that the most pressing national and international problems can be successfully addressed through the nonpartisan work of people of good faith within the context of the American form of representative democracy.

This book explores the German idea of federalism denoting 'diversity withinunity'. Historians, linguists and political scientists examine how federalism emerged in the Holy Roman Empire, was re-shaped by 19th Century cultural movements, and was adopted by the unified state in 1871 and again after 1945. The myth of federalism as a safeguard against totalitarianism is tested in regard to the Third Reich and the GDR. The book concludes with an outlook on German federalism's future in Europe.

Drawing upon a wide range of interviews with many of the key actors, Andrew Dorman examines how defense policy was formulated and implemented during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. This period witnessed major transformations in international and domestic politics, with defense emerging from its traditional postwar position of relative insignificance to become one of the key issues at the 1983 and 1987 general elections. Dorman provides a new understanding of policymaking by analyzing defense policy in terms of three constituent parts: declaratory policy; military strategy and procurement policy.

When Thomas Jefferson moved his victorious Republican administration into the new capital city in 1801, one of his first acts was to abolish any formal receptions, except on New Year's Day and the Fourth of July. His successful campaign for the presidency had been partially founded on the idea that his Federalist enemies had assumed dangerously aristocratic trappings--a sword for George Washington and a raised dais for Martha when she received people at social occasions--in the first capital cities of New York and Philadelphia. When the ladies of Washington City, determined to have their own salon, arrived en masse at the president's house, Jefferson met them in riding clothes, expressing surprise at their presence. His deep suspicion of any occasion that resembled a European court caused a major problem, however: without the face-to-face relationships and networks of interest created in society, the American experiment in government could not function.

Into this conundrum, writes Catherine Allgor, stepped women like Dolley Madison and Louisa Catherine Adams, women of political families who used the unofficial, social sphere to cement the relationships that politics needed to work. Not only did they create a space in which politics was effectively conducted; their efforts legitimated the new republic and the new capital in the eyes of European nations, whose representatives scoffed at the city's few amenities and desolate setting. Covered by the prescriptions of their gender, Washington women engaged in the dirty business of politics, which allowed their husbands to retain their republican purity.

Constrained by the cultural taboos on "petticoat politicking," women rarely wrote forthrightly about their ambitions and plans, preferring to cast their political work as an extension of virtuous family roles. But by analyzing their correspondence, gossip events, "etiquette wars," and the material culture that surrounded them, Allgor finds that these women acted with conscious political intent. In the days before organized political parties, the social machine built by these early federal women helped to ease the transition from a failed republican experiment to a burgeoning democracy.

The conceptual uncertainty when dealing with processes of integration and disintegration in Europe is striking because traditional notions of the nation-state, constitutionalism, sovereignty, and federalism do not account for emerging realities in either Western or Eastern Europe. This volume explores the complex inter-relationship between federal arrangements and their effects on integrating multi-ethnic societies in Europe, and takes stock of current debates on the effects of federalism on integration and disintegration in Eastern and Western Europe. For the first time federalism is addressed in a pan-European context and an attempt is made to look for remedies to overcome nationalism in both East and West within a federalist institutional framework.