The forefathers of the European Union, led by Jean Monnet, hoped to create a 'United States of Europe' with national sovereignties subordinated to a federal government. Few in Britain shared their dream. Yet Britain abandoned her aloof stand of 1950, and eventually joined the European Communities. Lord Beloff asks whether the key figures - Harold Macmillan, Sir Edward Heath and Harold Wilson, knowingly deceived the electorate into thinking that entry could be combined with the country's independence of action and historic constitution, or whether they thought that they could persuade continental statesmen from inside of the merits of a much looser structure. The actions and words of Lady Thatcher and John Major are scrutinised with this same question in mind, as are Labour's oscillations under Gaitskell, Wilson and Foot before plunging wholeheartedly into Eurofederalism under Kinnock and Blair. The key theme which emerges is of mutual misunderstanding between Britain and the continent, due to basic differences of outlook and interest, which have guaranteed continual controversy throughout our involvement in Europe.

The four dragons of Asia - Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea - have achieved remarkable progress over the past decades. These newly industrialising countries (NICs) have emerged as major actors on the world economic scene. Their success can be attributed to a number of factors related to historical background, relationship with China, pattern of governance and performance of administrative, political and economic institutions. This book examines the role of public administration in the accomplishments of the NICs and identifies potential areas of challenge for the dragons.

This book shows that privatization in Britain constitutes a form of state power. After analyzing the historical and ideological background, the study examines how market processes indirectly extend state control by governing participation in state asset sales, regulatory regimes, deregulated policymaking and the marketization of trade unions. Privatizing control remade British democracy. Direct state power has been concentrated and held in reserve, while market processes guide wide areas of routine decision-making. Thus, it is demonstrated that privatization has depoliticized choice and diminished freedom.

"The two Clinton victories do not mark a break in a pattern of mediocre Democratic performance in presidential elections. The 1996 presidential victory was combined with Republican retention of both houses of Congress. We find little evidence here of a resurgence of the kind that could spark even the most optimistic Democratic activist to speak of a new or renewed Democratic majority, or even of a new or renewed Democratic presidential majority.

Bill Clinton's re-election is a great triumph for Bill Clinton; it is certainly a good thing for the Democrats. But it was clearly a very personal triumph that neither generated across-the-board gains for the Democratic party in 1996 nor created a stable basis for the party's electoral success in the future. Nothing that happened in 1996 suggests that the dealigned electoral politics that have dominated the last thirty years is coming to an end. In 2000, Bill Clinton moves from electoral politics to electoral history. The forces that twice elected him enter the uncertainty that characterizes all electoral politics in a dealigned age."

Based upon the work of a study-group of the Study of Parliament Group, this book examines the impact of EU membership on the Westminster Parliament. It considers the development and effectiveness of new procedures for parliamentary scrutiny and looks in detail at the handling of EU business by the two Houses in recent sessions. It contains detailed case studies of Parliament's dealings with the Common Agricultural Policy and with farm animal welfare and examines the significance for Parliament of the Maastricht Treaty, analysing the stormy debates surrounding its ratification. It also includes an appendix, outlining developments in the parliaments of the other EU countries. This book, written from a unique parliamentary perspective, is essential reading for everyone who is involved or interested in the continuing debate about Britain's future role in Europe.

In developing Legislative Term Limits, the editor has included material that has explicit and testable models about the expected consequences of term limits that reflect Public Choice perspectives. This book contains the best efforts of economists and political scientists to predict the consequences of legislative term limits.

The evolution of British public policy through the industrial revolution, the Victorian age and the inter-war years to 1939 is an essential element of British history. It is also a necessary preliminary to the understanding of today's policy choices as they confront governments. It has not previously been viewed as a totality, embodying the economic aspects, both macro and micro, together with social and welfare provision and the patterns of ideas affecting both. Sydney Checkland's treatment, first published in 1983, embraces all these aspects, and is set within the changing configuration of class and politics as the franchise extended. As successive governments responded to these challenges they sought to improve the operation of the market economy and to ease the social pressures that it generated. They had to find an acceptable level of consent to what they were doing; this often involved limiting the choices of individuals and of groups. Of the latter, in large-scale business the trade unions were an increasing problem. Reciprocally these interests tried both to limit the actions of governments as these affected themselves and, indeed, to influence the general course of policy. Account is taken of the fact that Britain was not one nation, but four, each with its perspective and aspirations. The pattern increases in complexity with the passage of time, so that the discussion of the First World War and the troubled decades of the twenties and thirties comprise the largest section of the book.

In the United States, homeownership is synonymous with economic security and middle-class status. It has played this role in American life for almost a century, and as a result, homeownership's centrality to Americans' economic lives has come to seem natural and inevitable. But this state of affairs did not develop spontaneously or inexorably. On the contrary, it was the product of federal government policies, established during the 1930s and developed over the course of the twentieth century. At the Boundaries of Homeownership traces how the government's role in this became submerged from public view and how several groups who were locked out of homeownership came to recognize and reveal the role of the government. Through organizing and activism, these boundary groups transformed laws and private practices governing determinations of credit-worthiness. This book describes the important policy consequences of their achievements and the implications for how we understand American statebuilding.

Why have the Democrats lost five of the last seven presidential elections, even though polls consistently show that more Americans identify with that party than with the Republican party? And why are Democratic presidential nomination races usually so much more bitter and fractious than those held by the Republicans?The answer, argues William Mayer, lies in an important but too often ignored feature of American politics: The Democrats are a more ideologically diverse, less cohesive party than the Republicans and thus have greater difficulty maintaining party unity. After extensively documenting the Democrats' traditional problems of division and disagreement, Mayer presents evidence suggesting that in recent years the Republican advantage over the Democrats has finally started to narrow--raising important questions about the future of the Republican coalition.

In "A Democracy of Despots" correspondent Donald Murray provides an eyewitness account of the struggle for power in the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev and in Russia under Boris Yeltsin, showing how both men used and abused the democratic institutions they helped make possible. The story tells of the emerging democratic government is one of ambitious men and women who optimistically launched their experiment in democracy only to find themselves at war with one another and mired in the habits of rule by fiat.

It was this approach, Murray argues, that eventually discredited not only presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin but also the leaders and advisers who joined them under the democrats' banner and that led many Russian citizens to support the reformed communists in the 1995 elections.

This memoir by the second most powerful Communist Party leader during the early Gorbachev years provides an important alternative view of the USSR's transformation--a view that is gaining ground in Russian politics today. In a substantial new piece for this edition, Mr. Ligachev outlines the political agenda of today's communist coalition--the establishment of a new Soviet Union, with strong economic and political integration of its member-states.Yegor Ligachev, a seasoned Party boss from Siberia, made a solid career for himself in the capital during the Khrushchev era, but, following Khrushchev's ouster, chose to retreat to the provinces. In 1985, his political patrons brought him back to Moscow to help them build a dynamic new leadership team under Mikhail Gorbachev. The two reform-minded communists launched an effort to inject life and energy into the Party, economy, and society through a series of liberalizing measures. But when Ligachev saw the reforms moving into a revolutionary phase that could result in the Party's loss of control over the helm of state, he found himself increasingly siding with the opposition.In this gripping book, Ligachev describes the evolving confrontation between opposing forces at high-level Party meetings and sessions of the Politburo as well as in less formal conversations. Along the way, he gives revealing glimpses not only of Gorbachev but also of Yuri Andropov, Andrei Gromyko, Alexander Yakovlev, Eduard Shevardnadze, Boris Yeltsin, and other top leaders. Notorious events such as the 1989 massacre in Tbilisi and the Gdlyan/Ivanov affair--in which, Ligachev argues, he was unjustly implicated--are also highlighted.

Americans are disenchanted with politics, their government, and their leaders. For evidence, we don't have to look very far: the elections of 1994 turned over control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, and the new House Republicans' Contract with America was the biggest single anti-government initiative since the Boston Tea Party, with term limits, campaign finance reform, and a balanced budget amendment high on its list of priorities. But before Americans climb again on a new bandwagon of government restructuring, they would do well to listen to Cal Mackenzie's admonitions in The Irony of Reform. The trouble with contemporary government, he explains, is not a lack of change or "restructuring" over the years, but rather the disjointed, inadvertent, and unpredictable pattern of reform we have followed since World War II. Mackenzie traces the roots of our current distress, noting that more tinkering will only lead to more-though perhaps different-problems. Something much bolder is needed-a new approach that enables leadership, facilitates coalition building, and enhances accountability. Mackenzie proposes a cure for the political ills diagnosed here-a hard and painful cure for a very crippled body politic.

The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. While there is unanimous condemnation of the practice, there is no consensus on the causes nor any persuasive analysis of what is likely to happen in the coming decades. In The Insidious Momentum of American Mass Incarceration, Franklin E. Zimring seeks a comprehensive understanding of when, how, and why the United States became the world leader in incarceration to further determine how the use of confinement can realistically be reduced. To do this, Zimring first profiles the growth of imprisonment after 1970, emphasizing the important roles of both the federal system and the distribution of power and fiscal responsibility among the levels of government in American states. He also examines the changes in law enforcement, prosecution and criminal sentencing that ignited the 400% increase in rates of imprisonment in the single generation after 1975. Finally, Zimring then proposes a range of strategies that can reduce prison population and promote rational policies of criminal punishment. Arguing that the most powerful enemy to reducing excess incarceration is simply the mundane features of state and local government, such as elections of prosecutors and state support for prison budgets, this book challenges the convential ways we consider the issue of mass incarceration in the United States and how we can combat the rising numbers.

The four years of the Bush presidency cover a momentous era in American and world history. In international affairs the events in Eastern Europe and the then Soviet Union in late 1989 gave the President a high profile. The advent of the 'New World Order' made the United States pre-eminent: the triumph of the West was assured, with the added bonus of the 'peace dividend' as arms control agreements and defense savings seemed imminent. The President's personal popularity flourished in this climate and reached a new peak with the triumph of the allied forces in the Gulf War. The Gulf conflict saw Bush at his most decisive: firm in his moral stance, skilled in his action to bring together allied support backed by the United Nations, and confident in his handling of public opinion.

Examines the reconstruction of institutional power relationships that had to be negotiated among the courts, the parties, the President, the Congress, and the states in order to accommodate the expansion of national administrative capacities around the turn of the twentieth century.

'Rieselbach has written a first-rate Congress text. It proves students with extremely well organized, comprehensive, and timely coverage in a no nonsense, but most readable, presentation. He is to be applauded for the fine integration of substantial material in a range of valuable theoretical perspectives.' - Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Vanderbilt University

The institution of the prime minister in France remains understudied. There are many personalized accounts of the work of individual prime ministers and their relations with presidents and government ministers. However, there has been no rigorous attempt to analyse the prime minister's overall influence in the decision-making process. This study aims to examine the contemporary role of the prime minister in the French political system. By so doing, the book provides a systematic analysis of the prime minister's influence over the policy-making process from 1981-1991. There is also new evidence on the student demonstrations of 1986. Robert Elgie has published articles for journals such as "Governance", "West European Politics" and "Modern and Contemporary France".

Parliamentary cabinets are supposed to be collective bodies, taking their decisions on the basis of agreements among all the members. Yet much has been made of the growth of the role of prime ministers, not just in Britain, but all over Western Europe. Much has also been made of the trend towards letting cabinet decisions be taken by committees or even by individual ministers.;These are the issues which this study examines, on the basis of the replies of over 400 cabinet ministers across Western Europe. The result is an empirical analysis of a subject on which what has been known so far has tended to be speculation.;Other works by Jean Blondel include "Voters, Parties and Leaders", "An Introduction to Comparative Government", "Comparative Legislatures", "Political Parties", "The Discipline of Politics", "World Leaders", "The Organisation of Governments", "Government Ministers in the Contemporary World", "Political Leadership" and "Cabinets in Western Europe". Ferdinand Mueller-Rommel is the author of "New Politics in Western Europe", "Cabinets in Western Europe" and "Gruene Parteien in Westeuropa".

In this revealing book Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg tells what it was like to be chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission during the Nixon presidency. He draws extensively from his meticulously kept diary, enabling the reader to be a fly on the wall during meetings with Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and other key policy makers. During the Nixon period, the debate over how to deal with the Soviets on nuclear issues and arms control remained central. On the domestic scene efforts to promote and regulate the growth of a nuclear power industry were complicated by a rising tide of environmental protest. Dr. Seaborg describes how the Atomic Energy Commission, shorn of much of the political immunity of its early years, sought to maintain its programmes and ultimately its very existence, while besieged by competing pressures from the White House, other government agencies, anti-nuclear activists, industry, state governments, and Congress.

This volume provides an introduction to, and assessment of, the major organizational changes in Britain's public services since the late 1970s which have collectively been identified as the emergence of a "new managerialism".

Leadership: The Ultimate Guide

Few Americans have observed the ups and downs of presidential leadership more closely over the past thirty years -- from Nixon to Clinton and Watergate to Whitewater -- than David Gergen. A White House adviser to four presidents, both Republican and Democrat, he offers a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of their struggles to exercise power and draws from them key lessons for leaders of the future. Taking us inside the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, Gergen reflects on everything from why Nixon was the best global strategist among recent presidents to how the Bill-and-Hillary seesaw rocked the White House during Clinton's tenure as president.

Gergen argues that, as the twenty-first century begins, our success as a country will depend heavily upon the success of a new generation in power. Drawing upon his many experiences in the White House, he offers seven vital elements for future leaders. What they must have, he says, are inner mastery; a central, compelling purpose rooted in moral values; a capacity to persuade; skills in working within the system; a fast start; a strong, effective team; and a passion that inspires others to keep the flame alive.

A set of essays critically assessing aspects of the state's involvement in caring in modern societies, with particular reference to Britain, Japan, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Paul Close is also the editor of "Family and Economy in Modern Society".

Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis's taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl's science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm's-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu...everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work. Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.