Chris McNickle argues that New York City Mayor David Dinkins failed to wield the power of the mayor with the skill required to run the city. His Tammany clubhouse heritage and liberal political philosophy made him the wrong man for the time. His deliberate style of decision-making left the government he led lacking in direction. His courtly demeanor and formal personal style alienated him from the people he served while the multi-racial coalition he forged as New York's first African-American mayor weakened over time.

Dinkins did have a number of successes. He balanced four budgets and avoided a fiscal takeover by the unelected New York State Financial Control Board. Major crime dropped 14 percent and murders fell by more than 12 percent. Dinkins helped initiate important structural changes to the ungovernable school system he inherited. His administration reconfigured health care for the poor and improved access to medical treatment for impoverished New Yorkers.

McNickle argues that David Dinkins has received less credit than he is due for his successes because they were overshadowed by his failure to fulfill his promise to guide the city to racial harmony. This stimulating review of a transitional period in New York City's history offers perspective on what it takes to lead and govern.

The effects of neoliberal economic reforms in the Southern Mediterranean are now widely regarded as a main underlying cause of the Arab uprisings. An often neglected dimension is that of the reforms' implications for local governance. The contributions to this edited volume examine how state power is being re-articulated but also challenged at sub-national levels in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey. They explore the effects of neoliberal economic and local governance reforms such as decentralization, public-private partnerships, and outsourcing in the area of public service delivery, poverty alleviation, and labor market reforms on local patronage networks, public accountability, and state-society relations. The findings show that such reforms are often subordinated to established patterns of political contestation among actors who seize on the opportunities that reforms offer to advance their political agendas, thereby illustrating the local specificity of 'actually existing neoliberalisms'. The book thus fills an important knowledge gap by combining public policy and management theories with those on patron-client networks and public accountability at the local level, and situating them within the critical literature on neoliberalism. This book was published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

Set against a backdrop of concerns about the potential break-up or radical change to the global world order, this volume sets out to investigate the use of sports mega-events by a number of emerging states. Sports mega-events, it is argued, can be understood as a key component in states' 'soft power' strategies, that is, their attempts to showcase their nations on the international stage, increase their power relative to others via non-coercive means and to increase trade and tourism. Many studies on soft power simply cite the concept's founder (Joseph Nye) and make little attempt at unpicking the mechanisms behind its creation. This volume does this by shining a light on emerging economies and by putting forward a soft power 'ideal type' to aid researchers in understanding the strategies employed by states in advancing their interests.

Problems of internal and external security in South-East Asia have persisted as one set of competing global alignments has been succeeded by another, with major impact on regional relationships. This book, first published in 1989, examines how the states of The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) have attempted to confront the problems of regional security. It considers the nature and role of the Association - intended to promote economic growth, social progress and cultural development - traces its institutional development from 1967 and identifies a basic structural weakness arising from the differing strategic perspectives held by member governments. Leifer explores in particular ASEAN's response to conflicts over Kampuchea, renamed Cambodia in 1990, which was critical in exposing those differing perspectives and the limited role of a diplomatic community in coping with regional security problems. This comprehensive work will be of particular value to students and academics with an interest in South-East Asian diplomacy, history and regional security.

This study is one of the very first to analyze North Korea and the challenges that it presents to international security and community, by looking through the prism of the first two years of the Kim Jong-un regime.

Policy Making in the Public Interest is the first text and workbook to provide a short and firmly focused introduction to local government policy making techniques. Each chapter introduces core policy concepts and competencies and concludes with exercises that encourage the reader to apply the theme of the chapter to a practical policy issue in local government, such as city-planning, community-economic development, public safety programming, utility planning, developing regional partnerships, and sustainable growth and development. The exercises explore issues students are likely to analyze as interns or observe in a service learning assignment with local government. For practitioners and elected officials, the exercises focus on issues commonly confronted on the job. This unique approach is designed specifically to lead the reader to a complete and multi-dimensional understanding of 'the public interest' and to provide tools for identifying and adopting local government policies that will support it. An accompanying eResource page contains grading forms to evaluate verbal presentations and analytical work, PowerPoint slides, downloadable forms for students and practitioners, as well as links and resources. Policy Making in the Public Interest is an essential text and workbook for classes in public policy or local government operations, a vital self-guided handbook for managers and elected officials, and a useful resource and instructional guide for workshops.

Since the first elections of 1994, the South African constitution officially guarantees and promotes a wide range of political and civil rights and institutionalizes the separation of powers with an independent judiciary. This has made South Africa a political symbol of change, hope and democracy in Africa and around the world. However, since the introduction of free and fair electoral processes and with ANC dominating the presidency and the parliamentary seats, the political scene has been scattered by democratic challenges. South Africa remains a flawed democracy, combining free elections and respect for basic civil liberties with problems of governance, an underdeveloped political culture, and low levels of public participation. Today, South Africa stands at a crossroads. While the constitutional democracy has survived, South African democracy seems to have weakened by state capture, internal ANC implosion, corruption, societal polarization, social exclusion, xenophobia, and threats of state economic bankruptcy. South Africa faces growing discontent symbolized in intensified societal and political debates, protests and demonstrations providing for the question if this is a sign of dissatisfied citizens demanding deeper democracy or activities questioning the established constitutional democracy from an anti-democratic, populist, and radical point of view. South Africas Democracy at the Crossroads explores the question; what are the challenges to future democratization in South Africa?

This book, compiled from the 2nd Global Report of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) on Decentralization and Local Democracy, analyzes the architecture of fiscal decentralization in one hundred and ten countries as well as in major metropolitan areas. In the majority of these countries, local authorities are taking on more and more responsibilities for public investment and the provision of services that are essential for both economic development and the well being of their citizens. If increasing fiscal decentralization has been a global trend in recent decades, there are significant variations across and within regions and countries. Local budgets make up on average 25% of public expenditure in the countries of the European Union but less than 5% in many developing countries. Decentralization in terms of revenue and expenditure autonomy has also increased, however this has been uneven across countries and has seen greater advances in expenditure than in revenues, where sources remain limited and uncertain, especially for small and middle size cities. With accelerating urbanization and important shifts in the global context (climate change, increasing risk of natural disaster, migration, and demographic changes among others), current funding levels are insufficient for local governments to respond to the urbanization of poverty, growing investment requirements and other pressing needs. The economic and financial crisis that began in 2008 only worsened the situation. This report, offered as part of UCLG's ongoing commitment to deepen understanding of the level of government closest to citizens, identifies universal challenges facing local government finance, as well as those more regional and country specific. Some of the most common are inadequate sources of revenue, unpredictable transfers and grants, excessive higher-level budget controls, and unfunded mandates. In addition to analyzing these challenges and opportunities, the Report proposes recommendations to strengthen the fiscal role and performance of local governments around the world.

From 2003 to 2009 sensational judicial bribery scandals rocked Mississippi's legal system. Famed trial lawyers Paul Minor and Richard (Dickie) Scruggs and renowned judge and former prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter proved to be the nexus of these scandals. Seven attorneys and a former state auditor were alleged to have attempted to bribe or to have actually bribed five state judges to rule in favor of Minor and Scruggs in several lawsuits. This is the story of how federal authorities, following up on information provided by a bank examiner and a judge who could not be bribed, toppled Minor, Scruggs, and their enablers in what was exposed as the most significant legal scandal of twenty-first-century Mississippi.

James R. Crockett details the convoluted schemes that eventually put three of the judges, six of the attorneys, and the former auditor in federal prison. All of the men involved were successful professionals and three of them, Minor, Scruggs, and fellow attorney Joey Langston, were exceptionally wealthy. The stories involve power, greed, but most of all hubris. The culprits rationalized abominable choices and illicit actions to influence judicial decisions. The crimes came to light in those six years, but some crimes were committed before that. These men put themselves above the law and produced the perfect storm of bribery that ended in disgrace.

The tales Crockett relates about these scandals and the actions of Paul Minor and Richard Scruggs are almost unbelievable. Individuals willingly became their minions in power plays designed to distort the very rule of law that most of them had sworn to uphold.

The emergence of large regions within Russia as centres of gravity for political and international power, and the changing relationship between these emerging regions and the centre are critically important factors currently at work within Russia. This book examines the whole question of Russian regions and regionalism. It considers important themes related to regionalism, including demography, security, military themes and international relations, and looks at a wide range of particular regions as case studies. It discusses the extent to which regions have succeeded in establishing themselves as centres of power, and assesses the degree to which President Putin is succeeding in incorporating regions into a hierarchy of power in which the primacy of the centre is retained.

14 Weeks to Smarter Government In Smarter Government: How to Govern for Results in the Information Age, former governor Martin O'Malley draws on his deep experience in implementing performance measurement and management, or "Stat" systems, at the city and state levels in Baltimore and Maryland. And the results speak for themselves: the biggest crime reduction in any big city in America; a reversal of a 300-year decline in the health of the Chesapeake Bay; and schools ranked #1 for five years in a row. Now, take these tested solutions and apply them to your government organization in fewer than four months. Smarter Government Workbook: A 14-Week Implementation Guide to Governing for Results is your practical, hands-on companion workbook for Smarter Government and for realizing the promise of Stat. Smarter Government Workbook: A 14-Week Implementation Guide to Governing for Results distills the lessons from Smarter Government and concisely presents an interactive, easy-to-follow, proven 14-week plan any government can follow to achieve strategic performance management. You will devise a framework to: Gather and share timely, accurate information Rapidly deploy resources Build leadership and collaboration Develop and refine effective strategic goals and key performance indicators Assess your results The difference between a dream and a goal is a deadline. Here's your plan.

"Decentralise authority and let managers manage" has been an almost universal message in UK public services over the last 15 years. But does it really work? This study attempts to show that behind the ministerial rhetoric the experiences of NHS trusts, grant maintained schools and housing associations were in practice distinctly mixed. The text offers a theoretical analysis of the origins and results of decentralized public management in the UK.

This book takes a comparative approach to local government across 14 European countries, looking at processes of decentralisation, regionalisation and reforms of local government. Examining second levels of government, such as UK Counties, French Departements, Italian and Spanish Provinces, and German Landkreise, this book reveals both the specific characteristics of particular countries, and also similarities across Europe. As the first book focussing on the second level of local governments, this monograph combines comparative analysis of institutional trends and reforms of local government with examination of country-specific features to provide an original and insightful evaluation of European governance. Organised along common thematic lines, leading experts in their field outline the historical development of local government, and analyse recent or current reform debates. The book argues democratic quality and effectiveness of this territorial level of government is in the focus of on-going debates about the rescaling of statehood and a shift from 'government to governance'. The Second Tier of Local Government in Europe will be of interest to students and scholars studying local government, public administration and multi-level governance.

Over the past three decades, decentralization has been seen as the means for allowing local governments to become more accountable, and for encouraging the deepening of democracy and the building of village communities. By drawing on original village-level case studies of six villages in three different Indian states, this book presents a systematic analysis of the impact of decentralization on the delivery of social services at the local level within India. Supplementing national and state-level data and analyzing the different historical legacies in each state, the book argues that decentralization is not simply a function of the structure of the decentralization program or of the relationship between higher-tiered and local government. Rather, the possibility of decentralization affecting social outcomes depends on several interacting factors, including the distribution of power among local elites, the dynamics of political competition, and the level of civil society mobilization. By examining constitutionally-mandated political decentralization across India, this book identifies the circumstances under which local government structures can lead to improved social services and societal wellbeing, as well as presenting a substantial contribution to studies on South Asian Politics and Local Government.

Privatization of local government is making headlines throughout the world. Scottsdale, Arizona, contracts for fire protection; Baltimore, to run nine city schools; and Chicago and Philadelphia for a range of services from janitors to recreational facilities. The United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia have arguably gone further than the United States. But much of the debate on contracting has been high on politics, philosophy, and emotion with little attention to practical issues of how to do contracting well. The book shifts the debate away from the politics and rhetoric to the practicalities and realities of contracting.

The book is concerned with four issues--the role of contracting in government, the appropriateness of different contracting strategies, the process of contracting, and who does the contracting. Drawing on examples in the United States and the United Kingdom, the author considers the historical and cultural context of contracting, where contracting works and where it doesn't, the features of smart contracting, and the conditions that are conducive to smart contracting. The book provides an invaluable guide to those concerned with the practicalities of contracting.

This volume contains articles examining freedom of information statutes, including those protecting government employees who expose official misconduct. Using United States laws as examples, the articles explore the relationship of these laws to administrative and constitutional theory in the United States. In addition, they demonstrate how varying conceptions of information illuminate the controversies in the application of these laws to the revolution in the electronic storage and retrieval of information. The articles allow the reader to speculate how the connection of these laws to liberal democratic theory explains their recent adoption in several countries and their international application.

New York Politics examines aspects of state government that are often hidden in the secret sessions of the parties' legislative conferences: the closed-door budget; a complicated array of opaque agencies, authorities, and local governments; and a campaign finance system that lacks transparency. New York is unique among the American states in the existence of regional and demographic divisions, making it difficult to govern. Edward V. Schneier, Antoinette Pole, and Anthony Maniscalco bring clarity and understanding to the politics of the Empire State. This third edition of the leading textbook on New York politics combines historical, legal, statistical, and journalistic sources with the candid perspectives of legislators, lobbyists, and other public officials. Critical updates and new information include an analysis of the rise and fall of Governor Andrew Cuomo, coverage of growing demographic diversity in New York State and its government, and the impact of unified government when the legislature and executive branch are both controlled by the Democratic Party.

Provides an overview of state and local taxation, the current and future outlook across the nation, the role of taxes in economic development, and tax administration. Analyzes and compares all types of state and local taxes-income (individual and corporate) sales (retail and wholesale taxes on food, medicine, gas, and electricity), excise and consumption (on motor fuel, tobacco, and alcoholic beverages and on food, lodging, amusements, parimutuels, and lotteries), property (on different types of property), and severance taxes (on timber and minerals). Examines the philosophy behind the different taxes, recent trends, and current and future policy options. Appendices describing policy analysis and evaluation and listing key sources of information about state and local taxes, many statistical exhibits, and selective bibliography further enhance this reference for undergraduate and graduate students, the general public, and for public administrators, economists, and political scientists.

The International Directory of Government is the definitive guide to people in power in every part of the world. All the top decision-makers are included in this one-volume publication, which brings together government institutions, agencies and personnel in every country and dependency in the world. Each chapter offers information about: the country's system of government the head of state the legislature government ministers and ministries the election commission the judiciary state-related agencies and other institutions arranged by subject heading. For a number of countries, information has also been included about provincial government where considerable power is devolved to government at that level. Institutional entries contain the names and titles of principal officials, postal, e-mail and internet addresses, telephone, and fax numbers and other relevant details.

Liberal democracies are experiencing a major transformation of public governance by which self-regulation, co-operation and negotiation between public and private actors and across different political-administrative levels play an increasingly important role for policy-making and implementation. Using the term 'governance imagery', or what a given society envisions to be the proper way of governing public affairs, this volume examines the emergence, causes and consequences of the politics of self-governance both within relevant social science theorizing and in the everyday production of public governance in various policy areas. It questions how self-governance materialized in various areas of public governance in different liberal democracies, and the driving forces and political effects of attempts to enhance the role of self-governance. Challenging the theory and practice of public administration, The Politics of Self-Governance is an indispensable read for all those interested in new forms of public governance.

This book provides the only available historical account and comprehensive assessment of the factors surrounding the 2004 referendum on an elected assembly in the North-East region of England.

The referendum delivered a 'no' vote of considerable magnitude and called a halt to the program of gradual reform being pushed through by the Labour government. This book examines the campaigns around and the lead-up to the referendum, and offers in-depth analysis of the result, plus explorations of future options available to policy-makers around the sub-national governance of England (a key aspect of the 'English Question'). Crucially, the book contains chapters from scholars who carried out cutting-edge research at the time of the referendum and are thus in a unique position to contribute authoritatively to the historical understanding of these events. This volume will be of great benefit to students and researchers in Regional Studies, Local Government Studies and Constitutional Studies.

Governing the Locals demonstrates that with the exception of a brief period in 1990-92 when the local soviets fostered mass mobilization, local governments in post-Soviet Russia have actively constrained grass-roots activism. Rather than serving as instruments of the 'schooling in civil society, ' or of 'making democracy work'_as the conventional wisdom holds_local governments have been used by the regional authoritarian or ethnocratic regimes as instruments of top down social control. The author suggests that this tendency has been on the rise under President Putin, whose reforms have served to integrate local government into a centralized power vertical potentially facilitating authoritarian style social mobilization non only on a regional level, but also on a nation-wide scale. The author examines the impact of local self-governing institutions on nationalist movement mobilization in Russia. Using insights from social movement theories, Lankina argues that similar to the soviets in the Soviet system, municipalities in post-Soviet Russia continue to influence local societies through their control over social networks, material resources, and public agenda setting. Accordingly, their facilitating or constraining role crucially affects movement successes or failures. This is the first study identifying the centrality of local government for understanding the nature of state-society relations in Russia, and for explaining the broader questions of social activism or lack thereof in the post-Soviet space.

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states' insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement's ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement. Kate Masur's magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois "black laws" helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.