This book offers a comprehensive overview of the role of parliamentary administrations in the control of European Union policy-making. It questions whether the decision to give parliaments greater powers in the aftermath of the Lisbon Treaty had only the intended effect of political debate on European policies, or whether it has also resulted in the bureaucratisation of parliaments. The authors argue that the challenges of information-management faced by parliaments lead them to delegate an extensive set of tasks to their administrations. They offer a broad empirical picture, analysing the challenges faced by national parliaments and the role and response of their administrations in the case of the European Parliament, national parliaments and regional parliaments. In addition, the book studies the interaction between different administrations and their contribution to interparliamentary cooperation. It presents a new and different perspective on the challenges and dynamics of multi-level parliamentarism.

Under pressure from both the Federal government and private citizens, local and state governments are restructuring their services, including the areas of education, highway, and transportation. While the federal government wants to reassign responsibilities to local governments, voters want greater efficiency and lower taxes via privatization. This edited collection considers these pressures, the responses from state and local governments, and specific experiments in privatizing local services.

The book's opening chapter presents an overview of the changing landscape, while the following chapters consider possibilities in both education and highway services. In education, interdistrict school choice and state-local structures are considered. Highway services are seen in federal-state and state-private relationships. Reporting on a variety of experiments, each chapter illustrates a type of service or arrangement for restructuring governmental services.

This text evaluates the validity of a key proposition of public choice theory: that competition is associated with superior performance by governmental organizations. Three forms of competition in local government are identified: competition between local authorities; competition between councils and private contractors; and competition between parties for political power. The extent and consequences of competition are assessed in both the UK and USA. The analysis is used to draw conclusions on the effects of competition and the validity of public choice theory.

Examining cutting-edge issues of international relevance in the ongoing redesign of the South African local government fiscal system, the contributors to this volume analyze the major changes that have taken place since the demise of apartheid. The 1996 Constitution and subsequent legislation dramatically redefined the public sector, mandating the development of democratic local governments empowered to provide a wide variety of key public services. However, the definition and implementation of new local functions and the supporting democratic decision-making and managerial capabilities are emerging more slowly than expected. Some difficult choices and challenges commonly faced by developing countries must be dealt with before the system can evolve to more effectively meet the substantial role envisioned for local governments. The contributors outline these choices and challenges, consider options for meeting them, and review the implications of different decisions. Their analyses also highlight the interrelationships among the elements of the local fiscal structure, and emphasize the often-ignored challenge of how to define an appropriate fiscal decentralization implementation strategy in an environment where local governments are extremely diverse in terms of needs, resources and capacities. Though the research, much of it based on newly collected data, is specific to South Africa, the approach provides a model for other countries facing similar fiscal decentralization policy challenges. Applied public finance and policy academics, policymakers in developing countries, researchers and program managers in international development organizations, and students interested in local government finance in developing countries will find this timely and comprehensive volume a valuable addition to their libraries.

As 300 million Americans squeeze into our country, and as single-person households outnumber parents with children, it's time to rethink our land use laws that favor the single-family house. This provocative book visits sites of recent controversies--from an immigration dispute in a Virginia suburb, to eminent domain in New York City, to illegal apartments in the backyards of California. Boudreaux explores how we could scrap the old housing bias in favor of affluent homeowners, and in its place harness the free market to provide for a greater variety of residences--apartments, townhouses, and mobile homes - for the twenty-first century.

When the global financial crisis spread to Europe and its weak periphery through the banking sector, few contemplated that the real causes of the crisis did not reside only in the faulty architectures of globalisation and European integration but also in a pronounced power-shift to the 'global East'. The authors connect the 'local' with the 'global', and the 'local' with the 'European'. In this context, Fouskas and Dimoulas scrutinize the financial, geopolitical and historical underpinnings of the current Greek debt crisis that threatens not just the cohesion of the European Union, but the entire security architecture of the Euro-Atlantic world. By identifying the 'debt problem' as being one of the 'birthmarks' of Greece passed by the country's one hegemonic master onto another, they challenge the current half-truths about the contemporary debt crisis in Greece and the Euro-zone.

In the post-war era one of the most significant transformations in the democratic process throughout Western Europe has been the widespread introduction of regional elections. Symptomatic of this decentralization has been the shift of various legislative powers to regional governing bodies. As a result, electorates throughout Western Europe now have more opportunities to express their preferences and air their grievances across electoral arenas while the dynamics of electoral competition have become increasingly multifarious and complex. Voters can now use regional elections to articulate their discontent with the policies of the national government or can elect based on the political offer in the regional electoral arena.This book brings together leading experts on elections who analyze differences between regional and national electoral outcomes in thirteen West European countries between 1945 and 2011. It extends existing insights by providing new empirical evidence and by presenting alternative accounts for differences between the regional and national vote across Western Europe.

Although difficult, complicated, and sometimes discouraging, collaboration is recognized as a viable approach for addressing uncertain, complex and wicked problems. Collaborations can attract resources, increase efficiency, and facilitate visions of mutual benefit that can ignite common desires of partners to work across and within sectors. An important question remains: How to enable successful collaboration? Inter-Organizational Collaboration by Design examines how these types of collaborations can overcome barriers to innovate and rejuvenate communities outlining the factors and antecedents that influence successful collaboration. The book proposes a theoretical perspective for collaborators to adopt design science (a solution finding approach utilizing end-user-centered research, prototyping, and collective creativity to strengthen individuals, teams, and organizations), the language of designers, and a design attitude as an empirically informed pathway for better managing the complexities inherent in collaboration. Through an integrated framework, evidence-based tools and strategies for building successful collaboration is articulated where successful collaboration performance facilitates innovation and rejuvenation. This volume will be essential reading for academics, researchers, leaders and managers in nonprofit, private, and government sectors interested in building better collaborations.

The history of medieval Germany is still rarely studied in the English-speaking world. This collection of essays by distinguished German historians examines one of most important themes of German medieval history, the development of the local principalities. These became the dominant governmental institutions of the late medieval Reich, whose nominal monarchs needed to work with the princes if they were to possess any effective authority. Previous scholarship in English has tended to look at medieval Germany primarily in terms of the struggles and eventual decline of monarchical authority during the Salian and Staufen eras - in other words, at the "failure" of a centralised monarchy. Today, the federalised nature of late medieval and early modern Germany seems a more natural and understandable phenomenon than it did during previous eras when state-building appeared to be the natural and inevitable process of historical development, and any deviation from the path towards a centralised state seemed to be an aberration. In addition, by looking at the origins and consolidation of the principalities, the book also brings an English audience into contact with the modern German tradition of regional history (Landesgeschichte). These path-breaking essays open a vista into the richness and complexity of German medieval history.

The contributors assess to what extent regional organizations in Europe and Latin America provide a space for the regulation and provision of social policies in the area of social protection, higher education and health. They analyse the impact of regional organizations on social citizenship following political struggle and contestation.

The increasing importance of civil society and civil society actors in recent decades has ensured that they now feature prominently in the European Union's enlargement strategy with the EU now possessing a series of policies on civil society in line with its perceived importance in the expansion of the Eurozone. Drawing on interviews with civil society organizations and in conjunction with an examination of EU Civil Society Policy and the legal and institutional environment in Turkey, this book questions the impact that these policies have had on Turkish civil society suggesting that it is, at best, limited. Instead this book argues that the EU could not accomplish its expected objectives within the framework of its civil society policy in Turkey due to a universalist understanding that ignores the current domestic structure of Turkish civil society as well as disregarding its political nature and the autonomous character of Turkey's civil society actors. The result is one of the most wide-ranging and in-depth studies on Turkish civil society and European Union, as such it is an important text for students and scholars of EU enlargement and civil society.

In January 2014, for the first time in the history of federal farm legislation going back to the Great Depression, all four members of the US House of Representatives from Kansas voted against the Farm Bill, despite pleas by the states agricultural leaders to support it. Why? The story of the Agricultural Act of 2014, as it unfolds in Framing the Farm Bill, has much to tell us about the complex nature of farm legislation, food policy, and partisan politics in present-day America. Framing the Farm Bill is an enlightening look at federal agricultural policy-its workings, its history, and its present state-as well as the effect federal legislation has on farming practices, the environment, and our diet, in a thoroughly readable primer on the politics of food in America.

Written by a team of leading experts, "The Palgrave Review of British Politics 2006" provides up-to-date coverage of developments in British government and politics. An indispensable reference book, it covers the entire political year and includes chapters on the constitution, government and administration, the law, Parliament, public policy, devolution, foreign policy, relations with the EU, local government, elections and public opinion, the party system, pressure politics, the media and democracy, plus a statistical appendix.

A critical yet constructive description of the rich analytical techniques and substantive applications that typify how statistical thinking has been applied at the RAND Corporation over the past two decades. Case studies of public policy problems are useful for teaching because they are familiar: almost everyone knows something abut health insurance, global warming, and capital punishment, to name but a few of the applications covered in this casebook. Each case study has a common format that describes the policy questions, the statistical questions, and the successful and the unsuccessful analytic strategies. Readers should be familiar with basic statistical concepts including sampling and regression. While designed for statistics courses in areas ranging from economics to health policy to the law at both the advanced undergraduate and graduate levels, empirical researchers and policy-makers will also find this casebook informative.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This book is a study of why people approve and disapprove of the mayor in four cities with long histories of racial conflict: New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago and Charlotte NC. It examines the relative influence of race, racial factors, racial environment, and perceptions of the quality of life in determining mayoral approval.

Nation states around the globe are increasingly raising the 'federalism' card as a means of explaining their commitment to democracy, self-determination, and recognition of the rights of all peoples. Yet, the term federalism does not convey the same set of institutions, values and beliefs to all people at all times. This collection of essays is designed to help scholars and practitioners understand the fluid and dynamic nature of federalism, with particular emphasis on the federal system in the United States. The book is written to aid our understanding of the contemporary question 'which federalism?'

Technological innovation, the globalization of exchange, greater marital instability, and new environmental and health challenges are reshaping the world in which we live. This edited volume analyzes current and projected future socioeconomic trends in the context of New York State, a state that has historically played an important role in public policy innovation. The contributors identify major trends, compare New York State to the United States as a whole, and indicate the need for new social policy at the local, state, and federal levels. Among the issues discussed are the distribution of income, trends in land use, recent immigrants, and family living arrangements.

Koven examines how political philosophy shapes public policy. In particular, he emphasizes the influence of ideology on one policy area--budgeting in the public sector. That political beliefs greatly affect the type of policy implemented appears obvious, as would the benefit of rational--not ideological--policymaking. Yet, the question of whether policy is developed by politically biased appointees or by neutral administrators is not so easily answered. Koven asserts that government policy determined by philosophical factors directly contradicts the view that public policy should be developed by policy experts via rational analysis. He concludes that through the recognition and control of confounding influences, objective policy can--and should--be formulated.

This study of 19th-century local government examines the role of local government officials and the social origins of this growing bureaucracy. As the predecessor of the London County Council, the Metropolitan Board of Works was an important body and its officials formed a large and significant professional group, not hitherto studied in such depth.

A political economy analysis of the history of food security in the Arab world, including the role played by the global food price crisis in the Arab Spring and the Arab response aiming at greater food sovereignty via domestic food production and land acquisition overseas - the so-called land grab.

In their tenth co-authored study, Brennan and Hahn propose both a new method of biographical study for students of political communication and a new way of evaluating candidates for presidential office. The authors argue that given the biases inherent in the print and broadcast media, the only way to obtain accurate assessment about presidential candidates is to analyze information from the primary sources--the candidates themselves. They show how careful listening and rigorous analysis can enable the reader to extract reliable clues to presidential competence from the speeches, debates, press conferences, and advertising spots of the candidates. Challenging traditional rhetorical criticism in which biography is used to help evaluate speeches, Brennan and Hahn demonstrate that speeches can be effectively used to arrive at reliable evaluations of speakers. In order to establish the need for a new approach, the authors begin with a critique of the major extant methods of political analysis (biography, psychobiography, political biography and rhetorical biography). They then respond to that need by focusing on methods of analyzing information directly from political speeches and other utterances, identifying five major arenas for evaluating candidates: personality orientation, leadership ideal, ideology, epistemology, and axiology. Each of the arenas is divided into theory and application sections, providing the reader with both the methods in practice and an understanding of why they work. The final chapter examines the relationship of the media to political analysis. A comprehensive bibliography completes the work.

This book provides up-to-date coverage of developments in British government and politics written by a team of leading experts. An indispensable reference book, it covers the entire political year and includes chapters on the constitution, government and administration, the law, Parliament, public policy, devolution, foreign policy, relations with the EU, local government, elections and public opinion, the party system, pressure politics, the media and democracy, plus a statistical appendix.

Africa is changing and it is easy to overlook how decentralization, democratization, and new forms of illiberalism have transformed federalism, political parties, and local politics. Chapters on Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa help fill an important gap in comparative institutional research about state and local politics in Africa.

"Redesigning the Work of Human Services" explores alternative organizational designs for the delivery of human services--designs that emphasize collaborative governance and partnerships among public and private agencies, local control and responsibility for results, and the use of innovative information, planning, and community capacity-building technologies. This book redefines the debate about whether human services should be privatized or not. The author suggests that the basic task of human services--to enable families to socialize the young--is one that can neither be fulfilled effectively by the state nor by private agencies. Rather, carefully crafted public-private partnerships, when combined with new accountability mechanisms and the sophisticated use of emerging information technologies, are likely to offer more in the way of effective, efficient, and appropriate human services. Because this work is solidly grounded in the literature on both human and business services, the author's suggestions for major redesign are comprehensive and intelligently qualified.