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This study explores the difficulties of translating presidential policy initiatives into ground-level policy implementation by the permanent government. Drawing on organization theory, it focuses on the ways that bureaucratic behaviours shape an agency's responsiveness to directives.
This assessment of government corporations examines their records and identifies advantages and failures. The author challenges the reader to think creatively about the government corporate form and ways to reinvent it, capitalizing on its strengths and compensating for its shortcomings.
This prize-winning study examines the impact of the employment of women and ethnic and racial minorities in public organizations on the implementation of government programs by those agencies. Driving the study is the question of whether the concept of representative government applies also to the permanent government--the bureaucracy. What difference does it make if an administration is either more or less representative of the population it serves? To what extent, if at all, is an agency's responsiveness to different segments of the public a function of the demographic composition of the agency itself? This study, which won the Leonard D. White award, is the most systematic test to date of the concept of representative bureaucracy. Selden tests the relationship between the demographic representativeness of district office staffs and lending decisions in the Farmers Home Administration's Rural Housing Loans Program. In fleshing out the implications of representative bureaucracy, the book makes an important contribution to the debates on bureaucratic power and illuminates the tensions underlying the assumptions of bureaucratic neutrality and affirmative action.
This text on representive bureaucracy covers topics such as: bureaucracy as a representative institution; bureaucratic power and the dilemma of administrative responsibility; and representative bureaucracy and the potential for reconciling bureaucracy and democracy.
States are the key to contemporary government reform efforts in the United States, but we know very little about their relative effectiveness at resource allocation and their actual capacity to absorb additional fiscal and managerial responsibilities. This path-breaking study examines state budget offices as institutional actors, with special attentio to the role of budget examiners. Drawing on empirical findings from field studies of eleven states in the American heartland, the authors demonstrate how budgeting at the state level has become more policy-oriented, requiring complex decision making by budget analysts. The incrementalist model of budgetary decision-making thus gives way to a mu...
The Harvard Law Review is offered in a digital edition, featuring active Contents, linked notes, and proper ebook formatting. The contents of Issue 7 include a Symposium on privacy and several contributions from leading legal scholars: Article, "Agency Self-Insulation Under Presidential Review," by Jennifer Nou Commentary, "The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: Myths and Realities," by Cass R. Sunstein SYMPOSIUM: PRIVACY AND TECHNOLOGY "Introduction: Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma," by Daniel J. Solove "What Privacy Is For," by Julie E. Cohen "The Dangers of Surveillance," by Neil M. Richards "The EU-U.S. Privacy Collision: A Turn to Institutions and Procedures,"...
The U.S. president has to make difficult, important, and very public decisions every day. We don't expect one person to be an expert in all the areas in which the president has to make decisions. So how do presidents do it? They rely on their staffs to give information and advice. "Good Advice" is a systematic study of Jimmy Carter's reign and those who advised him. Daniel E. Ponder discusses the president's policies, the advisors behind each, and how much of that advice ultimately became incorporated into the president's official proposals. The book's central thesis is that although presidents have tended to centralize policy-making authority in the White House staff, the dynamics of staff ...
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Between 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson defined affirmative action as a legitimate federal goal, and 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon named one of affirmative action’s chief antagonists the head of the Department of Labor, government officials at all levels addressed racial economic inequality in earnest. Providing members of historically disadvantaged groups an equal chance at obtaining limited and competitive positions, affirmative action had the potential to alienate large numbers of white Americans, even those who had viewed school desegregation and voting rights in a positive light. Thus, affirmative action was—and continues to be—controversial. Novel in its approach a...