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City-County Consolidation and Its Alternatives: Reshaping the Local Government Landscape
City-country consolidation builds upon the Progressive tradition of favoring structural reform of local governments. This volume looks at some important issues confronting contemporary efforts to consolidate governments and develops a theoretical approach to understanding both the motivations for pursuing consolidation and the way the rules guiding the process shape the outcome. Individual chapters consider the push for city-county consolidation and the current context in which such decisions are debated, along with several alternatives to city-county consolidation. The transaction costs of city-county consolidation are compared against the costs of municipal annexation, inter-local agreements, and the use of special district governments to achieve the desired consolidation of services. The final chapters compare competing perspectives for and against consolidation and put together some of the pieces of an explanatory theory of local government consolidation.
Policy and Politics in State Budgeting
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...
Local Budgeting
Local budgeting serves important functions that include setting priorities, planning, financial control over inputs, management of operations and accountability to citizens. These objectives give rise to technical and policy issues that require open discussion and debate. The format of the budget document can facilitate this debate. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of all aspects of local budgeting needed to develop sound fiscal administration at the local level. Topics covered include fiscal administration, forecasting, fiscal discipline, fiscal transparency, integrity of revenue administration, budget formats, and processes including performance budgeting, and capital budgeting.
Medicaid Politics
Medicaid, one of the largest federal programs in the United States, gives grants to states to provide health insurance for over 60 million low-income Americans. As private health insurance benefits have relentlessly eroded, the program has played an increasingly important role. Yet Medicaid’s prominence in the health care arena has come as a surprise. Many astute observers of the Medicaid debate have long claimed that “a program for the poor is a poor program” prone to erosion because it serves a stigmatized, politically weak clientele. Means-tested programs for the poor are often politically unpopular, and there is pressure from fiscally conservative lawmakers to scale back the $350-b...
The Public Budgeting and Finance Primer
This primer succinctly summarises key theoretical concepts in fiscal choice for both practitioners and scholars. The author contends that fiscal choice is ultimately a choice of both politics and economics. The book first introduces budget institutions and processes at various levels of government, which restrict budget decision makers' discretion. It also explains budget decision makers' efforts to make rational resource allocations. It then shows how and why such efforts are stymied by the decision makers' capacity and institutional settings. The book's unique benefit is its emphasis on all the essential topics, with short, module-type chapters which can be read in any order.
Cooperation and Conflict between State and Local Government
This book introduces students to the complex landscape of state-local intergovernmental relations today. Each chapter illustrates conflict and cooperation for policy problems including the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental regulation, marijuana regulation, and government management capacity. The contributors, leading experts in the field, help students enhance their understanding of the importance of state-local relations in the U.S. federal system, argue for better analysis of the consequences of state-local relations for the quality of policy outcomes, and introduce them to public service career opportunities in state and local government.
The Connected City
The Connected City explores how thinking about networks helps make sense of modern cities: what they are, how they work, and where they are headed. Cities and urban life can be examined as networks, and these urban networks can be examined at many different levels. The book focuses on three levels of urban networks: micro, meso, and macro. These levels build upon one another, and require distinctive analytical approaches that make it possible to consider different types of questions. At one extreme, micro-urban networks focus on the networks that exist within cities, like the social relationships among neighbors that generate a sense of community and belonging. At the opposite extreme, macro...
Public Administration Reformation
In an attempt to instil trust in their performance, credibility, integrity, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and good governance, many public organizations are in effect viewing tax-paying citizens as consumers. Little research exists to explore synergies between the market economy, public administration reformation, and their complex bilateral effects. This book takes a timely look at the heightened need for public administration reform as a result of the economic challenges currently faced by nations across the globe. In particular it explores the roles of eGovernment and a citizen-centric focus in this transformation. Public Administration Reform examines several commonly-held assumptions about public administration: the public sector is slow and bureaucratic; government employees are frequently disengaged; and government agencies are sometimes wasteful. eGovernment is proposed as a key tool in the improvement of both public services and reputations of public organizations.
The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics
The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics is an authoritative volume on an established subject in political science and the academy more generally: urban politics and urban studies. The editors are all recognized experts, and are well connected to the leading scholars in urban politics. The handbook covers the major themes that animate the subfield: the politics of space and place; power and governance; urban policy; urban social organization; citizenship and democratic governance; representation and institutions; approaches and methodology; and the future of urban politics. Given the caliber of the editors and proposed contributors, the volume sets the intellectual agenda for years to come.
Collaborating to Manage
Collaborating to Manage captures the basic ideas and approaches to public management in an era where government must partner with external organizations as well as other agencies to work together to solve difficult public problems. In this primer, Robert Agranoff examines current and emergent approaches and techniques in intergovernmental grants and regulation management, purchase-of-service contracting, networking, public/nonprofit partnerships and other lateral arrangements in the context of the changing public agency. As he steers the reader through various ways of coping with such organizational richness, Agranoff offers a deeper look at public management in an era of shared public program responsibility within governance. Geared toward professionals working with the new bureaucracy and for students who will pursue careers in the public or non-profit sectors, Collaborating to Manage is a student-friendly book that contains many examples of real-world practices, lessons from successful cases, and summaries of key principles for collaborative public management.
