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Despite their many failings and the perennial political controversies that surround them, governments sometimes 'get it right' in a big way. We can learn much from examining when and how this occurs. This book tells the story of 15 instances of highly successful government reforms, programmes, and projects from around the world.
Policy design efforts are hampered by inadequate understanding of how policy tools and actions promote effective policies. The objective of this book is to address this gap in understanding by proposing a causal theory of the linkages between policy actions and policy effects. Adopting a mechanistic perspective, the book identifies the causal processes that activate effects and help achieve goals. It thus offers a powerful analytical tool to both scholars and practitioners of public policy seeking to design effective policies.
The world today is more unequal than it has ever been before. Therefore, global inequalities represent a crucial issue of the contemporary global economy. This volume carries the title ‘Geopolitics, Discrimination, Gender, & Immigration’. It contains eleven selected papers which touch upon the topic of inequalities from various perspectives. The scope of the discussion in the papers is wide and it opens possibilities for further research in problems that are directly or indirectly related to inequalities of opportunity, gender issues, immigration and global policies.
Featuring the latest research by Brazilian-based scholars previously inaccessible to an English-speaking audience, this book is a timely, authoritative, multidisciplinary overview of social policies in Brazil during the Temer austerity and the Bolsonaro populist presidencies. The breadth of policies studied herein provides clues on the political agenda, preferences, and strategies during this tumultuous period in Brazil’s history. Divided into four parts, Part I is a conceptualization: it brings basic understanding of Brazilian social policies, explains the trajectory of the Brazil political landscape, including the growth of a populist right-wing movement, the economic crisis and the incr...
'Everyone wants good government, but how do we know when we have it? The path-breaking Quality of Government Institute cuts through the tiresome ideological debate with theoretically grounded empirical analyses of the components, measures, and outcomes of good government. The book's contributors demonstrate the relevance of political science, and they do so with arguments and evidence that should improve policy and, ultimately, peoples' lives.' – Margaret Levi, University of Washington, US 'All too often today research in political science is irrelevant and uninspiring, shying away from the "big" questions that actually matter in people's lives. Good Government shows that this does not hav...
Perfectionism, as routinely used and perpetuated by droves of psychologists and relevant medical specialists, connotes obsession with certain repetitive thoughts and behaviours extreme of the average. What we have in The Healthy Perfectionist is the shedding of light on the reality of perfectionism as routine modes of making sense of and tackling whichever circumstances confronting any person, to achieve a better outcome or state of affairs. In this well-crafted eight-chaptered book, the author, using impressive and comprehensive comparative data and historical evidence, incisively and systematically shows how perfectionism-the urge and efforts directed at achieving more effective methods an...
While governments prefer to alter budgets to fit their ideological stances, the domestic and international contexts can facilitate or constrain behavior. The Politics of Budgets demonstrates when governments do and do not make preferred budgetary changes. It argues for an interconnected view of budgets and explores both the reallocation of expenditures across policy areas and the interplay among budgetary components. While previous scholars have investigated how politics and economics shape a single budgetary category, or collective categories, this methodologically rich study analyzes data for thirty-three countries across thirty-five years to provide a more comprehensive theoretical approach: a 'holistic' framework about the competition and contexts around the budgetary process and an of examination of how and when these factors affect the budgetary decision-making processes.
Winner of the Herbert A. Simon Book Award of the American Political Science Association, American Society for Public Administration Book Award of the American Society for Public Administration Political scientists and public administration scholars have long recognized that innovation in public agencies is contingent on entrepreneurial bureaucratic executives. But unlike their commercial counterparts, public administration “entrepreneurs” do not profit from their innovations. What motivates enterprising public executives? How are they created? Manuel P. Teodoro’s theory of bureaucratic executive ambition explains why pioneering leaders aren not the result of serendipity, but rather ari...
Public administration plays an integral role at every stage of social policy creation and execution. Program operators' management decisions shape policymakers' perceptions of what can and should be accomplished through social programs, while public administrators wield considerable power to mobilize tangible and intangible resources and fill gaps in policy designs. Furthermore, the cumulative effects of public administrators' daily activities directly influence outcomes for program participants, and may shift policy itself. Location also matters to social policy, as those same administrators are expected to innovate continuously in response to shifting local and national conditions, includi...
In an era filled with mistrust for big government and big business, Charles Goodsell goes against this grain to draw attention to public agencies admired for what they do and how well they do it. In his groundbreaking new book, Goodsell places renewed focus on organizational mission and its potential to be a strong energizing force in government—one that animates a workforce internally and attracts admiration and talent externally. He offers a normative template for the mystique that underlies this phenomenon and highlights—in six rich case studies—a driving sense of purpose, a cultural and motivational richness, and a capacity for tolerating dissent while still innovating and learning. Analyzing what works best (and what doesn’t), Goodsell provides a metric through which agency mystique can be evaluated and modeled. Goodsell’s fresh take on public agencies not only defines good public administration in terms of ethical conduct, constitutional accountability, and performance effectiveness, but argues that the field must add the crucial standard of institutional vitality.