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Flirting with Disaster is the first thorough examination of government successes and failures in responding to natural disaster situations. The author contrasts the bureaucratic principles that dominate governmental activity with the disruptive effects of disaster and the forms of human behavior that emerge during disaster situations. By comparing case studies of Hurricane Hugo, Hurricane Andrew, the Loma Prieta earthquake, and the 1990 floods in South Carolina, the author is able to identify the factors that contribute to effective response to disasters and the conditions under which relatively minor crises may lead to system breakdown. The book looks at an extremely important but previously unexamined area of public administration and public policy; presents a general theory of governmental performance in natural disaster situations; identifies factors contributing to government success or failure in coping with disasters; offers fresh insights into how the government can improve its response in disaster situations; and integrates insights from emergency management studies, agenda-building research, and the study of collective behavior.
Now updated with examples through 2010, this classic study examines the disruptive effects of disasters on patterns of human behavior and the operations of government, and the conditions under which even relatively minor crises can lead to system breakdown.
Based on five years of extensive research by the Government Performance Project, this volume offers a comprehensive analysis of how government managers and elected officials use management and management systems to improve performance. Drawing on data from across the nation, it examines the performance of state, county, and city governments between 1997 and 2002 within the framework of basic management systems: financial information, human resources, capital and infrastructure, and results evaluation. Key issues addressed: • How governments strategically select elements of management to emphasize the role of leadership • How those governments that aim to improve performance differ from those that do not • What “effective management” looks like Through this careful, in-depth investigation, the contributors conclude that the most effective governments are not those with the most resources, but those that use the resources available to them most carefully and strategically. In Pursuit of Performance is an invaluable tool for government leaders and the scholars who study them.
While medical identification and treatment of gender dysphoria have existed for decades, the development of transgender as a “collective political identity” is a recent construct. Over the past twenty-five years, the transgender movement has gained statutory nondiscrimination protections at the state and local levels, hate crimes protections in a number of states, inclusion in a federal law against hate crimes, legal victories in the courts, and increasingly favorable policies in bureaucracies at all levels. It has achieved these victories despite the relatively small number of trans people and despite the widespread discrimination, poverty, and violence experienced by many in the transgender community. This is a remarkable achievement in a political system where public policy often favors those with important resources that the transgender community lacks: access, money, and voters. The Remarkable Rise of Transgender Rights explains the growth of the transgender rights movement despite its marginalized status within the current political opportunity structure.
A concise and provocative introduction to state legislative politics, State Legislatures Today is designed as a supplement for state and local government courses and upper level courses on legislative politics. The book examines state legislatures and state lawmakers, putting them in historical context, showing how they have evolved over the years, and differentiating them from Congress. It covers state legislative elections (including the impact of redistricting, candidate recruitment, etc.), the changing job description of state legislators, legislatures as organizations, the process by which legislation gets produced, and the influences upon legislators.
"How can democracies effectively represent citizens? The goal of this Handbook is to evaluate comprehensively how well the interests and preferences of mass publics become represented by institutions in liberal democracies. It first explores how the idea and institutions of liberal democracies were formed over centuries and became enshrined in Western political systems. The contributors to this Handbook, made up of the world's leading scholars on the various aspects of political representation, examine how well the political elites and parties who are charged with the representation of the public interest meet their duties. Clearly, institutions often fail to live up to their own representat...
How partisan politics influence grant-related decisions at the state level. Each year, states receive hundreds of billions of dollars in grants-in-aid from the federal government. Gubernatorial success is often contingent upon the pursuit and allocation of these grants. In Governors, Grants, and Elections, Sean Nicholson-Crotty reveals the truth about how U.S. governors strategically utilize these funds. Far from spending federal money in apolitical ways, they usually pursue their own policy interests in the hopes of maximizing their or their party’s electoral success. Nicholson-Crotty analyzes three decades of data on the receipt and expenditure of grants in all fifty states. He also draw...
The Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government is an historic undertaking. It contains a wide range of essays that define the important questions in the field, evaluate where we are in answering them, and set the direction and terms of discourse for future work. The Handbook will have a substantial influence in defining the field for years to come. The chapters critically assess both the key works of state and local politics literature and the ways in which the sub-field has developed. It covers the main areas of study in subnational politics by exploring the central contributions to the comparative study of institutions, behavior, and policy in the American context. Each chapter outlines an agenda for future research.
This book analyses the historical sociology of state formation in the Horn of Africa. It examines the genesis, trajectories, processes, routes and consequences of the evolution of state formation. Three analytical and explanatory models explain the process of state formation in the HOA: proto-state, colonial and national liberation. The models, heuristically and innovatively, provide understanding, interpretation and analysis of state formation. While the proto-state model explicates an indigenous historical process of state formation, the colonial model refers to an externally designed and imposed process of state formation. The national liberation model concern state formation conducted under liberation movement and ideology. The distinct significance of these models is that collectively they generate sufficient analysis of state formation. They are also unique in that they have never been employed as aggregate analytical and explicative instruments to address the predicament of state formation in the Horn of Africa.