Download or read book Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions written by Alberto Alesina and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We present a model that links heterogeneity of preferences across ethnic groups in a city to the amount and type of public good the city supplies. We test the implications of the model with three related datasets: US cities, US metropolitan areas, and US urban counties. Results show that productive public goods -- education, roads, libraries, sewers and trash pickup -- in US cities (metro areas/urban counties) are inversely related to the city's (metro area's/county's) ethnic fragmentation, even after controlling for other socioeconomic and demographic determinants. Ethnic fragmentation is negatively related to the share of local spending on welfare. The results are mainly driven by observations in which majority whites are reacting to varying sizes of minority groups. We conclude that ethnic conflict is an important determinant of local public finances.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Quality of Government written by Andreas Bågenholm and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent research demonstrates that the quality of public institutions is crucial for a number of important environmental, social, economic, and political outcomes, and thereby human well-being. The Quality of Government (QoG) approach directs attention to issues such as impartiality in the exercise of public power, professionalism in public service delivery, effective measures against corruption, and meritocracy instead of patronage and nepotism. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this rapidly expanding research field and also identifies viable avenues for future research. The initial chapters focus on theoretical approaches and debates, and the central question of how QoG can be measured. A second set of chapters examines the wealth of empirical research on how QoG relates to democratization, social trust and cohesion, ethnic diversity, happiness and human wellbeing, democratic accountability, economic growth and inequality, political legitimacy, environmental sustainability, gender equality, and the outbreak of civil conflicts. The remaining chapters turn to the perennial issue of which contextual factors and policy approaches—national, local, and international—have proven successful (and not so successful) for increasing QoG. The Quality of Government approach both challenges and complements important strands of inquiry in the social sciences. For research about democratization, QoG adds the importance of taking state capacity into account. For economics, the QoG approach shows that in order to produce economic prosperity, markets need to be embedded in institutions with a certain set of qualities. For development studies, QoG emphasizes that issues relating to corruption are integral to understanding development writ large.
Download or read book Demanding Development written by Adam Michael Auerbach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the uneven success of India's slum dwellers in demanding and securing essential public services from the state.
Download or read book Accountability without Democracy written by Lily L. Tsai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-27 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the fundamental issue of how citizens get government officials to provide them with the roads, schools, and other public services they need by studying communities in rural China. In authoritarian and transitional systems, formal institutions for holding government officials accountable are often weak. The state often lacks sufficient resources to monitor its officials closely, and citizens are limited in their power to elect officials they believe will perform well and to remove them when they do not. The answer, Lily L. Tsai found, lies in a community's social institutions. Even when formal democratic and bureaucratic institutions of accountability are weak, government officials can still be subject to informal rules and norms created by community solidary groups that have earned high moral standing in the community.
Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Governance written by David Levi-Faur and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Oxford Handbook will be the definitive study of governance for years to come. 'Governance' has become one of the most popular terms in contemporary political science; this Handbook explores the full range of meaning and application of the concept and its use in a number of research fields.
Download or read book Nation Building written by Andreas Wimmer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer’s theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states’ capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries.
Download or read book Community Scale and Regional Governance written by Liesbet Hooghe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second of five ambitious volumes theorizing the structure of governance above and below the central state. This book is written for those interested in the character, causes, and consequences of governance within the state. The book argues that jurisdictional design is shaped by the functional pressures that arise from the logic of scale in providing public goods and by the preferences that people have regarding self-government. The first has to do with the character of the public goods provided by government: their scale economies, externalities, and informational asymmetries. The second has to do with how people conceive and construct the groups to which they feel themselves belonging. In this book, the authors demonstrate that scale and community are principles that can help explain some basic features of governance, including the growth of multiple tiers over the past six decades, how jurisdictions are designed, why governance within the state has become differentiated, and the extent to which regions exert authority. The authors propose a postfunctionalist theory which rejects the notion that form follows function, and argue that whilst functional pressures are enduring, one must engage human passions regarding self-rule to explain variation in the structures of rule over time and around the world. Transformations in Governance is a major new academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states up to supranational institutions, down to subnational governments, and side-ways to public-private networks. It brings together work that significantly advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars. The series targets mainly single-authored or co-authored work, but it is pluralistic in terms of disciplinary specialization, research design, method, and geographical scope. Case studies as well as comparative studies, historical as well as contemporary studies, and studies with a national, regional, or international focus are all central to its aims. Authors use qualitative, quantitative, formal modeling, or mixed methods. A trade mark of the books is that they combine scholarly rigour with readable prose and an attractive production style. The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the VU Amsterdam, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.
Download or read book Democratic Federalism written by Robert P. Inman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Federalism, defined generally as a collection of self-governing regions under a central government, is widely viewed as a sensible choice of polity both for emerging democracies and for established states. But while federal institutions are positively correlated with valued economic, democratic, and justice outcomes, ultimately it is unclear how they are connected and which cause which. In Democratic Federalism, Robert Inman and Daniel Rubinfeld explore how federalism works and propose concrete and proven policy guidance on how federalist policies can be designed and implemented successfully. The authors define federalism according to three parameters: how much federal revenue comes through local governmental bodies, the number of local governmental bodies, and the extent to which these local bodies are represented federally. In applying these parameters to economic concepts and theory, Inman and Rubinfeld explain how federalism works in a way meant to engage scholars in political science and sociology and policymakers drafting regulation in federalist governments. The book offers applicable ideas and comparative case studies on how to assess potential policies and how to actually design federalist institutions from scratch. Both authors have real experience with both, most notably in their work advising the South African government on how to build a federalist democracy. This book will be an essential guide to understanding and applying federalist concepts and principles"--
Download or read book Decentralized Governance and Accountability written by Jonathan A. Rodden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviews recent lessons about decentralized governance and implications for future development programs and policies.
Download or read book Statistics on Race and Ethnicity written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 6 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Public Good and the Brazilian State written by Anne G. Hanley and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who and what a government taxes, and how the government spends the money collected, are questions of primary concern to governments large and small, national and local. When public revenues pay for high-quality infrastructure and social services, citizens thrive and crises are averted. When public revenues are inadequate to provide those goods, inequality thrives and communities can verge into unrest—as evidenced by the riots during Greece’s financial meltdown and by the needless loss of life in Haiti’s collapse in the wake of the earthquake. In The Public Good and the Brazilian State, Anne G. Hanley assembles an economic history of public revenues as they developed in nineteenth-century Brazil. Specifically, Hanley investigates the financial life of the municipality—a district comparable to the county in the United States—to understand how the local state organized and prioritized the provision of public services, what revenues paid for those services, and what happened when the revenues collected failed to satisfy local needs. Through detailed analyses of municipal ordinances, mayoral reports, citizen complaints, and financial documents, Hanley sheds light on the evolution of public finance and its effect on the early economic development of Brazilian society. This deeply researched book offers valuable insights for anyone seeking to better understand how municipal finance informs histories of inequality and underdevelopment.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Governance and Limited Statehood written by Thomas Risse and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unpacking the major debates, this Oxford Handbook brings together leading authors of the field to provide a state-of-the-art guide to governance in areas of limited statehood where state authorities lack the capacity to implement and enforce central decision and/or to uphold the monopoly over the means of violence. While areas of limited statehood can be found everywhere - not just in the global South -, they are neither ungoverned nor ungovernable. Rather, a variety of actors maintain public order and safety, as well as provide public goods and services. While external state 'governors' and their interventions in the global South have received special scholarly attention, various non-state actors - from NGOs to business to violent armed groups - have emerged that also engage in governance. This evidence holds for diverse policy fields and historical cases. The Handbook gives a comprehensive picture of the varieties of governance in areas of limited statehood from interdisciplinary perspectives including political science, geography, history, law, and economics. 29 chapters review the academic scholarship and explore the conditions of effective and legitimate governance in areas of limited statehood, as well as its implications for world politics in the twenty-first century. The authors examine theoretical and methodological approaches as well as historical and spatial dimensions of areas of limited statehood, and deal with the various governors as well as their modes of governance. They cover a variety of issue areas and explore the implications for the international legal order, for normative theory, and for policies toward areas of limited statehood.
Download or read book Regional Public Goods written by Antoni Estevadeordal and published by IDB. This book was released on 2004 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Boundaries of Contagion written by Evan Lieberman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-23 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have governments responded to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in such different ways? During the past quarter century, international agencies and donors have disseminated vast resources and a set of best practice recommendations to policymakers around the globe. Yet the governments of developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean continue to implement widely varying policies. Boundaries of Contagion is the first systematic, comparative analysis of the politics of HIV/AIDS. The book explores the political challenges of responding to a stigmatized condition, and identifies ethnic boundaries--the formal and informal institutions that divide societies--as a central influence on politics and policymaking. Evan Lieberman examines the ways in which risk and social competition get mapped onto well-institutionalized patterns of ethnic politics. Where strong ethnic boundaries fragment societies into groups, the politics of AIDS are more likely to involve blame and shame-avoidance tactics against segments of the population. In turn, government leaders of such countries respond far less aggressively to the epidemic. Lieberman's case studies of Brazil, South Africa, and India--three developing countries that face significant AIDS epidemics--are complemented by statistical analyses of the policy responses of Indian states and over seventy developing countries. The studies conclude that varied patterns of ethnic competition shape how governments respond to this devastating problem. The author considers the implications for governments and donors, and the increasing tendency to identify social problems in ethnic terms.
Download or read book Segregation by Design written by Jessica Trounstine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Segregation by Design draws on more than 100 years of quantitative and qualitative data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments generate race and class segregation. Starting in the early twentieth century, cities have used their power of land use control to determine the location and availability of housing, amenities (such as parks), and negative land uses (such as garbage dumps). The result has been segregation - first within cities and more recently between them. Documenting changing patterns of segregation and their political mechanisms, Trounstine argues that city governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor. Contrary to leading theories of urban politics, local democracy has not functioned to represent all residents. The result is unequal access to fundamental local services - from schools, to safe neighborhoods, to clean water.
Download or read book Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa written by Daniel N. Posner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a theory to account for why and when politics revolves around one axis of social cleavage instead of another. It does so by examining the case of Zambia, where people identify themselves either as members of one of the country's seventy-three tribes or as members of one of its four principal language groups. The book accounts for the conditions under which Zambian political competition revolves around tribal differences and under which it revolves around language group differences. Drawing on a simple model of identity choice, it shows that the answer depends on whether the country operates under single-party or multi-party rule. During periods of single-party rule, tribal identities serve as the axis of electoral mobilization and self-identification; during periods of multi-party rule, broader language group identities play this role. The book thus demonstrates how formal institutional rules determine the kinds of social cleavages that matter in politics.
