Download or read book The Tides of Reform written by Paul Charles Light and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past fifty years, the Congresses and presidents of the United States have made many efforts to improve the performance of the federal government. In this book, a leading expert in public management examines the most important reform statutes passed and concludes that the problem is not too little reform but too much. Paul Light explains that Congress and the presidency have never decided whether they trust government and its employees to do their jobs well, and so they have moved back and forth over the decades between four reform philosophies: scientific management, war on waste, watchful eye, and liberation management. These four philosophies, argues Light, operate with different goals, implementation strategies, and impacts. Yet reform initiatives draw on one or another of them almost at random, often canceling out the potential benefits of a particular statute by passing a contradictory statute soon afterward. Light shows that as the public has become increasingly distrustful of government, the reform agenda has favored the war on waste and watchful eye. He analyzes the consequences of these changes for the overall performance of government and offers policy recommendations for future reform approaches.
Download or read book Reform Processes and Policy Change written by Thomas König and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-08-17 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Tsebelis’ veto players approach has become a prominent theory to analyze various research questions in political science. Studies that apply veto player theory deal with the impact of institutions and partisan preferences of legislative activity and policy outcomes. It is used to measure the degree of policy change and, thus, reform capacity in national and international political systems. This volume contains the analysis of leading scholars in the field on these topics and more recent developments regarding theoretical and empirical progress in the area of political reform-making. The contributions come from research areas of political science where veto player theory plays a significant role, including, positive political theory, legislative behavior and legislative decision-making in national and supra-national political systems, policy making and government formation. The contributors to this book add to the current scholarly and public debate on the role of veto players, making it of interest to scholars in political science and policy studies as well as policymakers worldwide.
Download or read book Political Reform in Indonesia After Soeharto written by Harold A. Crouch and published by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. This book was released on 2010 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three decades of authoritarian rule in Indonesia came to a sudden end in 1998. The collapse of the Soeharto regime was accompanied by massive economic decline, widespread rioting, communal conflict, and fears that the nation was approaching the brink of disintegration. Although the fall of Soeharto opened the way towards democratization, conditions were by no means propitious for political reform. This book asks how political reform could proceed despite such unpromising circumstances. It examines electoral and constitutional reform, the decentralization of a highly centralized regime, the gradual but incomplete withdrawal of the military from its deep political involvement, the launching of an anti-corruption campaign, and the achievement of peace in two provinces that had been devastated by communal violence and regional rebellion.
Download or read book The Making of a Political Reformer written by Surendra Bhana and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Study Offers Perspectives That More Accurately Situate Gandhi`S Role In South Africa`S History. The Focus Is On The Religious And Cultural Orientation Of His Compatriots Seeking To Add With This New Dimension To A Better Understanding Of The Making Of A Social Reformer.
Download or read book The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China written by Susan L. Shirk and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were. Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions. Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries.
Download or read book The Reformer written by Stephen F. Williams and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Besides absolutists of the right (the tsar and his adherents) and left (Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks), the Russian political landscape in 1917 featured moderates seeking liberal reform and a rapid evolution towards a constitutional monarchy. Vasily Maklakov, a lawyer, legislator and public intellectual, was among the most prominent of these, and the most articulate and sophisticated advocate of the rule of law, the linchpin of liberalism. This book tells the story of his efforts and his analysis of the reasons for their ultimate failure. It is thus, in part, an example for movements seeking to liberalize authoritarian countries today—both as a warning and a guide. Although never a cabinet member or the head of his political party—the Constitutional Democrats or “Kadets”—Maklakov was deeply involved in most of the political events of the period. He was defense counsel for individuals resisting the regime (or charged simply for being of the wrong ethnicity, such as Menahem Beilis, sometimes considered the Russian Dreyfus). He was continuously a member of the Kadets’ central committee and their most compelling orator. As a somewhat maverick (and moderate) Kadet, he stood not only between the country’s absolute extremes (the reactionary monarchists and the revolutionaries), but also between the two more or less liberal centrist parties, the Kadets on the center left, and the Octobrists on the center right. As a member of the Second, Third and Fourth Dumas (1907-1917), he advocated a wide range of reforms, especially in the realms of religious freedom, national minorities, judicial independence, citizens’ judicial remedies, and peasant rights.
Download or read book Britain before the Reform Act written by Eric. J Evans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years1815-1832, Britain came close to revolution. Fewer than twenty years separate the Battle of Waterloo from the passing of the ‘Great’ Reform Act but during this period Britain’s political elite was challenged as never before. In rising to that challenge, the political elite attempted, with considerable success, to ensure that Britain engineered that most perilous of transitions, from a less complex and more deferential society into a modern urban and industrial one, while avoding political revolution. In this extensively revised 2nd edition Evans engages with a welter of new material and fresh interpretations. The book sheds light both on the challenges to existing political and social authority and why those challenges were seen off. Evans examines: · The composition of Britain’s political elite and how this elite coped with the problems thrown up by a society urbanising and modernising at an unprecedented rate. · How Britain reacted to the longer-term implications of the French Revolution, including the development of a more cohesive national identity. · How the elite attempted to maintain public order in this period – and with what success. · The extent of change in Britain’s political system brought about by political, religious and administrative reforms Written in accessible style, with a rich collection of documents, chronology, glossary, a guide to further reading,and a ‘Who’s Who’ which summarises the careers and contributions of the main figures, this new edition is essential for all those interested in understanding Britain at this most crucial turning point in its history.
Download or read book The Politics of Court Reform written by Melissa Crouch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-19 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an analysis of the politics of court reform through a focused review of Indonesia's complex court system.
Download or read book The Making of Fornication written by Kathy L. Gaca and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-10-26 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers.
Download or read book Despite the Odds written by Merilee S. Grindle and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-26 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Despite the Odds' examines five examples of education reform in South America, focusing on the political battle to secure reform in the face of powerfully entrenched opposition. It shows how strategic choices by reformers can reshape power equations & undermine institutional biases.
Download or read book The Great Reformer written by Austen Ivereigh and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-11-25 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of Pope Francis that describes how this revolutionary thinker will use the power of his position to challenge and redirect one of the world's most formidable religions An expansive and deeply contextual work, at its heart The Great Reformer is about the intersection of faith and politics--the tension between the pope's innovative vision for the Church and the obstacles he faces in an institution still strongly defined by its conservative past. Based on extensive interviews in Argentina and years of study of the Catholic Church, Ivereigh tells the story not only of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the remarkable man whose background and total commitment to the discernment of God's will transformed him into Pope Francis--but the story of why the Catholic Church chose him as their leader. With the Francis Revolution just beginning, this biography will provide never-before-explained context on how one man's ambitious program began--and how it will likely end--through an investigation of Francis's youth growing up in Buenos Aires and the dramatic events during the Perón era that shaped his beliefs; his ongoing conflicts and disillusionment with the ensuing doctrines of an authoritarian and militaristic government in the 1970s; how his Jesuit training in Argentina and Chile gave him a unique understanding and advocacy for a "Church of the Poor"; and his rise from Cardinal to the papacy.
Download or read book Land Protest and Politics written by Gabriel Ondetti and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brazil is a country of extreme inequalities, one of the most important of which is the acute concentration of rural land ownership. In recent decades, however, poor landless workers have mounted a major challenge to this state of affairs. A broad grassroots social movement led by the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) has mobilized hundreds of thousands of families to pressure authorities for land reform through mass protest. This book explores the evolution of the landless movement from its birth during the twilight years of Brazil&’s military dictatorship through the first government of Luiz In&ácio Lula da Silva. It uses this case to test a number of major theoretical perspectives on social movements and engages in a critical dialogue with both contemporary political opportunity theory and Mancur Olson&’s classic economic theory of collective action. Ondetti seeks to explain the major moments of change in the landless movement's growth trajectory: its initial emergence in the late 1970s and early 80s, its rapid takeoff in the mid-1990s, its acute but ultimately temporary crisis in the early 2000s, and its resurgence during Lula's first term in office. He finds strong support for the influential, but much-criticized political opportunity perspective. At the same time, however, he underscores some of the problems with how political opportunity has been conceptualized in the past. The book also seeks to shed light on the anomalous fact that the landless movement continued to expand in the decade following the restoration of Brazilian democracy in 1985 despite the general trend toward social-movement decline. His argument, which highlights the unusual structure of incentives involved in the struggle for land in Brazil, casts doubt on a key assumption underlying Olson's theory.
Download or read book The Progressives Century written by Stephen Skowronek and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 542 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 20. How the Progressives Became the Tea Party's Mortal Enemy: Networks, Movements, and the Political Currency of Ideas -- Chapter 21. What Is to Be Done? A New Progressivism for a New Century -- List of Contributors -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
Download or read book Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India written by Mytheli Sreenivas and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-05-03 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Reform Lessons from Pensions Product Markets and Labour Markets in Ten OECD Countries written by Tompson William and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2009-08-24 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By looking at 20 reform efforts in ten OECD countries, this report examines why some reforms are implemented and other languish.
Download or read book The Politics of Pension Reform written by Giuliano Bonoli and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-14 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative study of European countries' efforts to reform pension systems in the context of ageing populations.
Download or read book The Politics of Institutional Reform written by Terry M. Moe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ground breaking analysis, Terry M. Moe treats Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment that offers a rare opportunity to learn about the role of power in the politics of institutional reform. When Katrina hit, it physically destroyed New Orleans' school buildings, but it also destroyed the vested-interest power that had protected the city's abysmal education system from major reform. With the constraints of power lifted, decision makers who had been incremental problem-solvers turned into revolutionaries, creating the most innovative school system in the entire country. The story of New Orleans' path from failure to revolution is fascinating, but, more importantly, it reveals the true role of power, whose full effects normally cannot be observed, because power has a 'second face' that is hidden and unobservable. Making use of Katrina's analytic leverage, Moe pulls back the curtain to show that this “second face” has profound consequences that stifle and undermine society's efforts to fix failing institutions.
