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Borrowing from the perspective of macroeconomics, it treats electorates, politicians, and governments as unitary actors, making decisions in response to the behavior of other actors. The macro and longitudinal focus makes it possible to directly connect the behaviors of electorate and government. The surprise of macro-level analysis, emerging anew in every chapter, is that order and rationality dominate explanations.
Macroeconomic policy is one of the most important policy domains, and the tools of macroeconomics are among the most valuable for policy makers. Yet there has been, up to now, a wide gulf between the level at which macroeconomics is taught at the undergraduate level and the level at which it is practiced. At the same time, doctoral-level textbooks are usually not targeted at a policy audience, making advanced macroeconomics less accessible to current and aspiring practitioners. This book, born out of the Masters course the authors taught for many years at the Harvard Kennedy School, fills this gap. It introduces the tools of dynamic optimization in the context of economic growth, and then applies them to a wide range of policy questions – ranging from pensions, consumption, investment and finance, to the most recent developments in fiscal and monetary policy. It does so with the requisite rigor, but also with a light touch, and an unyielding focus on their application to policy-making, as befits the authors’ own practical experience. Advanced Macroeconomics: An Easy Guide is bound to become a great resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and practitioners alike.
Tracking trends in American public opinion, this study examines moods of public policy over time. It argues that public opinion is decisive in American politics and identifies the citizens who produce influential change as a relatively small subset of the American electorate.
Since so few people appear knowledgeable about public affairs, one might question whether collective policy preferences revealed in opinion surveys accurately convey the distribution of voices and interests in a society. This study, the first comprehensive treatment of the relationship between knowledge, representation, and political equality in opinion surveys, suggests some surprising answers. Knowledge does matter, and the way it is distributed in society can cause collective preferences to reflect disproportionately the opinions of some groups more than others. Sometimes collective preferences seem to represent something like the will of the people, but frequently they do not. Sometimes they rigidly enforce political equality in the expression of political viewpoints, but often they do not. The primary culprit is not any inherent shortcoming in the methods of survey research. Rather, it is the limited degree of knowledge held by ordinary citizens about public affairs. Accounting for these factors can help survey researchers, journalists, politicians, and concerned citizens better appreciate the pitfalls and possibilities for using opinion polls to represent the people s voice.
Provides a framework to demonstrate how to unify formal, theoretical and empirical analysis through various interdisciplinary examples.
This book discusses the diversity and resilience in a hybrid regime where civil society organisations are either provided with complex sets of opportunities or face severe constraints. By studying the case of Iran between 1997 and 2013, it shows how the Islamic Republic regime went into two opposite directions under two presidencies and played in-between supporting and suppressing advocacy NGOs. After accommodating a novel theoretical framework enabling scholars to identify the contributing factors of diversity in the regime, four case-study chapters are designated for comparing the women’s rights and environmental NGOs across local and national governments. These two political and technical policy areas demonstrate the different scopes of freedoms for advocacy NGOs. The contrasting narratives of the civil activists and policymakers imply paradoxes and shifts in the arrangement of opportunities for action and advocacy, although the leadership and structure of the regime remained unchanged during the period of study.