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In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt created America's first domestic national service program: the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). As part of this program—the largest and most highly esteemed of its kind—nearly three million unemployed men worked to rehabilitate, protect, and build the nation's natural resources. It demonstrated what citizens and government could accomplish together. Yet despite its success, the CCC was short lived. While more controversial programs such as President Johnson's Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and President Clinton's AmeriCorps survived, why did CCC die? And why—given the hard-won continuation and expansion of AmeriCorps—is national service an option for fewer Americans today than at its start nearly eighty years ago? In The Politics and Civics of National Service, Melissa Bass focuses on the history, current relevance, and impact of domestic civilian national service. She explains why such service has yet to be deeply institutionalized in the United States; while military and higher education have solidified their roles as American institutions, civilian national service is still not recognized as a long-term policy option. Bass argues that only by examining these programs over time can we understand national service's successes and limitations, both in terms of its political support and its civics lessons. The Politics and Civics of National Service furthers our understanding of American political development by comparing programs founded during three distinct political eras—the New Deal, theGreat Society, and the early Clinton years—and tracing them over time. To a remarkable extent, the CCC, VISTA, and AmeriCorps reflect the policymaking ethos and political controversies of their times, illuminating principles that hold well beyond the field of national service. By emphasizing these programs' effects on citizenship and civic engagement, The Politics and Civics of National Ser
This volume explores the influence of professional service firms on public policy-making from a global perspective. Drawing on cases studies from around the world, researchers from different disciplines—including sociology, political science, geography, anthropology, history, and management studies—examine how professional service firms have generated power in the policy-making process. The chapters further investigate the structure and organization of these firms and their relationship with public agencies. They discuss the impact of strategies, techniques and models promoted by these firms on political decision-making. And they analyze how these firms have contributed to the formation of global policy-pipelines, facilitating the quick diffusion of policy ideas across time and space. Exposing how professional advisors can undermine democratic decision-making, the chapters in this book explore the potential for resistance and regulation of public-private relationships.
Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.
The call to "reinvent government"—to reform the government bureaucracy of the United States—resonates as loudly from elected officials as from the public. Examining the political and economic forces that have shaped the American civil service system from its beginnings in 1883 through today, the authors of this volume explain why, despite attempts at an overhaul, significant change in the bureaucracy remains a formidable challenge.
The traditional understandings that structure the relationships between public servants and the wider political system are said to have undergone considerable change. But what are these formalized and implicit understandings? What are the key dimensions of such bargains? In what conditions do bargains rise and fall? And has there been a universal and uniform change in these bargains?The Politics of Public Service Bargains develops a distinct perspective to answer these questions. It develops a unique analytical perspective to account for diverse bargains within systems of executive government. Drawing on comparative experiences from different state traditions, this study examines ideas and contemporary developments along three key dimensions of any Public Service Bargain - reward, competency and loyalty and responsibility.The Politics of Public Service Bargains points to diverse and differentiated developments across national systems of executive government and suggests how different 'bargains' are prone to cheating by their constituent parties. This study explores the context in which managerial bargains - widely seen to be at the heart of contemporary administrative reform movements - are likely to catch on and considers how cheating is likely to destabilize such bargains.
Securing economic growth by ensuring that its rewards are distributed to the poor and marginalised through social grants and effective delivery, remains a key challenge facing South Africa. This title examines the obstacles to effective service delivery and, in a series of case studies, reflects on lessons for delivery in developing countries.
Designated a Doody's Core Title! Winner of an AJN Book of the Year Award! Who Has a Right to Health Care? What Is the Government's Role in Providing Accessible Health Care? How Are Corporations, Insurance Companies, and Health Care Providers Affecting the Quality of Health Care? And, Most Importantly, Can We Reform the U.S. Health Care System? We often debate these issues in health care policy or public health courses, yet we do so without the proper knowledge of the underlying structure of the U.S. health care system--or a framework by which it can be judged. Many health care workers entering the system are ill-equipped to address the issues faced in direct health care practice, in part because they have no ability to evaluate it. In this innovative text, Gunnar Almgren provides all the tools necessary to understand and critique a health care policy in dire need of change. First, he describes the historical evolution of U.S. health care, explaining how the early roles of hospitals, doctors, and nurses still influence today's system. He explains the complex financial aspects of health care, including the concerns of all its major stakeholders. He looks at the government's role in regulating and funding health care, and how that role has expanded and contracted through various political administrations. An entire chapter describes the facilities and services available for the elderly--an issue that will continue to rise in importance as America ages. Finally, he examines the many causes of disparities in the U.S. health care system. In addition, Almgren offers a unique social justice analysis as a framework by which the current system--and proposed reforms--can be judged. By analyzing the health care system through various models of social justice, we can begin to understand and address the urgent issues of economic, racial, and geographic disparities that plague our current system. With its clear, thorough, and comprehensive coverage of U.S. health care, this unique text is accessible to all those in public health, nursing, social work, public policy, or public administration. No other book addresses the underlying issues of the U.S. health care system alongside a variety of social justice models that we can use to evaluate, and perhaps eventually, change it.
Across the world, welfare states are under challenge—or were never developed extensively in the first place—while non-state actors increasingly provide public goods and basic welfare. In many parts of the Middle East and South Asia, sectarian organizations and political parties supply basic services to ordinary people more extensively and effectively than governments. In sub-Saharan Africa, families struggle to pay hospital fees, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) launch welfare programs as states cut subsidies and social programs. Likewise, in parts of Latin America, international and domestic NGOs and, increasingly, private firms are key suppliers of social welfare in both urban and rural communities. Even in the United States, where the welfare state is far more developed, secular NGOs and faith-based organizations are critical components of social safety nets. Despite official entitlements to public welfare, citizens in Russia face increasing out-of-pocket expenses as they are effectively compelled to seek social services through the private market In The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare, a multidisciplinary group of contributors use survey data analysis, spatial analysis, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic and archival research to explore the fundamental transformation of the relationship between states and citizens. The book highlights the political consequences of the non-state provision of social welfare, including the ramifications for equitable and sustainable access to social services, accountability for citizens, and state capacity. The authors do not assume that non-state providers will surpass the performance of weak, inefficient, or sometimes corrupt states but instead offer a systematic analysis of a wide spectrum of non-state actors in a variety of contexts around the world, including sectarian political parties, faith-based organizations, community-based organizations, family networks, informal brokers, and private firms.
The Politics of Military Force examines the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative. The book argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad and force transformation), one needs to focus on processes of discursive change that result in different policy options appearing rational, appropriate, feasible, or even self-evident. Drawing on Essex School discourse theory, the book develops a theoretical framework to understand how discursive change works, and elaborates on how discursive change makes once unthinkable policy options not only acceptable but even without alternative. Based on a detailed discourse analysis of more than 25 years of German parliamentary debates, The Politics of Military Force provides an explanation for: (1) the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse in German security policy after the end of the Cold War (discursive change), (2) the rearticulation of German antimilitarism in the process (ideational change/norm erosion) and (3) the resulting making-possible of military operations and force transformation (policy change). In doing so, the book also demonstrates the added value of a poststructuralist approach compared to the naive realism and linear conceptions of norm change so prominent in the study of German foreign policy and International Relations more generally.
A critical analysis of the political roles and impact of social services in the United States, assessing their influence on the values, structures, and human behaviors underlying the present social order.