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The rapid process of urbanization currently swelling the poor urban neighborhoods of developing countries is changing local and national political landscapes. As the population of urban poor continues to grow--it is expected that by 2030 half of the total urban population will be poor--so are poor peoples' demands for access to public services, as well as the type and intensity of their engagements with political actors. The dissertation focuses on the different types of interactions between the urban poor and politicians and specifically tackles the following questions: What explains the variation in political participation among the urban poor? What drives the urban poor to become active in politics? What types of political activity are these citizens engaging in? The dissertation uses a mixed-methods strategy that makes use of a case study of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and survey data, including an original dataset that includes interviews with over 400 favela dwellers. It finds that in Brazil, there is a "favela effect" in political participation: favela dwellers are more likely to become politically engaged in a number of activities--voting, working for a politician, participating in neighborhood meetings--than people living in more affluent neighborhoods. In addition, the dissertation demonstrates that there are multiple pathways to political participation and that four factors are key in explaining the levels of political engagement: social networks, religious groups, government transfer schemes, and NGO programs. The dissertation contributes to the literature on political participation and democracy, and helps move the debate on political engagement of the urban poor beyond arguments that, on the one hand, portray them as uninterested or unable to engage in political activities and, on the other hand, describe them as the inevitable victims of clientelism and political bosses.
Joan Nelson elucidates the implications of this rapid growth and concomitant poverty for politics. Unlike many scholars who have sought an all-encompassing theory to explain the political behavior of the urban poor, Professor Nelson emphasizes the complex variety in the economic, social, and political circumstances that influence this behavior. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
A controversial look at how the failure of most of the poor to work at all has transformed American politics, by a New York University political scientist who is a leading advocate of workfare programs.
The debate on persisting poverty in the United States, somewhat dampened for the past decade, has now been fully rekindled. Devine and Wright have entered that debate with an analysis that is both quantitative and qualitative, informed on the one side by urban ethnography and steeped in official statistics and relevant data on the other. The result is an incisive and cogently documented narrative account leading to policy recommendations for a new president and a new era. In The Greatest of Evils, Devine and Wright develop three principal themes. First they argue that poverty is by no means monolithic: each subgroup within the population in poverty tends to have different problems. Secondly, the so-called "underclass" within the poverty population represents a new and especially corrosive development, one that cannot be analyzed in traditional terms nor dealt with in traditions ways. Thirdly, the War on Poverty of the Sixties was not the unmitigated disaster that so many have come to believe, and offered a boldness of vision that today's poverty policies tend to lack. In exploring these themes, the authors show how the social and economic costs of poverty-related problems exceed what it will cost to find remedies that address the underlying causes of residual poverty.
"There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the "underclass" debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor. Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor to the "underclass," and the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago. Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that will satisfy anyone? Why has public policy proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the deterioration of major cities? What strategies have helped poor people survive the poverty endemic to urban history? How did urban schools become unresponsive bureaucracies that fail to educate most of their students? Are there fresh, constructive ways to think about welfare, poverty, and public education? Throughout the book Katz shows how interpretations of the past, grounded in analytic history, can free us of comforting myths and help us to reframe discussions of these great public issues.
Analysis of community development and urban planning programmes for the rebuilding slum areas and the improvement of housing conditions of low income groups in the USA - examines government policies to alleviate urban area poverty through the model cities program, social participation therein, covers the planning methodology, etc.