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AbstractThe extent of centralized or decentralized government has been an issue in America's governing system since the Revolutionary War. The major issues debated at the Constitutional Convention revolved around the amount of authority the national government should possess in relation to the states. The centralization‐decentralization issue is still a matter of contention, but a major focus of the debate has shifted to the metropolitan area. Despite the differences in time and levels of governments, many of the same arguments made during the constitutional debates are similar to the arguments made for and against government reform in metropolitan areas today. The author reconsiders the centralization‐decentralization issues debated at the Constitutional Convention and the ratification fight in the context of the current debate in metropolitan areas. Theoretical support for this exercise is provided by the international relations model. An application of the issues debated and resolved by the colonists to the current debate on the extent of centralized government in metropolitan areas would favor the establishment of metropolitan government.

The past decade marks a watershed in Argentine civil-military relations. The country, an almost classic case of twentieth-century praetorianism, now has an historic opportunity to assert civilian control over the armed forces. This improvement in the prospects for civilian control of the armed forces may not be evident at first since the accession of the current president, Carlos Menem (1989-) was marked by an apparently dramatic retreat in the government's relations with the armed forces. While Menem's predecessor, Raul Alfonsin (1983-1989), pursued a policy which included prosecution of military human rights violators, Menem made an abrupt about-face. He granted a general pardon to those same military officers. However, this trade-off has given the government the freedom to assert a degree of civilian control over the armed forces hitherto lacking in range of important military policies in which the previous government had been largely stalemated by armed forces resistance. The threat of substantial political intervention by the armed forces is now on the wane.

Municipal government part-time employee benefit practices were analyzed using a sample of 358 local governments. Municipal governments provide part-time employees with benefits at significantly lower rates than for full-time employees. The provision of part-time benefits is associated with organizations that provide more family-friendly benefits and have more highly educated personnel directors and benefits administrators. The most frequently provided municipal part-time benefits include vacation, sick leave pension and health insurance. Municipal government benefit provision levels are substantially higher than private sector employers, however.

Bureaucracies, including large corporations and governmental agencies, are based on hierarchy and prone to secrecy. They encourage highly specialized forms of knowledge and structure themselves in compartmentalized ways. In stark contrast, environmental problems cut across all artificial divisions and boundaries. Managing Leviathan illustrates the nature of environmental problems from genetically modified crops to climate change, from urban sprawl to toxic chemicals to trace pharmaceuticals in our water supply. Understanding these problems, and how they might be resolved, requires that we transcend the divisions of government, economy, and knowledge. Solutions often also require the mobilization of citizen knowledge and values. Are governments and bureaucracies up to the complex task? How might they adapt to be better suited to meet the new environmental challenges that continuously arise? This extensively revised edition of Managing Leviathan expands from a North American to a global perspective and includes new articles on both European and Australian experiences as well as on transnational environmental issues. The overall pattern is remarkably clear: environmental administration demands integrative thinking and new forms of direct public involvement in governance

Harvey Milk was an influential advocate for gay rights. His election, assassination, and the riots that resulted from it transformed how many LGBT individuals interacted with politics, activism, and society itself.

This review examines policy feedback effects among the mass public, with a focus on social policies in the United States and Europe. It shows that existing policies feed back into the political system, shaping subsequent policy outcomes. Policies exert this effect by altering not only the capacities, interests, and beliefs of political elites and states but also those of the public. Public policies can shape political participation and attitudes. These effects can be positive or negative, enhancing or undercutting participation and conferring positive or negative messages about individuals' worth as citizens. These effects originate in elements of program design, such as the size, visibility, and traceability of benefits, the proximity of beneficiaries, and modes of program administration. Thus, public policy itself shapes the distance of citizens from government, with profound implications for democratic governance. Adapted from the source document.

This article disentangles the complexity of right-wing populism and feminist politics using an original framework based on inputs (representative claims) and outputs (policies) to examine a Polish case. In 2015, the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS) formed a single-party majority government led by a female prime minister after winning the elections. PiS is ideologically conservative, promotes traditional and national values and is supported by the Catholic Church. Additionally, it is hostile towards what it calls 'gender-ideology' and is reluctant to implement feminist policies. This article also reveals that PiS represents conservative women's interests and advocates an aspect of conservative feminism, therefore possessing a duality in its claims and policies. Overall, this article draws inferences about the nexus between social conservatism, populism and feminism, and thus seeks to contribute to the scholarly literature by examining a timely issue against the backdrop of rising populism, illiberalism and anti-gender campaigns.

The government itself, which is the only mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable [with the standing army] to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. Henry Thoreau, in "Civil Disobedience" It is easy to say — and often is said — that we cannot have tolerable relations with new revolutionary regimes. The problem is that our anticommunist paranoia has made it impossible to find out. We do not know whether Mao's declared interest in a relationship with the Americans in the 1940s or Ho Chi Minh's were sincere. And the reason we don't know is that we never tried to find out. Those who reported it was a possibility were hounded out of the foreign service because of our suspicion and fear of communism. The legacy of that era brings to mind Ivan the Terrible's practice of murdering the bearer of bad news. We are more civilized than that; we have been content simply to ruin people's careers. J. William Fulbright, in The Price of Empire (1989) This poisonous thing I'm trying to describe is [a] characteristic way of dealing with criticism. It used to be enough to brand a critic as a radical or a leftist to make people turn away. Now we need only to call him a liberal. Soon "moderate" will be the M word, "conservative" will be the C word and only fascists will be in the mainstream. E. L. Doctorow, Brandeis Commencement, May 21, 1989 We have lived with violence for seven years It was not worth one single life But the patriot's fist is at her throat Her voice is in mortal danger... Adrienne Rich, "Natural Resources," in Dream of a Common Language (Norton, 1978)

This article analyses state formation in Botswana and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in the light of general theories of state formation. It seeks to explain why Botswana became a strong state, while state power in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe has eroded. Three main arguments are made. First, Zimbabwe's experience shows that security threats and compulsion to collect revenue are not sufficient conditions for establishing a strong state. Second, the Botswana case indicates that the formation of a strong state may be possible even in the absence of such compulsions. Third, both cases reveal that patterns of state formation ultimately depend on the interests of ruling regimes, and on their ability to promote those interests. The creation of a strong state requires that regimes must have an interest in a strong state as well as the power to carry out a project of state building. This depends on the relationship between regimes and their constituencies. The article concludes by pointing out the need for expanding the framework described by security-based and fiscal theories, to include considerations about how state formation is related to the underlying social forces on which state power is based. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright, the International Political Science Association.]

Abstract
Existing research demonstrates how governments can use insights from behavioral science to design policy and alter residents' behavior. This article proposes that the effect of behavioral interventions may be different in hierarchical organizations where the decision to change behavior and the execution of that decision are split between different individuals. We examine the effect of two small-scale interventions—personal reminders and financial incentives—in a large-scale field experiment with public schools in Denmark. The Ministry of Education invited a representative sample of public schools to adopt a program that provides information on students' socio-emotional competencies. Results show that small financial incentives increased managers' adoption of the program by 7 percentage points. Frontline workers' subsequent data generation and performance information acquisition were also increased in the incentive treatment groups, even though the latter was not incentivized. Reminders paired with incentives had an impact on the managers' adoption, but the reminder effect disappeared during the implementation phase. These findings demonstrate both the potentials and limitations of applying behavioral research on individual residents to hierarchical organizations.