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Discover analytical tools and practices to help improve the quality of risk management in government organizations Federal agencies increasingly recognize the importance of active risk management to help ensure that they can carry out their missions. High impact events, once thought to occur only rarely, now occur with surprising frequency. Managing Risk in Government Agencies and Programs provides insight into the increasingly critical role of effective risk management, while offering analytical tools and promising practices that can help improve the quality of risk management in government organizations. Includes chapters that contribute to the knowledge of government executives and managers who want to establish or implement risk management, and especially Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), in their agencies Features chapters written by federal risk managers, public administration practitioners, and scholars Showing government officials how to improve their organization's risk management capabilities, Managing Risk in Government Agencies and Programs meets a growing demand from federal departments and agencies that find themselves increasingly embarrassed by risky events that raise questions about their ability to carry out their missions.

If investment in the EEC countries has been the major preoccupation of the international business community in the 1960's, contracting in the Arab states seems to become one of the major trends of the 1970's. The need for multicountry business and tax information was felt simultane­ ously. Language difficulties, scarcity of legal and other sources, distance and, most of all, the novelty of business expansion in this direction made such information still more necessary than in the European or inter­ American setting. A few symposiums were held, corporate and tax laws were translated, research studies were initiated, among which the book of Mr and Mrs SIIILLING on Doing Business in Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf States, a rich mine of general business information. I was therefore very pleased when Mrs CLERIN, completing her tax studies at Ecole Superieure des Sciences Fiscales in Brussels, mentioned that she was going to live in the Middle East, had the opportunity to work with a well-known international accounting firm and proposed to focus her final dissertation at the School on the tax planning of operations in Arab countries. She devoted months of research to the study of sources both in Middle East and in industrial­ ized Western countries, to come up with a true planning study, clear, readable and practical. The description of the tax and corporate structure of the operating territories will be found in the first half of the book.

This collection is an important contribution in both the historical and contemporary analysis of Pan-Slavism. It places this concept in context of Yugoslavism, as well as Russian appeals to Slavic and Orthodox solidarity and competing European identity. This book will become a standard study on the topic through its comprehensive and systematic approach, covering most Slavic countries and not treating Pan-Slavism as just a type of failed meta nationalism, but as an important idea informing the Slavic world today. - Florian Bieber, Professor of Southeast European History and Politics, University of Graz, Austria The heyday of Pan-Slavism may be long gone, but the idea of the brotherhood of Slavs continues to inspire a range of cultural, civilisational and geopolitical imaginations in Europe. This book is a veritable treasure trove for anyone interested in the curious evolution of this understudied phenomenon and its contemporary ramifications. - Filip Ejdus, Associate Professor, Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade, Serbia This book explores origins, manifestations, and functions of Pan-Slavism in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, arguing that despite the extinction of Pan-Slavism as an articulated Romantic-era geopolitical ideology, a number of related discourses, metaphors, and emotions have spilled over into the mainstream debates and popular imagination. Using the term Slavophilia to capture the range of representations, the volume analyses how geopolitical discourses shape the identity and policies of a community, providing a comparative analysis that covers a range of Slavic countries in order to understand how Pan-Slavism works and resonates across geographic and political contexts. Mikhail Suslov is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Marek Cejka is Associate Professor in the Department of Territorial Studies at Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic. Dorevic Vladimir is Assistant Professor in the Department of Territorial Studies at Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic.

"Frankly, he had no use for the National Government. He feared the Conservative Party had been led astray by strange gods and had departed from its old ideals. This was how the Norfolk Chronicle summed up the speech of Colonel Thomas Purdy to a gathering of the North Norfolk Conservative Association in January 1935. The colonel was well known in the county. He had served as an officer in the Norfolk Regiment during the Great War, including as a company major with the men of the king's Sandringham estate who met their fate in Gallipoli. A lifelong Conservative and party activist, he had railed against the cross-party National government's 'un-Conservative' policies since the formation of that administration in 1931. Continued membership, he warned, amounted to self-destruction. He had most emphatically not, he said, become a Conservative in order to support coalition government, much less so one led since 1931 by a Labour prime minister. Ramsay MacDonald was a peace campaigner during the war and a socialist whose policies now included far-reaching reforms to the Indian constitution, a particular bugbear for Purdy"--

This paper presents the first empirical test of innovation type and diffusion in local government. Five types of innovations – one product, three process and one ancillary – were tested in a multivariate model that included environmental, organizational and diffusion variables. The research was conducted on 120 upper tier English local authorities using a multiple informant survey instrument. Results indicate that adoption of innovation is both complex and contingent – different factors drive the diffusion of different types of innovation across upper tier English local government. These findings suggest that further research is required on the interactions of types of innovation in public organizations and that policy instruments developed to assist adoption need to be sensitive to variations between innovations.

Itaya et al. (2014) study the conditions for sustainability and stability of capital tax coordination in a repeated game model with tax-revenue maximizing governments. One of their major results is that the grand tax coalition is never stable and sustainable. The purpose of this note is to prove that there are conditions under which the grand tax coalition is stable and sustainable in Itaya et al.'s model.

In late February, the nation's attention snapped back and forth from protests in the Middle East to protests in the Middle West. Wisconsin's new Republican governor, Scott Walker, announced budget-saving measures that immediately set off a national debate over labor unions and their relation to state and local governments. Walker sought to force state employees to pay more of their pension and healthcare costs and to rescind most collective-bargaining privileges for most state workers. Other governors, mostly Republicans, have also taken up the first, calling for a rollback of collective bargaining for government workers and seeking reforms of pension systems that are contributing mightily to structural deficits. The action in America's state capitals reflects a broader trend with profound ramifications not only for present-day governance but also for the ideological alignment of the nation's parties. This trend, put fully into gear by the Great Recession, is the reconfiguration of the political categories of the West, and in a manner that has surprised almost everyone. Adapted from the source document.

The media can play an important role in the relationship between citizens and their government by acting as a watchdog and providing timely information about malfeasance and corruption. We examine whether citizens' perceptions of government corruption are closer to country experts' assessments in countries where there are higher levels of press freedom. Using data on citizens' perceptions of government corruption and country expert evaluations of levels of political corruption for over 100 countries, we present evidence that the relationship between expert measures of corruption and citizens' perceptions is heightened as the level of press freedom increases across our sample. These findings suggest that a free press can play an important role in bringing corruption to light, educating citizens, and potentially allowing them to better hold their elected officials accountable.

According to Robert Brustein, the theater should be taken seriously as one of the fine arts, but it should also be considered a means to reflect on our world, times, and culture from a different perspective. However, this presents a great challenge—the masses must come to appreciate the theater as a means of leisure, but also one of learning. If Word Plays tickles your funny bone as well as touches your mind, then Brustein will have achieved his goal. Word Plays, a collection of Brustein's articles, satires, and skits, is his attempt to both entertain and educate about the current political and cultural environment in America. Openly positioning himself as a left-leaning political observer, Brustein's material is wide-ranging and witty. His provocative views on contemporary politics and his ease with a broad range of subjects, from Shakespeare to The Sopranos, makes this an enjoyable, engaging, and reflective volume. The book is divided into three sections. The first is a set of short essays, many of which link political themes to the dramatic arts and others that are purely political commentary. The second includes a series of "dramatic commentaries"—short skits— lampooning contemporary politics and modern American life. The final section consists of "elegies and eulogies" honoring recently deceased icons of the American theater.

In this essay, Susanna Soojung Lim examines the philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev's representation of China and Japan in his theory of Pan- Mongolism. Emerging at the disjuncture between Solov'ev's ecumenism and the geopolitical realities of contemporary history, Pan-Mongolism was a creation onto which the philosopher projected his anxiety and disillusionment at the failure of his vision. Lim begins by surveying Russian perceptions of East Asia before the 1850s and situating Solov'ev within the popular discourse of the "yellow peril." Discussing how Solov'ev recapitulates previous notions of this east, she considers Pan-Mongolism in terms of an acute Russian response to the historical and cultural changes originating in China and Japan at a period when the modernization of these nations was challenging the existing relationship between, and indeed the very categories of, east and west. A hybrid construct shaped by Russian occidentalism as well as orientalism, Pan-Mongolism is an idea that reveals both the strength and weakness of Solov'ev's Utopian universalism.

Although the determinants of trust in governments have received significant attention in the literature on political trust, there has been no attention paid to whether environmental concerns affect governmental trust. Yet, if individuals are worried about local and global environmental degradation, they may think that the government has failed in providing them with the best living conditions. Hence, it is plausible to expect local and global environmental concerns and trust in government to be inversely correlated. Using 2005 data from 24 countries, this hypothesis is tested against competing theories of civic participation, interpersonal trust, and economic considerations to explain individual trust in government. Multilevel models that specify the impact of individual- and national-level factors provide evidence that global environmental concerns do actually matter.

The article examines the use of Orthodox Christianity in the debates over the cultural heritage of contemporary Greece. Since the birth of modern Greece, Orthodox Christianity has been used as one of the foundational cultural markers for the construction of Modern Greek national identity. This employment of religion is particularly evident in the case of history in its popularized format. In contemporary cultural politics, debates over the building of a mosque in Athens or the role of Orthodoxy in history textbooks offer particular illustrations of the public significance of Orthodox Christianity. This high profile role was particularly pronounced during the reign of the late Archbishop Christodoulos (1998–2008). The article suggests that the engagement and influence of the Church on public debates depends upon the nature of the affair: The Church enjoys more authority in ecclesiastical issues and is far less influential on issues of broader interest, such as geopolitical disputes.