Suchergebnisse

The budgeting literature has long focused on "institutional friction" as a cause of ubiquitous punctuated equilibrium (PE) findings. A recent wave of scholarship looks to identify specific institutional mechanisms that affect the number of punctuations in policy outputs. We contribute to this growing body of research by focusing on the complexity of the institutional environment surrounding a policy area as well as that of the government as a whole. These factors have opposite effects: the more complex a policy area, the greater the likelihood of extreme spending changes. But, higher institutional capacity in general leads to greater stability. To test these ideas, we develop a novel index of budgetary change that balances the conceptual importance of extreme changes while analyzing the entire distribution of budget changes, not only the tails. In addition, we also demonstrate that findings are robust to a number of important distinctions, such as between series associated with slowly moving demographic trends or quickly moving stochastic events. We, therefore, demonstrate the robustness of important findings from the established literature, add a new measure of the dependent variable, and push the literature forward with a new focus on issue complexity and institutional capacity.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Part I. "Seek and Ye Shall Find" -- Chapter 1. Search, Information, and Policy Agendas -- Chapter 2. Organizing for Expertise or Organizing for Complexity? -- Chapter 3. Information, Search, and Government -- Part II. Information and the Growth of Government -- Chapter 4. The Rise and Decline of Institutional Information Processing in the Executive and Legislative Branches -- Chapter 5. From Clarity to Complexity in Congress -- Chapter 6. The Search for Information and the Great New-Issue Expansion -- Chapter 7. The Thickening and Broadening of Government -- Chapter 8. Rounding Up the Usual Political Suspects -- Part III. The Implications of Information in Government -- Chapter 9. Organizing Information and the Transformation of U.S. Policy Making -- Chapter 10. Organizing Complexity -- Appendices -- References -- Index.

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) brings together data on government activities in over twenty countries, and provides a consistent categorizing system to understand when a given institution of government in a particular country took action on any issue of public policy. All topics are covered, comprehensively, over several decades, in some countries going back to World War II. Because of the open-data philosophy that animates the international network of scholars involved in the project and their meticulous attention to comparability and common data coding conventions, the databases of the CAP represent an unprecedented resource for the study of public policy across national borders. In this major new book, leaders of each national team provide the background and information needed for anyone to understand how best to make use of these newly available historical databases. Interested users will range from novice students of public policy to accomplished scholars, from interested citizens to professional journalists, political or partisan activists, and professional staff of legislative assemblies or national administrative agencies. The book's sections include chapters introducing the CAP to a new audience, describing each national project, illustrating various cross-national uses and analyses that the CAP data allow, and concluding with ideas for further practical and research uses.

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) brings together data on government activities in over twenty countries, and provides a consistent categorizing system to understand when a given institution of government in a particular country took action on any issue of public policy. All topics are covered, comprehensively, over several decades, in some countries going back to World War II. Because of the open-data philosophy that animates the international network of scholars involved in the project and their meticulous attention to comparability and common data coding conventions, the databases of the CAP represent an unprecedented resource for the study of public policy across national borders. In this major new book, leaders of each national team provide the background and information needed for anyone to understand how best to make use of these newly available historical databases. Interested users will range from novice students of public policy to accomplished scholars, from interested citizens to professional journalists, political or partisan activists, and professional staff of legislative assemblies or national administrative agencies. The book's sections include chapters introducing the CAP to a new audience, describing each national project, illustrating various cross-national uses and analyses that the CAP data allow, and concluding with ideas for further practical and research uses.

Suspect Citizens offers the most comprehensive look to date at the most common form of police-citizen interactions, the routine traffic stop. Throughout the war on crime, police agencies have used traffic stops to search drivers suspected of carrying contraband. From the beginning, police agencies made it clear that very large numbers of police stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment. Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number of high-level offenders might be found. The key element in this strategy, which kept it hidden from widespread public scrutiny, was that middle-class white Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. Tracking these police practices down to the officer level, Suspect Citizens documents the extreme rarity of drug busts and reveals sustained and troubling disparities in how racial groups are treated