Public administration as an American profession originated in the early twentieth century with urban reformers advocating the application of scientific and business practices to rehabilitate corrupt city governments. That approach transformed governance in the United States but also guaranteed recurrent debate over the proper role of public administrators, who must balance the often contradictory demands of efficiency and politically defined notions of the public good. Currently the business approach holds sway. Legitimated by Al Gore's National Performance Review, the New Public Management...

More than fifty years have passed since the American Political Science Association published "Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System," a controversial report that addressed the lack of national cohesion within the major parties. Although parties have changed a great deal since then, they remain a critical component of American democracy.

While the possibilities and limits of responsible party government have been central topics in the literature since 1950, this book is the first to reassess all aspects of the APSA report. Here a distinguished group of scholars--among them Charles O....

During the first two decades of the twentieth century in cities across America, both men and women struggled for urban reform but in distinctively different ways. Adhering to gender roles of the time, men working for independent research bureaus sought to apply scientific and business practices to corrupt city governments, while women in the settlement house movement labored to improve the lives of the urban poor by testing new services and then getting governments to adopt them.

Although the two intertwined at first, the contributions of these "settlement women" to the development of the...

It is difficult to ignore the fact that, even as the United States becomes much more racially and ethnically diverse, our neighborhoods remain largely segregated. The 1968 Fair Housing Act and 1977 Community Reinvestment Act promised to end discrimination, yet for millions of Americans housing options remain far removed from the American Dream. Why do most neighborhoods in American cities continue to be racially divided?

The problem, suggests Mara Sidney, lies with the policies themselves. She contends that to understand why discrimination persists, we need to understand the political...

Organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are familiar to anyone with an interest in environmental protection. As activist groups, they played by the same rules for years. But in 1994, the rules changed.

With the Republican takeover of Congress, environmental groups faced sweeping changes in federal policies that threatened the enforcement of environmental laws. As these organizations intensified their efforts to meet these challenges, they also altered their electoral strategies and political spending patterns. This book traces those actions and shows what they...

Organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are familiar to anyone with an interest in environmental protection. As activist groups, they played by the same rules for years. But in 1994, the rules changed.

With the Republican takeover of Congress, environmental groups faced sweeping changes in federal policies that threatened the enforcement of environmental laws. As these organizations intensified their efforts to meet these challenges, they also altered their electoral strategies and political spending patterns. This book traces those actions and shows what they mean...

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which originally was intended to prohibit barriers to black registration and voting, has been hailed as a triumph for civil rights and as a catalyst for the election of minorities to public office in both the Deep South and the urban North. To advance its objective, federal courts instructed many cities to change from at-large to single-member district electoral systems as a way to ensure that minorities had a reasonable chance to elect representatives of their choice.

In the first book to critique the implementation of this landmark legislation in a major...

Many of the basic issues of political science have been addressed by pluralist theory, which focuses on the competing interests of a democratic polity, their organization, and their influence on policy. Popular in the 1960s, pluralism gradually lost favor and nearly became obsolete when political scientists began to challenge its fundamental assumptions. Andrew McFarland shows, however, that this approach still provides a promising foundation for understanding the American political process.

Neopluralism draws on pluralism's foundational logic to synthesize its various strands into...

We expect Birkenstocks. We find wing-tips.

Professional organizations that advocate on behalf of environmental issues have become a permanent part of the American political landscape. From the Sierra Club to the Rainforest Action Network, these groups represent more than eleven million members and claim more than $3.5 billion in assets. Sometimes lambasted for non-stop fund-raising, top-heavy bureaucracies, or agendas out of touch with local concerns, they remain staunch advocates for Mother Nature in the marble halls of Washington. But what happens to a grassroots movement when it goes...

We expect Birkenstocks. We find wing-tips.

Professional organizations that advocate on behalf of environmental issues have become a permanent part of the American political landscape. From the Sierra Club to the Rainforest Action Network, these groups represent more than eleven million members and claim more than $3.5 billion in assets. Sometimes lambasted for non-stop fund-raising, top-heavy bureaucracies, or agendas out of touch with local concerns, they remain staunch advocates for Mother Nature in the marble halls of Washington. But what happens to a grassroots movement when it goes...