Community Power, Bureaucracy, and Environmental Politics in New York City

Community Power, Bureaucracy, and Environmental Politics in New York City
Author: Robert A. Rodriguez
Publisher:
Total Pages: 412
Release: 1999
Genre:
ISBN:

Three models, elite/rational, pluralist/incrementalist, and non-decision-making/political, are used to test several hypotheses related to community power and bureaucratic decision-making. The hypotheses raise fundamental questions about the nature of political power and the workings of public bureaucracies in respect to the siting process.

Community Power in a Postreform City

Community Power in a Postreform City
Author: Robert F. Pecorella
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2019-07-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 131548563X

This book represents the culmination of several years of research on community politics in New York City.

Street-Level Bureaucracy

Street-Level Bureaucracy
Author: Michael Lipsky
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 263
Release: 1983-06-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1610443624

Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.

Defining Environmental Justice

Defining Environmental Justice
Author: David Schlosberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2009
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199562482

The book uses both environmental movements and political theory to help define what is meant by environmental and ecological justice. It will be useful to anyone interested in environmental politics, environmental movements, and justice theory.

The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development

The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development
Author: Richard M. Valelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 898
Release: 2016-09-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0191086983

Scholars working in or sympathetic to American political development (APD) share a commitment to accurately understanding the history of American politics - and thus they question stylized facts about America's political evolution. Like other approaches to American politics, APD prizes analytical rigor, data collection, the development and testing of theory, and the generation of provocative hypotheses. Much APD scholarship indeed overlaps with the American politics subfield and its many well developed literatures on specific institutions or processes (for example Congress, judicial politics, or party competition), specific policy domains (welfare policy, immigration), the foundations of (in)equality in American politics (the distribution of wealth and income, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual and gender orientation), public law, and governance and representation. What distinguishes APD is careful, systematic thought about the ways that political processes, civic ideals, the political construction of social divisions, patterns of identity formation, the making and implementation of public policies, contestation over (and via) the Constitution, and other formal and informal institutions and processes evolve over time - and whether (and how) they alter, compromise, or sustain the American liberal democratic regime. APD scholars identify, in short, the histories that constitute American politics. They ask: what familiar or unfamiliar elements of the American past illuminate the present? Are contemporary phenomena that appear new or surprising prefigured in ways that an APD approach can bring to the fore? If a contemporary phenomenon is unprecedented then how might an accurate understanding of the evolution of American politics unlock its significance? Featuring contributions from leading academics in the field, The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development provides an authoritative and accessible analysis of the study of American political development.

Understanding Urban Politics

Understanding Urban Politics
Author: Timothy B. Krebs
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2020-02-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1538105233

In Understanding Urban Politics: Institutions, Representation, and Policies, Timothy B. Krebs and Arnold Fleischmann introduce a framework that focuses on the role of institutions in establishing the political “rules of the game,” the representativeness of city government, the influence of participation in local democracy, and how each of these features influences the adoption and implementation of public policies. Part 1 lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by exploring the many meanings of “urban,” analyzing what local governments do, and providing a history of American urban development. Part 2 examines the organizations and procedures that are central to urban politics and policy making: intergovernmental relations, local legislatures, and the local executive branch. Part 3 looks at elections and voting, local campaigns, and non-voting forms of participation. The four chapters in Part 4 focus on the policy process and the delivery of local services, local government finances, “Building the City” (economic development, land use, and housing), and policies affecting the quality of life (public safety, the environment, “morality” issues, and urban amenities). Krebs and Fleischmann bolster students’ learning and skills with guiding questions at the start of each chapter, which ends with key terms, a summary, discussion questions, and research exercises. The appendix and website aid these efforts, as does a website for instructors.

Fascism Old and New

Fascism Old and New
Author: Carl Boggs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2018-06-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351049690

Deep historical trends suggest the United States could be moving toward a distinctly novel form of fascism, embracing elements of the historical phenomenon as it appeared in such countries as Italy, Germany, Japan, and Spain while departing in significant ways. A twenty-first century fascism would hardly be revolutionary or totalitarian, as it would involve no dramatic break with the past, following a logic of continuity and building on firmaments of entrenched power going back to World War II. This new type of fascist regime would be driven by a tightening confluence of sectoral interests in American society: corporate, state, military, and cultural – interests favoring oligarchy, authoritarianism, the warfare system, and surveillance order within an expanding globalized matrix of power. The dominant historical forces emphasized by such theorists as C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite) and Sheldon Wolin (Democracy, Inc.), an important foundation of this book, have grown stronger and more pervasive across the decades. An integrated power structure has been fueled by new advances in technology, a money-saturated political system, and neoliberal globalism bolstered by the spread of right wing populism that, among other things, has catapulted Donald Trump into the U.S. presidency. In this book, Carl Boggs explores new political and ideological terrain in systematically considering the prospects for a gradual development of fascism in contemporary American society and, by extension, elsewhere across the advanced industrial world. He persuasively argues that modern fascistic trends, arguably most visible in the U.S., demonstrate a closer affinity with Mussolini’s Italy (corporate state) than with the more extreme Nazi German model of tyranny and genocide. A very timely scholarly enterprise, this book will be of interest to students of contemporary radical politics, fascism more broadly, US political history, ideologies and party politics.

Collective Dreams

Collective Dreams
Author: Keally D. McBride
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2007-08-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0271046120

How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society. Different chapters investigate how ideals of community intersect with conceptions of self and identity, family, the public sphere and civil society, and the state, situating community at the core of the most contested political and social arenas of our time. Ideals of community also influence how we evaluate, choose, and build the spaces in which we live, as the author’s investigations of Celebration, Florida, and of West Philadelphia show.Following in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Keally McBride reveals how consumer culture affects our collective experience of community as well as our ability to imagine alternative political and social orders. Taking ideals of community as a case study, Collective Dreams also explores the structure and function of political imagination to answer the following questions: What do these oppositional ideals reveal about our current political and social experiences? How is the way we imagine alternative communities nonetheless influenced by capitalism, liberalism, and individualism? How can these ideals of community be used more effectively to create social change?

Epistemic Communities, Constructivism, and International Environmental Politics

Epistemic Communities, Constructivism, and International Environmental Politics
Author: Peter M. Haas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2015-08-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317511395

Epistemic Communities, Constructivism and International Environmental Politics brings together 25 years of publications by Peter M. Haas. The book examines how the world has changed significantly over the last 100 years, discusses the need for new, constructivist scholarship to understand the dynamics of world politics, and highlights the role played by transnational networks of professional experts in global governance. Combining an intellectual history of epistemic communities with theoretical arguments and empirical studies of global environmental conferences, as well as international organizations and comparative studies of international environmental regimes, this book presents a broad picture of social learning on the global scale. In addition to detailing the changes in the international system since the Industrial Revolution, Haas discusses the technical nature of global environmental threats. Providing a critical reading of discourses about environmental security, this book explores governance efforts to deal with global climate change, international pollution control, stratospheric ozone, and European acid rain. With a new general introduction and the addition of introductory pieces for each section, this collection offers a retrospective overview of the author’s work and is essential reading for students and scholars of environmental politics, international relations and global politics.