Priorities for 2001 and Beyond

In July 1995, ASPA's Endowment Board established the Donald C. Stone Fund to honor the memory of this public administration legend. Income from this fund is used to sponsor a lecture or symposium at ASPA's national conference, which reflects Stone's varied interests and contributions to the field. This year marked the sixth Donald C. Stone Lecture. On March 13, Ferrel Heady was ASPA's Stone Lecturer and gave the following speech.     

Some Unfinished Business in Public Administration

In July 1995, the American Society for Public Administration's Endowment Board established the Donald C. Stone Fund to honor the memory of this public administration legend. Income from this fund is used to sponsor a lecture or symposium at ASPA's national conference, which reflects Stone's varied interests and contributions to the field. This year marked the seventh Donald C. Stone Lecture. On March 26, Philip Rutledge was ASPA's Stone Lecturer and gave the following speech.     

The Future Is Uncentralized

In July 1995, ASPA's Endowment Board established the Donald C. Stone Fund to honor the memory of this public administration legend. Income from this fund is used to sponsor a lecture or symposium at ASPA's national conference which reflects Stone's varied interests and contributions to the field. This year marked the fifth Donald C. Stone Lecture. On April 4, Harlan Cleveland, former ASPA National President, was ASPA's Visions 2000 Stone Lecturer and gave the following speech.     

Times of Turbulence

In July 1995, the American Society for Public Administration's Endowment Board established the Donald C. Stone Fund to honor the memory of this public administration legend. Income from this fund is used to sponsor a lecture or symposium at ASPA's national conference, which reflects Stone's varied interests and contributions to the field. This year marked the eighth Donald C. Stone Lecture. On March 18, Astrid E. Merget was ASPA's Stone Lecturer and gave the following speech.     

Transforming Public Service in a World without Boundaries

In July 1995, the American Society for Public Administration's Endowment Board established the Donald C. Stone Fund to honor the memory of this public administration legend. Income from this fund is used to sponsor a lecture or symposium at ASPA's national conference, which reflects Stone's varied interests and contributions to the field. This year marked the ninth Donald C. Stone Lecture. On March 30, Adam W. Herbert was ASPA's Stone Lecturer and gave the following speech.     

Women in the American Society for Public Administration: Another Decade of Progress But Still a Way to Go

During ASPA's first fifty years (1939–1989), the role of women in the Society evolved from virtual invisibility, to token representation, to major participation. In the 1990s, women's role in ASPA continued to expand. They achieved just about full partnership with male colleagues in the organization's governance and they increased their contributions to ASPA's efforts to support the improvement of theory and practice in public administration through research and scholarship. However, women have not yet achieved parity with their male colleagues in scholarly output. For women to achieve full equality with men in ASPA, they must be better represented in contributions to literature and knowledge in the profession.     

The Present and (Normative) Future of Public Administration and Implications for ASPA

ASPA's future is intertwined with institutional trends in public administration, shaped especially by the directions of today's network governance. The implications for the future of ASPA and of other public administration professional associations are significant. In the author's view, ASPA must hold on to its unique generalist niche, but she counsels that ASPA should pay closer attention to advancing democratic and social equity issues throughout government.     

Federal and Local Interests in the Nation's Capital: Congress and District of Columbia Appropriations

Canadian political scientist Donald C. Rowat posits the thesis that there is a "conflict of interest" in all federal capital cities between the national government and the local residents. Federal and local interests in the nation's capital have been so intertwined that it is difficult to define or separate them. Congress has used the appropriations process to intervene in local policy matters even when the federal interest is not involved.     

Book Reviews

Book review in this article:
Localism and Centralism in Europe: The Political and Legal Bases of Local Self-Government . By Edward C. Page.
Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of the Constitution . By Robert C. Vipond.
Reluctant Partners: Implementing Federal Policy . By Robert P. Stoker.
Affirmative Action at Work: Law, Politics, and Ethics . By Bron Raymond Taylor.
Repealing the War Powers Resolution: Restoring the Rule of Law in US Foreign Policy . By Robert F. Turner.
Agenda For Excellence: Public Service in America . By Patricia W. Ingraham and Donald F. Kettl, eds.
The Budget-Maximizing Bureaucrat: Appraisals and Evidence . By Andre Blais and Stephane Dion, eds.
Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking and Investigations, 1946–1990 . By David R. Mayhew.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: L. R. Jones and Gmenn C. Bixler, Mission Financing to Realign National Defence Donald Axclrod, Shadow Government: The Hidden World of Public Authorities - And How They Control Over $1 Trillion of Your Money Fred Thompson and L.R. Jones, Reinventing the Pentagon: How the New Public Management Can Bring Institutional Renewal Anthony Downs, New Visions for Metropolitan America     

Big Questions for a Significant Public Administration

During the 1999 "Building Bridges Tour" (see Stivers 2000), PAR readers encouraged the editors to focus more attention on the so-called "Big Questions/Big Issues" of the field of public administration. In response to this suggestion, we created a new forum for scholarly discourse simply called "Big Questions/Big Issues." This inaugural forum begins with a context setting essay by John Kirlin,a leading proponent of the Big Questions/Big Issues perspective. Kirlin' essay is immediately followed by Laurence E. Lynn Jr.'s thought provoking piece, "The Myth of the Bureaucratic Paradigm: What Traditional Public Administration Really Stood For." Lynn' essay is important for it takes to task those who carelessly attack "traditional public administration." We asked J. Patrick Dobel (University of Washington), David Rosenbloom (American University), Norma Riccucci (State University of New York at Albany), and James Svara (North Carolina State) to respond to Lynn' essay. We invite PAR readers to join the conversation using PAR' message board online at ASPA's Online Community (http://www.memberconnections.com/aspa/) or by writing directly to theauthors and/or editors.—LDT     

An exploration of Donald Trump's allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2016 General Election

As Republican candidate for president and later 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly and vociferously that the 2016 General Election was tainted by massive voter fraud. Here we use aggregate election statistics to study Trump's claims and focus on non-citizen populations across the country, state-specific allegations directed at California, New Hampshire, and Virginia, and the timing of election results. Consistent with existing literature, we do not uncover any evidence supportive of Trump's assertions about systematic voter fraud in 2016. Our results imply neither that there was no fraud at all in the 2016 General Election nor that this election's administration was error-free. They do strongly suggest, however, that the expansive voter fraud concerns espoused by Donald Trump and those allied with him are not grounded in any observable features of the 2016 election.     

From Reagan to Trump: The Origins of US Neoliberal Protectionism

Donald Trump is often seen as a radical departure from the neoliberalism that has shaped recent American history and, at first glance, nowhere does this seem truer than on trade. Trump’s support for protectionism certainly seems to depart from neoliberalism, which we are used to thinking of as involving unqualified support for free trade. But should this really be seen as a departure? This paper argues that, instead, Trump’s trade policy should be seen a kind of ‘neoliberal protectionism’, which seeks to use the coercive power of the state to force other nations to conform to a market‐based economic logic. The origins of this neoliberal protectionism can be traced back to the 1980s when debates about foreign industrial policies first caused the United States to adopt a more aggressive approach to trade. From this perspective, Trump’s trade policy represents not a rejection of neoliberalism but an extreme articulation of it.     

Theory Competency for MPA-Educated Practitioners

In this issue, Cynthia McSwain and Orion White, writing under the nom de plume O.C. McSwite, address the issue of theory in MPA education. This is an important aspect of the larger theory–practice question in public administration, especially given the large number of MPA students who are mid-career managers rather than pre-service students. McSwite's position is that theoretical competency does not consist of specific content, such as theories of the budgeting process; rather, it is a frame of mind that helps practitioners "know what kind of situation they are in." While McSwite's path to this conclusion is unique, it is also consistent with the approach taken in Donald Schon's The Reflective Practitioner. Both McSwite and Schon recognize how basic to good practice is this ability to size up situations in a systematic and useful way. As always, readers are invited to comment either directly to the authors or to the associate editor.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:
T he E den M emoirs. F acing the D ictators. T he R ight H on . T he E arl of A von , K.G., P.C., M.C.
W orld O rder and N ew S tates . By PETER CALVOCORESSI. With a Foreword by Donald Tyerman.
T he S oviet U nion at T he U nited N ations . By ALEXANDER DAWN.
T he last R efuge . By P eter T ownsend .
T he Y ugoslav law on G eneral A dministrative P rocedure : I nstitute of C omparative law , B elgrade
J eremy B entham , 1748-1792. By M ary P. M ack .
THE NEW R adicalism . By B ryan M agee .
T he S tate and the F armer . By P eter S elf and H. S toring .
J ohn A nderson , V iscount W awrw . By J ohn W. W hefur -B bnnbit .
S talin and the F rench C ommunist P arty , 1941–47. By A lfred J. R ieber .     

The Domestication of Violence: Forging a Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Britain, 1945-6

Stone engages with his subject on two levels, the theoretical and the empirical. On the theoretical side, he argues for the meaningfulness of the term 'collective memory' by showing how the response to the Holocaust in Britain served certain communal needs. 'Collective memory' here is the way in which a group produces narratives of the past which enable it to perpetuate itself, to take account of the past without disturbing its own self-definition. On the empirical level, Stone shows that this response was one which domesticated the horror of what had occurred in order to make its narration bearable. The process was by no means a deliberate whitewashing of the murders; it demonstrates how, in the construction of collective memory, the most painful episodes are unconsciously written out or integrated into more uplifting stories. For example, the murder of the Jews of Europe was frequently tied into a narrative of catastrophe and redemption in which the Zionist cause signalled the Jews' ultimate triumph over adversity. Looking at well-known texts and figures such as James Parkes, as well as lesser-known ones, Stone shows that 'collective memory' is a useful term for understanding the way in which texts and rituals combine to construct (whether consciously or otherwise) a certain understanding of the past. In the case of the British response to the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, this meant a failure to recognize the full enormity of what had taken place, and the incorporation of the murders into culturally familiar narratives.     

Is Sexism for White People? Gender Stereotypes,Race, and the 2016 Presidential Election

Political Behavior - On November 8, 2016 Donald Trump, a man with no office-holding experience, won the Electoral College, defeating the first woman to receive the presidential nomination from a...     

The Dynamics of Top‐Down Organizational Change: Donald Rumsfeld's Campaign to Transform the U.S. Defense Department

Drawing upon interviews with 69 defense policymakers and close observers, this article develops an extrapolation‐oriented case study of Donald Rumsfeld's campaign to transform the development of the U.S. Defense Department's future capabilities. This reform effort, launched by President George W. Bush during his first presidential campaign, encountered difficulties in developing and promoting the content of the proposed transformation and in executing it. Following Eugene Bardach's work on institutional craftsmanship and Michael Barzelay's efforts to further develop Bardach's methodology for extrapolation‐oriented case studies, the article explores the sources of the transformation campaign's difficulties, identifying several mechanisms linking common process context factors, exacerbated by process design features, to these negative outcomes. It also offers suggestions for rendering the design of change campaigns more robust to these vulnerabilities.     

Trump’s fraught national-security transition

President-elect Donald Trump's enthusiasm for consequential policy decisions during the transition suggests that he has a greater taste for the hands-on formulation and execution of foreign policy than is commonly appreciated. Given his dubious choices of Mike Flynn as national security adviser and Rex W. Tillerson as secretary of state, and the military skew of his selections overall, this disposition intensifies worries about the path of US foreign and security policy.