Parsis and Public Space in 19th Century Bombay: a Different Formulation of ‘the Political’ in a Non-European Context

Abstract

This paper looks at the Parsi community in 19th century India and its role as an agent in the formation of public cultural space in Bombay. The Parsis provide a unique example of an indigenous community under colonial rule, who through acceptance of the values of modernity and enterprise culture, manage to negotiate a position of prominence within one of the power centres of the then dominant British empire. The notion of the public sphere thus employed, provides an interesting contrast with the Habermasian theory of the bourgeois public sphere. Furthermore, it provides a model that directly challenges the somewhat simplistic subject-object relations that are often implicit within post-colonial theory. Indeed, there is a particular kind of desire for modernity that is reflected in the active participation of Parsis in the construction of imperial public space in Bombay. This leads to a reconsideration of the fluidity of the notion of the ‘political’ within the discussion of post-colonialism.     

Public Housing Residence and College Performance: Evidence From the Nation's Largest Urban Public University

Despite clear implications for human capital accumulation, there has been little research on the postsecondary educational experiences of students living in public housing. While there is significant and growing research exploring outcomes for public housing tenants, even in the education sphere, little of this work focuses on postsecondary outcomes and what role, if any, public housing plays in human capital accumulation. Our case study, New York City, is home to both the nation's largest urban public university system and the largest public housing authority. In this work, we use matching techniques to identify and describe the residential characteristics of students at the City University of New York. We explore how students who live in public housing developments differ from their peers in terms of characteristics associated with success in college, including demographics, neighborhood poverty, and high school preparation. We use regression techniques to test the relation between public housing residence, neighborhood income, and two indicators of early college performance: successful completion of credits attempted and one-year retention. In a naive model (including only residence and high school characteristics), public housing residence is negatively associated with our outcomes of interest, but less so when we control for other factors, including neighborhood income. Specifically, for students pursuing an associate's degree, we find a negative relation between public housing residence and credit completion and a less pronounced negative relation with retention. We find no significant relation between public housing residence and either baccalaureate outcome.     

Spheres of liberty,conflict and power: The public lives of private persons

State‐society relations during the modern period reflect notions of citizenship analogous to Isaiah Berlin's concepts of positive and negative liberty. Positive citizenship, motivated by what Robert O'Brien calls ‘the democratic impulse’, is highly participatory. The politics of seventeenth‐century Protestant social movements constitutes one historical model to which twentieth‐century fundamentalist movements can be compared. Characterized by a shrinkage of the private sphere and an expansion of public life, positive citizenship emphasizes active engagement in establishing and implementing normative standards for individuals and communities, and control of the state for virtuous ends. Negative citizenship concentrates on the protection of individual rights, expanding both the private sphere and a third or meta‐space which evinces qualities of public and private realms simultaneously. The historical model presented is what Jürgen Habermas has called the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, a quasi‐parallel polis from within which critics of state power assert their right to resist and organize their capacity to repel attempts to enforce standards of public virtue however arrived at. These ideal types are compared to different scenarios of state‐society relations to analyze the likely impact on public and private life of rapid globalization.     

Privatization and corruption: Patronage vs. spoils

We examine the issue of privatization of those public goods that can be provided in-house or contracted out. Such privatization appears straightforward, yet history shows otherwise. For example, the private contracting system for street cleaning in 19^th-century New York City was a failure, despite the safeguards instituted to ensure competition. The contract system was criticized for corruption, while in-house provision suffered from patronage abuses. We present two variations of the “rotten apple” theory to capture the salient features of the New York experience. The public officials and contractors were both operating under high-powered incentives, which invited opportunism. When players act strategically, the adverse effect of opportunism increases. Since the amounts of spoils can be larger than political contributions, contracting-out ends up being more costly, even though competition promotes productive efficiency. Another advantage of in-house provision is that incentives can be made low-powered by depoliticizing of the system.     

Information Sharing and Public Sector Knowledge Networks

As pressures to engage in cross-agency and cross-sectoral partnerships become more widespread, information sharing becomes an ever more critical and daunting aspect of public administration. In this edition's exchange among scholars and practitioners, Sharon S. Dawes, Anthony M. Cresswell, and Theresa A. Pardo of the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany, State University of New York, offer a "baker's dozen" of lessons they have culled from research and their own action research agenda studying the building of public sector knowledge networks in New York over the past 15 years. Grounded in a multidisciplinary, experientially based, and street-level view of the obstacles to and tactics for building successful public sector knowledge networks, the authors' warning to conceive collaborative information-sharing efforts as governance rather than information technology challenges is advice that practitioners ignore at their peril. Readers will find a more extensive eversion of this article on the PAR Web site (go to aspanet.org, click on PAR, then on the Theory to Practice icon). They also will find expert e-commentary on the article (plus the authors' response) from Lisa Bingham , Indiana University-Bloomington; Sharon Caudle , Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University; Louise K. Comfort , University of Pittsburgh; and Costis Toregas , American University.     

Trust Matters: Enhancing Government Legitimacy through Participatory Budgeting

Legitimacy is a problem of contemporary governance. Communities lack trust in elected officials—in their effectiveness, fairness, and representation of the public interest. Participatory budgeting (PB)—a set of democratic processes where residents determine how to spend a public budget—helps bridge that distance by letting the public make spending decisions. Since 2011, some of New York City’s (NYC) council members have been implementing PB with their capital budget—setting aside a million dollars in their districts each budget cycle for PB. Participatory budgeting has the potential to rebuild relationships between government and communities. Using data from over eighty interviews conducted by New York University (NYU) graduate students in 2013 and 2014 with PBNYC participants over two years, this article suggests that in council districts using PB, residents have greater feelings of access to and voice in local government, and better understanding of the complexities of spending public monies, often leading to a more positive view of government officials, and bolstering legitimacy of local government.     

Public shelter admission rates in Philadelphia and New York City: The implications of turnover for sheltered population counts

Abstract

Previous estimates of the size and composition of the U.S. homeless population have been based on cross‐sectional survey methodologies. National enumeration efforts have yielded point‐prevalence estimates ranging from 0.11 to 0.25 percent of the population. This study reports data from shelter databases in Philadelphia and New York City that record identifiers for all persons admitted and so make possible unduplicated counts of users.

Unduplicated counts of shelter users yield annual rates for 1992 of about 1 percent for both cities and rates near 3 percent over three years in Philadelphia (1990–92) and over five years (1988–92) in New York City. The annual rates are three times greater than rates documented by point‐prevalence studies. Shelter bed turnover rates are reported, as are average monthly first admission and readmission counts over a two‐year period. Implications for future research and public policy are discussed.     

School vouchers and academic performance: results from three randomized field trials

This article examines the effects of school vouchers on student test scores in New York, New York, Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, DC. The evaluations in all three cities are designed as randomized field trials. The findings, therefore, are not confounded by the self‐selection problems that pervade most observational data. After 2 years, African Americans who switched from public to private school gained, relative to their public‐school peers, an average of 6.3 National Percentile Ranking points in the three cities on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. The gains by city were 4.2 points in New York, 6.5 points in Dayton, and 9.2 points in Washington. Effects for African Americans are statistically significant in all three cities. In no city are statistically significant effects observed for other ethnic groups, after either 1 or 2 years. © 2002 by the Association for Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Use of Rental Housing Assistance by Immigrants in the United States and New York City

Abstract

The large influx of immigrants to the United States and New York City from poorer countries has sparked considerable debate as to whether immigrants are becoming a “public charge” to American society. Most arguments have centered around immigrants’ use of cash assistance programs. This article compares immigrants’ receipt of rental housing assistance with that of native‐born Americans.

Bivariate analyses reveal that immigrants, as a group, are no more likely than native‐born households to use any form of rental housing assistance. Indeed, in most instances immigrants are less likely than native‐born households to receive assistance, with two exceptions: immigrants who have been in the United States since 1970 and immigrants from the former Soviet Union in New York City. Multivariate analyses reveal similar results, except that immigrants who have been in the United States since 1970 are no more likely than other immigrants to receive housing assistance when we control for other factors.     

Quantum Change in the Fragmented Metropolis: Political Environment and Homeless Policy in New York City

The dominant paradigm for understanding urban policy change has long been that of “incrementalism.” The incrementalist argument is that institutional fragmentation reduces coordination, and thus discourages what might be called “nonincremental” or “quantum” change. This article seeks to test the incrementalist understanding of urban political change. Is it possible that under certain circumstances fragmentation can encourage quantum change? We will test this possibility with an analysis of homeless policy in New York City. Briefly put, over the last 25 years homeless policy in New York City has developed in a series of quantum jumps with dramatic, short‐term changes in funding, administration, and policy “philosophy.” Policy change followed this trajectory even though New York City's political environment is notoriously fragmented. This pattern contradicts what incrementalism would predict, and therefore suggests that that paradigm must be modified. Urban politics, this study suggests, can sometimes display the nonincremental, entrepreneurial, and “ideational” characteristics that have been identified as typical of the national “new politics of public policy.”     

Reviews and notes

Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post‐Industrial Socialism by Andre Gorz, Boston: South End Press, 1982, $7.50, 152 pp.

Robert Lekachman. Greed Is Not Enough. (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

Debunking is not Enough

Frank Ackerman, Reaganomics: Rhetoric vs. Reality. (Boston: South End, 1982).

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. The New Class War. (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

Power and the Intellectuals

Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims (New York, Oxford University Press, 1981)

Regis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities (London, New Left Books, 1981)

Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and The Rise of the New Class (New York, Seabury Press, 1979 (Note — Oxford University Press has picked up the imprint and published this work in paperback in 1982)

Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982).

Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan, The Anatomy of Job Loss: The How, Why, and Where of Employment Decline (London and New York: Methuen, 1982).     

Evaluating Urban Public Schools: Parents,Teachers, and State Assessments

Among the most contentious questions in public administration is how the performance of public organizations should be evaluated, and nowhere is this issue more salient than in urban public schools. While significant attention has been devoted to studying administrative measures of public organizations, the views of citizens concerning performance have been widely criticized and are not frequently gathered by schools. How these assessments relate to each other is central to many questions in education policy (e.g., choice, equity) and has important implications for democracy, bureaucratic professionalism, and public performance. This debate can be viewed as focusing on the distinction between convergent validity and discriminant validity. Using data from New York City's public school system with a cross‐sectional time‐series approach, parent and teacher evaluations are compared to government records of schools’ characteristics and performance. The findings suggest that parents and teachers are able to conduct intelligent, meaningful evaluations of school quality.     

马克思“唯灵论”批判思想研究

在马克思的理论视野中，资产阶级在政治与经济领域所持有的观念形态继承了宗教（基督教）以抽象的精神观念能动地把握世界的方式，从而都具有了唯灵论特征。因而，马克思把对宗教唯灵论的批判看作是政治与经济领域批判的前提。在政治领域中，资产阶级思想家把私有财产制度抽象人格化，从简单的经济关系出发来论证自由和平等，从而使建立在这种抽象人格基础上的自由和平等等政治国家的政治理念日益抽象化，并支配着社会成员的头脑且企图实现所谓的普遍利益而具有唯灵论特征；在经济领域中，资本拜物教是商品拜物教、货币拜物教的最高峰，资本这一抽象的“死劳动”借助于雇佣劳动这一“活劳动”得以不断增殖从而具有了支配人的灵性。马克思对这三种唯灵论批判的意图在于提醒人们要搞清楚资本主义制度所包含的矛盾以及资本主义社会的现实形态和观念形态之间的差别，不被抽象观念所支配，从而唤醒工人阶级的彻底的革命意识。     

The Path Not Taken: Leonard White and the Macrodynamics of Administrative Development

Leonard White , The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History ( New York: Macmillan , 1948).
Leonard White , The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829 ( New York: Macmillan , 1951).
Leonard White , The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861 ( New York: Macmillan , 1954).
Leonard White , The Republican Era, 1869–1901: A Study in Administrative History ( New York, Macmillan , 1958).
This is a review of four books by Leonard White: The Federalists (1948), The Jeffersonians (1951), The Jacksonians (1954), and The Republican Era (1958). In these books, White develops an approach to the study of administrative development that accounts for a broad range of considerations, including political and economic structure, the organization of the international order, popular culture, the stock of available communication and organizational technologies, and executive talent. White also offers an early argument about the significance of path dependence in institutional evolution. White's approach is largely concerned with the macrodynamics of administrative development. It has been neglected within the field of public administration over the last half century. A literature that builds on White's work would improve the field's ability to explain and anticipate failures in state building and administrative reform.     

Is the government exhausting its powers? An empirical examination of eminent domain exercises in New York City pre- and post-Kelo

A controversial U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) which did not limit the use of state's eminent domain powers, led to an unprecedented legislative reaction by almost all 50 states. Of all, New York State stands out as one of the single states not to respond with a legislative amendment. In this study, I ask whether the state's predation was greater in the years following these legal and political developments, in light of the freedom which was granted to local politicians by both the Supreme Court and the state's legislators. The article hypothesizes that contrary to common perceptions, judicial decisions impact local government actions even when no limits on the use of powers are being posed. I use rigorous statistics and scrupulously defined data to expand scholarly understanding of the aftermath of the judicial decision in Kelo. The main finding is that the decision has in fact affected political behavior, but in the opposite direction than commonly expected: politicians in New York City acted consistently with public opinion, which was hostile too Kelo, not by changing the law, but by changing their practice. Studying all known taking exercises in New York City between 1991 and 2019, the paper finds no increase in the number of development projects involving condemnations after 2005. In fact, the probability of a taking for economic development or urban renewal dropped by 90%. The use of eminent domain for such projects declined even when both state and federal courts refrain from interposing any actual limit on its use. The paper lends qualified support to an alternative assertion that takings decisions by government officials are largely shaped by planning and political needs and that officials are sensitive to revealed public preferences even when there is no constitutional or legal impediment on their exercise of power.     

Public Pension Funds and Operating Budgets: A Tale of Three States

This article provides a normative framework for understanding the important link between public pension fund management and government operating budgets. Three aspects of pension fund management are discussed that have a significant impact on the operating budget: pension contribution, investment strategy, and the funding of pension liabilities. Three cases concerning West Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City are discussed to illustrate these three important aspects. The normative framework and the case studies demonstrate two important principles in prudently managing public pension funds: ensuring intergenerational equity and protecting the long-term health of government budgets.     

Drivers and Consequences of Citizen Satisfaction: An Application of the American Customer Satisfaction Index Model to New York City

Using data from two telephone surveys of New York City residents conducted during 2000 and 2001, this article employs the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) model to examine the drivers—and behavioral consequences—of overall satisfaction with local government services. While the ACSI model has been widely used to analyze customer satisfaction in the private sector and, more recently, in the federal government, it has not been tried in a local government context. Applying the ACSI model to New York City, we find the perceived quality of public schools and especially the police, as well as road conditions and subway service, are the most salient drivers of satisfaction, but the significance of each service varies across income, race, and geography. For all groups in the city, overall satisfaction drives both trust in local government officials and intentions to move out of the city. Advantages and limitations of using the ACSI model to assess the quality of local government services are discussed.     

Fiscal Reaction to State Aid Uncertainties: Evidence from New York State

Late budgets have become increasingly present across the states and especially persistent in states such as New York and California. The combination of delayed states budgets and institutional constraints may trigger specific budgetary strategies. Uncertainty over state aid may lead school districts to over‐ or underestimate school budgets, which ultimately may have an effect on real property taxes and the amount of education consumed. Evidence from New York State school districts suggests that school districts react to uncertainty in the state budget through a combination of revenue, expenditure, and fund balance changes. The findings suggest that districts engage in “gaming” the institutional constraints, and tend to build up large fund balances as a response to perceived uncertainty.     

When is Growth Not Growth? The Curious Case of Mental Health Budgeting in New York

This article argues that the adverse impact of Medicaid on state budgets alleged in various public debates has been overstated, in some measure because of the inaccurate and misleading manner in which Medicaid expenditures are appropriated in state budgeting systems. Data on Medicaid and mental health spending in the state of New York is used for analysis. The first section provides a Medicaid spending and budgeting background. The second section discusses Medicaid and mental health in New York. The third section describes actual budgeted spending for mental health in New York, and the final section provides a discussion and concluding comments.