After rationality

where he teaches planning theory. His research explores decision making, plan implementation, and organizations. His books include Evaluating Plan Implementationand Approaches to Planning.     

After Decentralization: Patterns of Intergovernmental Conflict in Argentina, Brazil, Spain, and Mexico

Recent scholarship on the political determinants of decentralizationhas been useful for explaining initial decisions by nationalelites to decentralize, but the electoral independent variablesfavored by these analyses are insufficient to explain the complexprocess of decentralization over time. Distributional conflictsinvolving national chief executives and subnational governmentsoccurring after decentralization is initiated shape the processin ways that alter initial conditions. This study assesses changein the degree, pattern, and pace of decentralization in fourcountries: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Spain.     

Religion After Atheism

The recent history of Russia and China show that eradicating religion from the face of the earth is no easy task. In both cases the regimes were effective only as long as they carried out repressive measures, and this success was limited to public displays of religion, not private belief. As soon as forced secularization ceased, desecularization began almost immediately. Religious belief did not simply return previous levels, but rather has in some cases, most notably China, begun to spread like never before. These facts should force us to reconsider the mechanisms of secularization and whether or not a secular world is not just likely, but even possible.