State of the art called American Government

where he teaches ethics and public policy in addition to American government. He is the co-editor (with Leslie G. Rubin) of The Quest for Justice.     

The Quality of Management and Government Performance: An Empirical Analysis of the American States

Government performance is an enduring concern for students of public management, public administration, and political science. Government's administrative arrangements and managerial behavior can profoundly influence programmatic content, activities, and outcomes; therefore, considering public management's effects is necessary for a true understanding of public policy and government performance. This article uses data from the Maxwell School's Government Performance Project to examine the relationship between state governments' managerial capacity and a measure of government performance (specifically, state policy priorities). We find that state management capacity has direct effects on state policy commitments: States possessing higher levels of management capacity tend to favor programmatic areas that distribute societal benefits widely (that is, collective benefits) as opposed to narrowly (that is, particularized benefits). Our analysis demonstrates that public interest group activity, government ideology, and citizen ideology each have significant, predictable effects on state policy commitments. Thus, our findings place managerial capacity alongside other more commonly studied state characteristics as an important influence on government activities.     

Civic Culture and Government Performance in the American States

In a recent study, Robert D. Putnam reported a strong relationshipbetween civic culture and government performance among the newlyempowered regions of Italy. This article extends Putnam's methodologythe American states. Using similar techniques, we constructindices of civic culture and government performance for thestates. When correlated, the results reveal a clear link betweencivicness and performance. States that are more civic lend tohave governments that enact more liberal and innovative policies.This relationship between civicness and performance remainsstrong even after controlling for political culture, ideology,education, and other factors.     

Immigration and the Evolving American Welfare State: Examining Policies in the U.S. States

The inclusion of racial/ethnic minorities is often considered an important factor leading to a relatively limited American welfare system. However, given the federal nature of welfare eligibility rules and the states' role in determining benefit levels, few studies explicitly link questions of inclusion and benefit levels when explaining the evolution of American welfare policy. This study examines the relationship between inclusion and benefit levels by analyzing state policies related to the welfare reforms of 1996 which allowed states to decide if recent immigrants would be included in welfare benefits, and subsequently the extent to which this decision affected overall benefit levels offered by states under TANF. The results suggest that states' decisions regarding inclusion subsequently affect benefit levels, with the direction of these relationships most closely reflecting the erosion model's prediction of broader eligibility associated with lower benefit levels.     

Uniform State Law Adoptions in the American States: An Explanatory Analysis

No general explanation seems to distinguish popular from unpopularuniform state law proposals. Adoption appears to be a productof the timeliness of specific proposals rather than of the wisdomor "necessity" of the movement itself or of the purely technical,legal, or policy merits of individual proposals. Overall, thestates have not been highly responsive to uniform law proposals.The predominant factor discriminating high from low adoptingstates is political culture: moralistic states have, on average,the highest adoption rate; traditionalistic states have thelowest. This finding is plausible in terms of both the "goodcommonwealth" orientation of the moralistic political cultureand the "good government" orientation of many uniform law proposals.     

State Building and Capitalism: The Rise of the Swedish Bureaucracy

The purpose of this article is to answer the following question: When did Swedish bureaucracy arise? That is, to determine a point in time when the organizational technology that Weber called bureaucracy became dominant in the process of Swedish state formation, as well as when bureaucracy finally replaced the feudal form of government based on the authority of nobility and the hierarchical ties of individual loyalties. The importance of this question relates to the debate on the sequential logic of economic and political development. The change from an aristocratic/particularistic to a bureaucratic/universal state apparatus can be understood as a change from despotic to infrastructural state power. Most empirical material indicates that, in terms of institutional structure, the transition to a bureaucratic administration started in the 1850s. Contrary to what most Swedish historians have argued, the Swedish state remained feudal and particularistic all they way up to the mid-19th century. If any particular decade is key to this transformation, it would be the 1870s. By then the last of the noble privileges had disappeared, a uniform salary system had been introduced, and the various state apparatuses had begun reorganizing toward a higher level of efficiency and rationality.