Civil Servants on the Silver Screen: The Depiction of Government in American and Australian Cinema

With the prevalence of government, it is unsurprising to find it frequently represented on the silver screen. But, with the ability of film to influence perceptions and attitudes, questions arise, including: how is government portrayed on the silver screen? Are government bureaucrats berated or praised? This research examines the representation of government—and civil servants in particular—in a comparative setting. The top 100 box office grossing films of all time in the United States and Australia were selected to address the question: how do these films in the United States and Australia depict government? This study analyzes these 200 films and the more than 400 government characters in these films and suggests that government in both American and Australian films does not fare well. However, despite the generally negative—or at best mixed—depictions of government overall, individual government characters fare better.     

Latin american municipal government:the rise of metagovernment

Metagovernment, the extra-legal and informal government that has developed in the squatter settlements and informal economic sectors of Latin American nations is rapidly becoming the most relevent form of government for many Latin Americans. The roots of this phenomenon can be found in the early history of Latin American municipal governments and the persistence of an exclusionist and elitist set of institutions and va:ues from colonial times to the present The social and economic forces contributing to the rise of metagovernment emanate from the rural regions ane the high levels of population growth in the reglor toqether with the unbalanced patterns of regional development in the region. Metagovernment is a response to the exclusionist and elitist political cutture, and :he prcduct of new social forces and groups arising in urban Latin Amerlca.     

The ethics of managing scarcity: approaches to economy and prudence in a consuming society

This essay analyzes our character as a people, and its interplay with dramatic changes in our society before and after the formal close of the American frontier in 1890. Many of our prized character traits actually work against the prosperity we seek in the current day. We have not yet come to terms with the greed that contaminates every level of social analysis in American history. Nor have we moderated our individualism, entrepreneurialism, and anti-statism, even as we lose the promise of an expanding and vibrant middle class. Our faith in a great destiny must now embrace public purposes, plans, and management as necessary and desirable facets of ordered liberty.

I brought you into a plentiful land to enjoy its fruits and its good things. But when you came in you defiled my land, and made my heritage an abomination. Jeremiah 2:7     

Representative bureaucracy and impartial policing

Representative bureaucracy theory expects minority bureaucrats to advance the interests of minority citizens. Yet, little attention has been given to the variation in the acceptability, incentives and risks of representation across bureaucratic domains. Analysis of over two million police vehicle stops from four different US departments reveals that African American police officers do not treat African Americans preferentially, yet they mitigate existing racial disparities in policing. Compared with White officers, African Americans seem less disposed to use their discretion. They are disinclined to search drivers, yet inclined to cite them, displaying comparatively low disparities across social groups. These findings extend to pure traffic violations, and are robust to entropy balancing reweighting. We provisionally attribute African American police officers' impartial policing style to their compelling need to display their performance, and avoid blame, amidst intra‐organizational pressures and risks ensuing from the political salience of the police's clash with minority communities.     

The American Founders Entrusted Elites to Save Democracy from Itself

The word “democracy” does not appear in the US Constitution . Nor in the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence . That is because, as most Americans today would likely be surprised to discover , America's Founding Fathers not only distrusted democracy but, based on their close reading of Greek and Roman history, were actually hostile to the notion that it was the best system for governing society .     

Conclusion: exploring the heart of civic darkness

This article is a synthesis of Volume II of Public Policy and Administration: The Minnowbrook Perspective and an extension of the arguments found herein. And, it is an application of issues of ethics and morality to this volume. The author calls for a return to civility in public discourse and to Plato's conception of virtue, and particularly public virtue. New versions of civic space are important. The American emphasis on individualism must be tempered by a greater concern for the common good and the public interest. To achieve this public administrators must be both examples and representative citizens.

Cyrano: Perhaps I do exaggerate—a little.

Le Bret: You see!

Cyrano: But for the sake of principle.

Also in practice I have often found Exaggeration works extremely well.

—Edmund Rostand

Cyrano de Bergerac

And sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death.

—James 1:15

“Civic darkness” and “sin” are offputting words. “Offputting” is also an offputting word, but we must do what we can to follow Cyrano's advice to the Count de Guiche and color our discourse as but we can. Actually, sin is quite a useful word, meaning, as it does, transgression of a moral principle. Those whose sensibilities are offended when words such as sin are introduced, or react in anger at remembrances of the excesses of evangelical piety, would do well to revisit the idea of separation from the moral good and the consequences such separatilon has for persons and for societies. Such is the case with what I will call the sin of incivility, which I believe leads us into a civic heart of darkness, which is the deathtrap of American democracy. I will exaggerate—a little.

The word “moral” is also an attenuated word. It tends to conjure personal identity material and prejudgments about the authority, associations, and intent of the preacher or philosopher using the term. Fresh in my memory after twelve years is the aftermath of the publication of my article, “The Problem of Moral Reasoning in American Public Administration: The Case for a Code of Ethics,” in the Public Administration Review of January/February 1983. Of the nineteen letters I received about the article, five came from academic public administrationists wondering why a person of my background should now be joining the Moral Majority. I sent each of them a copy of my work exposing Jerry Falwell's problems with the Federal Trade Commission.

We have before us thirteen papers and twelve responses, each dealing with an important aspect of public policy. Are there common threads running through them? Do they highlight recurring themes in American public administration? Since they were written just before the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, was there anything prescient about them, or are they just historical artifacts, interesting enough in themselves but now overtaken by events?

There is a common thread, and that is a continuing commitment to the legacy of Mimowbrook I, understood as a post-positivist concern with social values. The most prophetic and, I believe, relevant statements of Minnowbrook I1 extended that understanding to the societal, organizational, and personal dimensions of communicative ethics, including the problem of the alienation of the self. I will elaborate that interest in my discussion of incivility below.

The old controversies were also there: in Willa Bruce's demand that Cynthia McSwain and Orion White translate their exercise in analytic psychology “into a practical application to real world problems,” for example, and in Gary Wamsley's passionate belief that public administrationists should “unmask the norms economists camouflage as science.” Complementarities were there, too, as when real world public administrator, Ray Pethtel, Virginia Commissioner of Transportation, said hurrah for egghead John J. DeIulio, describing him as “a scholar who recognizes the value of the public manager!” A pernicious theme that continued at Minnowbrook II, despite the efforts of conference organizers to diminish it through representation and structured dialogue, was that those who live more contemplative lives do not live in the real world. The truth is that most academic public administrationists are or have been heavily involved in workaday policy formulation and execution and that most civil servants reflect profoundly on what they do. Why, then, do we continue to use the language of separation?

Although there were arguments at Minnowbrook II, and I well remember the tension in the room after Bruce and Wamsley spoke, as on other occasions, we stayed well within the bounds of civility. That is what democracy does. It roughs and tumbles and postures and threatens and in the end stays within the bounds of civility. It finds a way we can live together. Minnowbrook II did not anticipate the degree to which incivility, manifested as displaced anger, separatist politics, and cultural isolation, would come to characterize public discourse in America in the 1990s and threaten the continued existence of democracy itself. Such a development demands careful analysis.

Plato would not have been surprised at any of this, as Dorothy Robyn pointed out in her paper about using cases for teaching public management. Since cases focus on how a process affected substantive policy questions, it is easy to ignore the inherent merits of the policy. Thus induction from fact replaces deduction from theory and leaves a large potential for casuistry and the justification of moral laxity. When discussion of a case begins with the postulate that at least one of the protagonists was unethical, the opportunities for recognizing moral ambiguity in the situation itself are limited. The temptation to reduce moral reasoning to laws and regulations tends to replace the abstraction of the public manager as a political being deducing his or her strategies from whatever ideal is being served. Deontological ethics become the analytical norm.⁽¹⁾

Plato's impatience with deontological ethics means that he is not a popular theorist among democrats today. Yet his critique of democracy remains the most powerful in philosophic literature, and I believe his analysis is particularly relevant for an American political environment of electronic sound bites and bored ignorance about the processes of government. There is a paradoxical way in which Plato's explication can deliver those of us who care too much.

The rhetoricians have their way in a democracy, Plato says. As they pursue their enthusiasms, trying to persuade the inattentive public here and there, misleading the people when necessary, they devise temporary solutions to fundamental problems. They consume as they encourage others to consume, leaving nothing in store. They live transient lives in mortal bodies. The worst thing about rhetoricians such as Gorgias, Plato believes, is that they misuse words. They often invert their meaning. Words are the vehicle of the dialectic that can lead us to transcendent truth, but in the hands of Gorgias, they produce only chaos and discord. In Plato's terms, the rhetoricians

once they have emptied and purged [the good] from the soul of the man whom they are seizing … they proceed to return insolence, anarchy, wastefulness, and shamelessness from exile, in a blaze of light, crowned and accompanied by a numerous chorus, extolling and flattering them by calling insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage.⁽²⁾

The deliverance inherent in Plato is the sure knowledge that virtue does not lie finally in what one can achieve in the political world, including the public good served in feeding the poor and bringing social justice to the disinherited. We work to achieve the good, yes; indeed, we may pour out our lives in service to democratic ideals. But virtue is a personal condition of the mind and spirit. In a calculous of inherent worth, prostitutes may be more virtuous than virgins. Virtue may be present in me while I endure any physical or temporal condition, including slavery, the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the trivialization of the Christian Church, or the collapse of the American Republic. Authentic freedom, and whatever wisdom has been given to me, exists in my being and only there. I can enslave myself, of course, and that includes slavery to any appetite, including the passion to be or do good.

Such reasoning is a useful antilogistic ingredient in dealing with the cascading series of manifestos in American public life telling us that we cannot live together; we cannot work together; we are not in this together; we are not Americans who have something in common, but racial, ethnic, gender, or sexually identified groups who demand to be recognized only or exclusively as different. I require that you recognize that we have nothing in common with one another. If goodness or greatness of soul is a capacity that each man and woman has, as Plato argued, then it is also true that each of us has a similar capacity for evil. The theologians of the Middle Ages called that capacity sin and defined it as separation from God, moral principle, and each other.     

How Do We Know We're Winning the War Against Terrorists? Issues in Measurement

We all come from many walks of life, but what brings us together, so I have learned from chasing terrorists for 25 years, is that as Americans, we are the terrorists' favorite target. Whether you are a millionaire, a diplomat, a tourist, or merely at the wrong place at the wrong time, terrorists are delighted when an American wanders into their sights. We thus have in common a joint need to develop methods to prevent us from becoming the next headline. One of the ways we do that is by determining what we should look at in the study of and response to terrorism. In the few minutes we have together, I'd like to explore with you a few issues in the measurement of terrorism. We'll consider what we should measure and why, starting with how we describe terrorism in general, then move on to specific issues, including group characteristics, negotiation behavior, patron state support to terrorists, combating terrorism, links of groups, coverage by the media, and the effectiveness of terrorists.     

Slavery food,soul food,salvation food: veganism and identity in the African Hebrew Israelite Community

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the transformation of meaning of food items central to African American fare from symbols of slavery to means of salvation as the African Hebrew Israelite Community (AHIC) live out their Biblically inspired lifestyle and perfect the vegan diet at its core. Although originating in Chicago in the late 1960s, for over 40 years the institutional and residential base of this transnational millenarian community has been in the Israeli desert town of Dimona. Based on long-term ethnographic acquaintance with their foodways in Israel and in the US, our analysis follows the AHIC’s eclectic incorporation of circulating religious, political, and scientific theories into their Bible-based cosmological-nutritional tenets of regenerative health and spiritual salvation. We argue that their ‘Edenic Diet’ reacts to the traumatic history of African Americans as slaves and as a discriminated against minority in the US, by serving as a means in their struggle for place and acceptance in modern Israel and an active component in their social and spiritual plans for the future.     

The Mechanism of State Charter School Policy Adoption: The Case of American States

This article concentrates on charter school policy that is regarded as the fastest growing innovative policy in America. Its adoption is more impressive than other innovative policies in the public educational area. By 2008, 40 states among 50 American states have passed charter school law since Minnesota became the first pathfinder to create charter school law about two decades ago. However, 10 states have not adopted charter school law. Based on this dichotomous policy phenomenon, the primary research question of the study focuses on clarifying what factors drive American states to adopt charter school policy. To obtain answers for this research question, the study dedicates to analyzing main hypotheses from the regional diffusion model and state characteristics, using event history analysis. The results demonstrate that the three predictor variables—regional diffusion, similar innovation, and gubernatorial political tendency—positively have significant effects in explaining the adoption of American state charter school policy.     

Leadership and innovation in the administrative state

The field of public administration, as well as the social science upon which it is based, has given little serious attention to the importance of vigorous leadership by career as well as non-career public administrators. The field tends to focus on the rigidities of political behavior and the obstacles to change. To reclaim an understanding of the importance of individual leadership the author suggests the use of biography and life history. The behavior and personality of the entrepreneur is an especially helpful perspective on the connection between leadership and organizational or institutional innovation. The case of Julius Henry Cohen, who played a pivotal role in the development of the New York Port Authority, is used to illustrate the connection between the entrepreneurial personality or perspective and innovation.

In the social sciences—and especially in the study of American political institutions—primary attention is given to the role of interest groups and to bureaucratic routines and other institutional processes that shape the behavior of executive agencies and legislative bodies. In view of the powerful and sustained pressures from these forces, the opportunities for leadership—to create new programs, to redirect individual agencies and broad policies, and to make a measurable impact in meeting social problems—are very limited. At least this is the message, implicit and often explicit, in the literature that shapes the common understanding of the professional scholar and the educated layperson in public affairs.⁽¹⁾ For administrative officials, captured (or cocooned) in the middle—or even at the top—of large bureaucratic agencies, the prospects for “making a difference” seem particularly unpromising. In his recent study of federal bureau chiefs, Herbert Kaufman expresses this view with clarity:… The chiefs did not pour out important decisions in a steady stream. Days sometimes went by without any choice of this kind emerging from their offices … If you need assurance that you labors will work enduring changes on policy of administrative behavior, you would do well to look elsewhere. ⁽²⁾

There are, of course, exceptions to these dominant patterns in the literature. In particular, political scientists and other scholars who study the American presidency or the behavior of other national leaders often treat these executives and their aides as highly significant actors in creating and reshaping public programs and social priorities. ⁽³⁾ However, based on a review of the literature and discussions with more than a dozen colleagues who teach in political science and related fields, the themes sketched out above represent with reasonable accuracy the dominant view in the social sciences.

The scholarly field of public administration is part of the social sciences, and the generalizations set forth above apply to writings in that field as well.⁽⁴⁾ (Indeed, Kaufman's book on federal bureau chiefs won the Brownlow Award, as the most significant volume in public administration in the year it was published.) Similarly, the argument regarding scholarly writing in the social sciences can be extended to the texts and books of reading used in courses in political science and public administration; what is in the scholarly works and the textbooks influences how we design our courses and what messages we convey in class. The provisional conclusion here, then, is that in courses as well as in writings the public administration field gives little attention to the importance of vigorous leadership—by career as well as noncareer administrators. Neither does it give much attention to the strategies of leadership that are available to overcome intellectual and political obstacles which impede the development and maintenance of coalitions which support innovative policies and programs.⁽⁵⁾

The further implication is that students learn from what we teach, directly and indirectly. Students who might otherwise respond enthusiastically to the opportunities and challenges of working on important social programs learn mainly from educators that there are many obstacles to change and that innovations tend to go awry.⁽⁶⁾ And there the education often stops, and the students go elsewhere, to the challenges of business or of law. Those students who remain to listen seem to be those more attracted to the stability of a career in budgeting or personnel management. Public administration needs these people, but not them alone. If career officials should have an active role in governance and if the general quality of the public service is to be raised, does it not require a wider range of young people entering the service—including those who are risk-takers, those who seek in working with others the exercise of “large powers”?

Taken as a class, or at least in small and middle-sized groups, scholars in the fields of public administration and political science tend to be optimistic in their outlook on the world. Informally, in talking with their colleagues, they tend to convey a sense that public agencies can do things better than the private sector, and they sometimes serve (even without pay) on task forces and advisory bodies that attempt to improve the “output” of specific programs and agencies and that at times make some modest steps in that direction. Why, then, do public administration writings and courses tend to dwell so heavily on the rigidities of political behavior and the obstacles to change?

One reason may be our interest, as social scientists, in being “scientific.” We look for recurring patterns in the complex data of political and administrative life, and these regularities are more readily found in the behavior of interest groups and in the structures of bureaucratic cultures and routines. The role of specific leaders, and perhaps the role of leadership generally, do not as easily lend themselves to generalization and prediction.

Perhaps at some deeper level we are attracted to pathology, inclined to dwell on the negative messages of political life and to emphasize weakness and failures when the messages are mixed. Here, perhaps more than elsewhere, the evidence is impressionistic. ⁽⁷⁾

Some of the concerns noted above—about the messages conveyed to students and to others—have been expressed by James March in a recent essay on the role of leadership. He doubts that the talents of specific individual managers are the controlling influences in the way organizations behave. He, however, questions whether we should embrace an alternative view—a perspective that describes administrative action in terms of “loose coupling, organized anarchy, and garbage-can decision processes.” That theory, March argues, “appears to be uncomfortably pessimistic about the significance of administrators. Indeed, it seems potentially pernicious even if correct.” Pernicious, because the administrator who accepts that theory would be less inclined to try to “make a difference” and would thereby lose some actual opportunities to take constructive action.⁽⁸⁾

March does not, however, conclude that the “organized anarchy” theory is correct. He is now inclined to believe that a third theory is closer to the truth. Administrators do affect the ways in which organizations function. The key variable in an organization that functions well is having a “density of administrative competence” rather than “having an unusually gifted individual at the top.” How does an organization come to have a cluster of very able administrators—a density of competence—so that the team can reach out vigorously and break free from the web of loose coupling and organized anarchy? Here March provides only hints at the answer. It happens, he suggests, by selection procedures that bring in able people and by a structure of motivation “that leads all managers to push themselves to the limit. “⁽⁹⁾     

The (Neglected) Statist Bias and the Developmental State: the case of Singapore and Vietnam

Abstract

This paper highlights three key weaknesses with the developmental state as a theory of the state. First, that the theory imagines the state in Weberian terms and then seeks to judge all states—even ones which are not Weberian—according to Weberian yardsticks which are not universal. Second, that the theory underestimates the extent to which it is itself bound up with dominant global power structures associated with the Cold War and the post-cold war period. Third, that in its concern to identify the correct ‘institutional mix’ for development to occur, developmental state theorists ends up believing that the (best) states really do stand apart from society, forgetting that this is an illusion which is fundamental to how states rule. Not to be alert to the state's ‘ideological effects’ is not really to study the state at all; this is ultimately a criticism which has to be levelled at the theory of the developmental state. To suggest—as many scholars do—that the theory's weaknesses can be solved by breaking the state down into its constituent parts, focusing more on society, or trying to locate the ‘blurred’ boundary between state and society more effectively, completely misses the point, since it does little, if anything, to uncover how states really rule. The issues are explored via a comparison of the state in Singapore and Vietnam.     

Improving Public Service Education Programs through Assessing the Performance of MPA Alumni

Educational outcomes assessment can improve public service education programs. This article applies the Model of Learning Outcomes for Public Service Education which suggest that enabling characteristics—factors that mediate the relationship among immediate, intermediate, and longer term outcomes—can improve our understanding of public service education. A survey was conducted of alumni at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, and the American University in Cairo in Cairo, Egypt. The responses from the two groups of MPA program alumni were striking: curriculum understanding and application were markedly similar, suggesting that this model is appropriate for use in different contexts.     

Health care finance in the US: Past,present, and future

Presently the US is the only major industrialized nation that does not insure universal access to health care for all of its citizens. Although the US spends one out of every eight dollars on health care, over one-eighth of all Americans lack basic health insurance coverage. Another concern is health care cost inflation. The quest for comprehensive health care coverage for all Americans began shortly after the turn of the century and has received varying degrees of support since then. Since the historical course of health policy in the US has followed an evolutionary rather than revolutionary course, unless consistent policies are developed to rationalize the incentives facing consumers, providers, and insurers, alike, the future path of American health policy will continue to be characterized by disjointed incrementalism. National health insurance can provide decision makers with a tool to structure and focus the American health care system. In order for cost control measures to be effective they must be coordinated with measures to promote universal access, and vice versa. NHI can be a catalyst to focus attention on the dual goals of access to care and cost containment.     

The debate over the U.S. government's role in health care financing:"deja vu,all over again"

Yogi Berra's famous quote captures the continuing debate over the legitimate role of the U.S. government in health care financing. The issues of individual choice, equity of access, and concern about income security are just as unresolved today as they were in the early twentieth century. Until we engage in an explicit national debate on these issues and come to a national consensus on the human and political values underlying our current health care situation, a “solution” to the health care financing problems will never be found. This article discusses the history of the issue of government's involvement in health care financing, American ambivalence about government regulation, and the role of American business as a major health care insurer.     

Budgeting,policy and administration: patterns and dynamics in the U.S

This article examines the relationships between policy, administration, and budgeting I argue that the administration of government is directly and primarily influenced by changes in policy and budgeting. A conceptual framework of the interrelationship between these three factors is presented. This framework is applied to Schick's classic periodicization of twentieth century U.S. history. Three value orientations of budgeting—control, management, and planning—were evident at different times during these periods. The framework is then applied to the period since 1981, labeled a phase of limitation. This phase has been an unhealthy development in American government.     

美国民意看中国六十年——变与不变的趋势分析

在过去60余年中,美国公众对中国的基本看法是负面的,但在不断改善之中。这种变化无法与两国关系发展的程度相匹配。导致看法负面的原因主要是两国的社会制度的差异和美国对"中国威胁"的担心。但随着中美两国关系越来越紧密,美国公众对经济竞争的担心逐渐超过对传统安全的担心,美国政府的对华合作政策也得到公众的认同,美国年青一代有可能在未来面对中国时更加自信。     

Anxiously Awaiting the Future of Restorative Justice in the United States

Abstract

The problems of mass incarceration and other criminal justice system failures in the United States—such as racial disparities, wrongful convictions, and high recidivism rates—have reached a tipping point. For the first time in decades, coalitions of politicians on the left and right are seeking criminal justice reform. What is the place of restorative justice in these efforts? What is the depth and breadth of restorative justice implementation? How familiar is the American public with restorative justice? How successful is the restorative justice movement? In this article, we seek answers to these questions as we try to assess the future of restorative justice in the United States.     

Confronting Coup Risk in the Latin American Left

Military coups d'état have become dramatically less frequent in Latin America over the past 20 years, leading many analysts to conclude that the risk of coups in the region today is negligible. Yet we observe that a particular subset of presidents in the region—namely, those commonly associated with the radical left—pursue a wide range of “coup-proofing” behaviors, primarily in the way that they manage relations with their militaries, but also in their political rhetoric. Our goal in this article is to explain why some Latin American presidents spend precious resources on coup-proofing. First, even as we demonstrate that coup activity is significantly diminished across the region as a whole, we offer evidence to suggest that coup risk is quite real in countries with radical left presidents. Second, we identify several specific strategies that these presidents have pursued to minimize coup risk. We explain the coup-proofing rationale behind each of these strategies and document their use in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Third, we show that no similar set of strategies or policies has been pursued by moderate leftist or more conservative presidents in the region. We infer from these empirical patterns that radical left presidents have undertaken substantial efforts to maintain military allegiance and to mitigate coup risk precisely because they recognize the possibility of military intervention. In our conclusion, we suggest that these strategies may confer a short-term benefit for the presidents who implement them, but they are likely to have negative consequences for the long-term stability of democratic institutions.     

Support for Palestinians among Jewish Americans: the importance of education and contact

The violent and protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict continues, and Jewish Americans play a significant role in influencing related US foreign policy as well as in promoting positive interactions with Palestinians globally. Diaspora populations have played an important role in international peace processes and American Jews are actively involved in peace efforts for Palestinian human rights. Previous research indicates a relationship between views about Israel, knowing Palestinian narratives, and promoting peace processes. Thus, the attitudes and experiences that Jewish Americans have are important to understand and predicting their support for Palestinians. An online internet survey distributed to Jewish listservs (n = 173) measured variables of gender, age, political views, Jewish socialization, family and own attitudes about Israel, courses on the conflict, and having been to the West Bank. Results indicated younger, more liberal Jewish Americans who had taken courses and been to the West Bank predicted more support for Palestinians. Implications for future research and education as an important process in moving the peace process forward both through interpersonal relationships and public policy efforts are discussed.