Bureaucratizing Democracy, Democratizing Bureaucracy

This article analyzes the relationship between how rationality is conceived and how democracy is practiced in the Bureau of Reclamation, a water development agency in the Department of Interior. The efforts of some inside the agency to institutionalize rational decision-making models, partly in response to new environmental law, expanded the number and range of interest groups that participated in its decisions fry incorporating their preferences into their models for evaluating plans. But the terms under which people could express their values and interests were strictly controlled in ways that some felt misrepresented their concerns. How we conceive of rationality has important implications for how and which people are included in bureaucratic decision making.     

An Unusual Economic Arrangement: The Brazilian Economy during the First Lula Administration, 2003–2006

This paper describes the economic policy and economic performance of Brazil during the first Lula administration, in 2003–2006. I show that in his first term as president Lula chose fast disinflation as one of the main priority of its economic policy. This choice required the adoption of high real interest rates, which also demanded an increase in the government’s primary surplus to keep the country’s public debt under control. Consequently, as I strive to demonstrate, investment in social safety net (the administration’s other main priority) was financed not only by the increase in tax revenues but also by a reduction in the government’s expenditure on both wages and benefits of public employees and in public investments in infrastructure. A combination of, on the one hand, a favorable global environment and, on the other, successful economic policies resulted in a significant improvement in the Brazilian macroeconomic performance. This in turn contributed a great deal to a reduction in both income inequality and poverty rates. I conclude by unveiling what I view as a quite unusual economic arrangement: president Lula’s economic choices over the 2003–2006 period ended up benefiting most the extremely rich (through high real interest rates) and the very poor (through the increase in income transfers).     

African American and White perceptions of police services: Within- and between-group variation

Existing research on attitudes toward the police identified demographic variables predicting citizen satisfaction with police services and performance. Common themes in this literature were the disparate rates of satisfaction reported by African American and Caucasian citizens. While it is generally understood that African American citizens express lower levels of satisfaction, the degree to which this reduced satisfaction is consistent among African Americans and the factors causing such variation are unclear. In addition, variation in levels of citizen satisfaction across diverse measures of police services has yet to be considered by race. This study used data from a medium-sized Midwestern community to contrast samples of White and African American citizens to better understand how demographic, experiential, and neighborhood contextual factors shape perceptions of global, traditional, and community police services. Results from this study indicate that there is significant variation in the importance of certain exogenous factors in predicting satisfaction with police services. The differences between perceptions and race are most prominent in the community policing services model.