Federalism Revised: The Promise and Challenge of the No Child Left Behind Act

Federalism in education has undergone significant changes since the Winter Commission. During the early 1990s, federal policy makers faced the challenge of organizational fragmentation and policy incoherence in public education. In the last 15 years, the intergovernmental system has evolved from one that is predominantly compliance‐driven to one that is performance based, as suggested by the congressional adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. While the former is often characterized by images of “picket fence” federalism and administrative silos, the latter remains very much a work in progress, with the promise of raising academic proficiency. This paper first examines the paradigm shift and then considers emerging politics in intergovernmental relations. The author explores the ways in which state and local policy makers are altering the rules governing education service provision in response to performance‐based federal expectations.     

Managing Racial Diversity: Matching Internal Strategies with Environmental Needs

Although demographic diversity has been of paramount concern to researchers and practitioners in public management, studies exploring managerial strategies to capitalize on and respond to the needs of diverse client populations are scarce. This article examines strategies for managing diversity as a way to buffer environmental challenges in service delivery and performance resulting from heterogeneous client demands. Findings suggest that administrators prioritize diversity efforts when faced with higher levels of regulatory violations (a performance measure). A higher percentage of black residents is associated with lower service quality. However, the effect of managerial strategies for diversity on performance is conditioned by the racial composition of the clients: as the percentage of black nursing home residents increases, diversity management efforts are associated with a lower number of regulatory violations. Similarly, at higher levels of racial heterogeneity, diversity management efforts are associated with fewer regulatory violations.     

Measuring and Explaining Political Sophistication through Textual Complexity

Political scientists lack domain‐specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text snippets and incorporate these results into a statistical model of sophistication. This includes previously excluded features such as parts of speech and a measure of word rarity derived from dynamic term frequencies in the Google Books data set. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and rescaled to political texts in a way that facilitates probabilistic comparisons. We reanalyze the State of the Union corpus to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using our improved approach, including the ability to compare complexity as a function of covariates.     

Employee Perceived Effect of Leadership Training: Comparing Public and Private Organizations

This study reports on the effectiveness of a year-long field experiment involving training in transformational and transactional leadership in the public and private sectors. Using before and after training assessments by employees of several hundred Danish leaders, the analysis shows that transformational leadership training is associated with increases in behaviors linked to both transformational leadership and the use of verbal rewards, but only for public sector organizations. There is no impact in private sector organizations. Transactional leadership training appears to be equally effective in stimulating the use of pecuniary rewards in both public and private organizations.     

Transdisciplinary public leadership theory: Between the extremes of “traditional public administration” and “new public management”

The 21st century public organization is faced with complex problems, informed stakeholders, and information flows, which necessitate a corresponding open system view of leadership. The traditional notions of public administration and new public management had been structured by strict bureaucratic rules and managerial flexibility, respectively. This paper begins by theorizing two hypothetical constructs (helicopter and deadbeat leadership), which engage in extreme micromanagement/surveillance and negligence/indifference, respectively. Those form basis for designing an optimal (transdisciplinary) leadership, which forges synergistic link between leaders, subordinates, and external actors in codesigning objectives and strategies to address societal problems. Strategies to promote transdisciplinary leadership are discussed.     

How Values Shape Program Perceptions: The “Organic Ethos” and Producers’ Assessments of U.S. Organic Policy Impacts

Among the more recognizable programs related to natural and sustainable food is the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program. Although the robustness of the organic food market is difficult to contest, many debate the extent to which U.S. organic policy outcomes adequately serve consumers and the organic agriculture producers they rely on. This paper engages the debate from the perspective of certified organic producers. Drawing on the results of a nationwide survey of USDA‐certified producers, we first provide a snapshot of how producers assess the environmental, consumer, and market impacts of U.S. organic food policy. We then examine the extent to which organic producers’ policy impact perceptions are associated with their alignment with an “organic ethos”—understood as producers’ commitment to core organic principles and the organic movement. The paper highlights producers’ values as perceptual filters and cognitive mechanisms that help shape producers’ policy impacts perceptions, illustrating a contributing factor to the enduring nature of organic policy debates.     

Counterterrorism,Community Policing and the Flags Protests: An Examination of Police Perceptions of Northern Ireland's Operation Dulcet

In 2013 Northern Ireland (NI) witnessed the most protracted period of public-disorder ever seen in the United Kingdom. After Belfast City Council voted to fly the Union flag in-line with the manner adopted in the rest of the United Kingdom, loyalist protestors blocked roads, attacked offices, and held marches through Belfast city center. During what became known as Operation Dulcet, police had to respond to the protests and violence, mindful of existing tensions in NI. This article reports on data collected from interviews conducted with officers involved in the policing of these events. The findings demonstrate that the police response was understood using narratives concerning the primacy of human rights, a focus on perceived proportionality, and ultimately, related to the potential violence linked to historic conceptions of community divisions in NI.     

Consolidating democracy by containing distribution: “sandwich tactics” in Indian political development, 1936–96

How did Indian democracy avoid the fate of other Third World democracies that collapsed in the face of distributional conflicts, when such conflicts were in ample evidence in India? The traditional answer is that the inclusiveness of the Indian National Congress during the independence movement gave the party legitimacy after independence and allowed it to contain social conflict. This argument fails to account for the persistence of Indian democracy after the 1960s. This article suggests that the pre-independence Congress did not accommodate challengers from below as is commonly suggested, but rather outflanked them by championing still weaker groups further down the social ladder. This “sandwich tactic” has been used repeatedly by Congress leaders during successive crises and accounts for the party's long innings in power, its continued strength today, and, inter alia, the acquiescence of Indian elites in electoral democracy.