HOPE VI: A Promising Vintage?

Public housing policies in distressed communities if they are to succeed, must be based on much more realistic assumptions than they are now. We look at HOPE VI, a public housing policy that not only changes the physical environment, but also social services, job training, work opportunities, transportation, child care and other support services. HOPE VI goes a long way to improving public housing policies for distressed communities.     

Do conditional cash transfer programs shift votes? Evidence from the Honduran PRAF

How do national social programs influence local voting? This study utilizes the experimental set up of a conditional cash transfer program to show that small, targeted cash transfers can have large electoral effects. The Honduran PRAF program allocated an average of $18 per capita per year to poor households within municipalities that were randomly assigned to receive the program. Although the program was administered at the national level, the program increased an incumbent mayor's re-election probabilities by 39%, without significantly influencing voting behavior in presidential elections. Moreover, the evidence suggests that transferring cash to poor households were more effective at increasing political support than interventions providing public goods for poor villages.     

The role of government in maintaining rural water supplies: caveats from Malawi's gravity schemes

Malawi earned a great deal of praise for its programme to build gravity‐fed piped water schemes in rural areas, because the government limited its own role by turning over many responsibilities to the community. Unfortunately, the government has not been able to provide the supporting services and recurrent financing necessary under even this limited role. As a result, the schemes are functioning at about 50% of capacity. These problems did not arise because programme designers and implementers neglected to plan for operation and maintenance. Rather, they thought that a very good system was in place. However, both observers and those directly concerned failed to identify or act on flaws in the planned system for a number of reasons, such as the blinding success of the construction programme, and a willingness to accept rather than evaluate underlying critical assumptions. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Conceptualizations of good citizenship and political participation

Theorists have variously defined what it means to be a good citizen. But how do citizensthemselves views their responsibilities? And is there any relationship between a person's view of citizenship and his or her political participation? This paper uses a combination of methods to explore these issues. A Q method study reveals four citizenship perspectives that provide evidence for striking differences in how people define the participatory responsibilities of a good citizen. An exploratory survey analysis finds that the four citizenship perspectives are significantly related to political behavior, even when socioeconomic status and attitudinal variables related to participation are controlled. While adding to our understanding of participation, these findings also underscore the importance of investigating the conceptualizations of citizens to gain more complete understandings of how political systems work.