Organizational centralization in court administration: An empirical assessment

Data gathered from a national survey of court managers are used to examine the centralized versus decentralized perspectives recently developed in organizational theories of court administration. Two areas are examined in the research: administrative decision making and job formalization. Utilizing discriminant analysis, it appears that few states are dominated by a single management approach, and that in all likelihood the local norms and values influence the ways in which the courts are managed.     

Electoral equilibria with restricted strategies

We construct a spatial election model in which candidates inherit initial positions in the strategy space, presumably from previous political activity, and they are restricted to strategies close to their initial positions. We establish sufficient conditions for the existence of an equilibrium. The equilibrium need not entail an expectation of a zero plurality for each candidate. We then apply this model to a sequence of elections in which a series of opposition candidates challenge incumbents. Given certain regularity conditions, the result will be an apparent incumbency advantage, corresponding to that observed in recent congressional elections.     

An Approach to Measuring Subnational Administrative Autonomy in Education

Efforts to measure decentralization have focused on political or fiscal autonomy, but not on administrative autonomy. Focusing on the education sector, we measured de facto subnational administrative autonomy across 64 countries/economies, via the domains of human resource management, salary management, budget management, and service content design. The findings reveal that subnational autonomy can differ substantially across those domains and within countries, and that the use of a single country-level indicator for administrative decentralization is inadequate. Furthermore, we show that administrative decentralization is as significant a factor as federal status in evaluating the degree to which a country/economy is decentralized or centralized.     

Gulick and the american presidency: vision,reality, and consequences

One of Luther Gulick's most significant legacies was his conception of the executive. This chapter explores the nature and origins of that conception and shows how it coincided with President Franklin Roosevelt's notions for altering the powers of the presidency. These two conceptions came together in the Brownlow Committee's recommendations and their subsequent promulgation in the Executive Reorganization Act of 1939.

Gulick's notions of an executive were derived from the city manager, a different executive than any with which the authors of the Constitution were familiar. It thus contributed to one of the most profound changes in our Constitution, reshaped our notion of the presidency, crystallized a new public philosophy about how we govern ourselves, and entrenched a conventional wisdom that underlies the practice of public administration. These results spawned an alliance between presidents, who found it useful to portray themselves as powerful chief executive officers buttressed by the potent symbols of science and efficiency and the nascent field of public administration which gained legitimacy as the obedient scientific managers of the president. An alliance, however, which could not survive the changes of constituencies that began to emerge in the late 1960s.

The presidency has evolved from managerial to plebiscitary and finally to highly politicized with a variety of potentialities not all of which can be viewed as benign, but all of which leave public administration without a role that is simultaneously legitimate and which encompasses the complexity and discretion dictated by our circumstances. The chapter closes with lessons we might draw from Luther Gulick's life and apply to our efforts to fashion a new role for public administration in a government of shared powers.     

1922 and the problems of docudrama

SUMMARY

In this article the authors use 1922, (a ‘true story’) to probe the social function of television in South Africa. In particular they examine the transformations effected on historical “fact” by the genre of docudrama and the kinds of preferred readings this offers television viewers. The popularity of this form, they suggest, is that in this world of uncertainty, the docudrama gives viewers both pleasurable access to, and a moral orientation towards, the ‘real’.     

In Defense of the Standard Picture: Overcoming Death by a Thousand Cuts

In a previous article, I defended the standard picture of law (or SP), so labeled by its foremost critic, Mark Greenberg. In that article, I addressed Greenberg's root-and-branch critique of the SP and, to a much lesser extent, a related critique by Scott Hershovitz. But the Greenberg and Hershovitz frontal attacks on the SP are not its only threats. Some theorists, while not attacking the SP directly, give accounts of law that the SP cannot accommodate. Those theorists will be challenged here, because if they are correct, the SP is not a tenable account of law.