The Problem of Political Authority


Book Description

The state is often ascribed a special sort of authority, one that obliges citizens to obey its commands and entitles the state to enforce those commands through threats of violence. This book argues that this notion is a moral illusion: no one has ever possessed that sort of authority.




Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving


Book Description

How do issues end up on the agenda? Why do lawmakers routinely invest in program oversight and broad policy development? What considerations drive legislative policy change? For many, Congress is an institution consumed by partisan bickering and gridlock. Yet the institution's long history of addressing significant societal problems - even in recent years - seems to contradict this view. Congress and the Politics of Problem Solving argues that the willingness of many voters to hold elected officials accountable for societal conditions is central to appreciating why Congress responds to problems despite the many reasons mustered for why it cannot. The authors show that, across decades of policy making, problem-solving motivations explain why bipartisanship is a common pattern of congressional behavior and offer the best explanation for legislative issue attention and policy change.




Political Problems


Book Description

This anthology is intended to be used in Political Philosophy courses. It focuses on contemporary political problems, and it is intended to be paired with any of the numerous readers which are dedicated to the history of political philosophy. History, theory, and political problems are the three pillars of the political philosophy course. However, while the anthologies on the history of political philosophy are numerous, there are relatively few sources (and even fewer single sources) that focus on contemporary political problems. This book fills that gap, with the leading contemporary positions on school vouchers, government support for the arts, pornography, same sex marriage, drug legalization, gun control, terrorism, torture, capital punishment, affirmative action, Immigration, and the environment.




The Politics of Attention


Book Description

On any given day, policymakers are required to address a multitude of problems and make decisions about a variety of issues, from the economy and education to health care and defense. This has been true for years, but until now no studies have been conducted on how politicians manage the flood of information from a wide range of sources. How do they interpret and respond to such inundation? Which issues do they pay attention to and why? Bryan D. Jones and Frank R. Baumgartner answer these questions on decision-making processes and prioritization in The Politics of Attention. Analyzing fifty years of data, Jones and Baumgartner's book is the first study of American politics based on a new information-processing perspective. The authors bring together the allocation of attention and the operation of governing institutions into a single model that traces public policies, public and media attention to them, and governmental decisions across multiple institutions. The Politics of Attention offers a groundbreaking approach to American politics based on the responses of policymakers to the flow of information. It asks how the system solves, or fails to solve, problems rather than looking to how individual preferences are realized through political action.







Manual of Healthcare Leadership - Essential Strategies for Physician and Administrative Leaders


Book Description

How physician executives and managers can become outstanding leaders in times of rapid change Written by authors who have more than sixty years of combined experience in healthcare, physician, and organizational leadership, this groundbreaking book is an innovative blueprint for overcoming the complex changes and challenges faced by leaders in today's healthcare environment. Rather than being a theoretic work, The Manual of Healthcare Leadership is intended to be a relevant, practical, and real-world guide that addresses the myriad organizational, regulatory, budgetary, legal, staffing, educational, political, and social issues facing leaders in the healthcare industry. One of the primary goals of this book is to enable readers to maximize the performance of each staff member in the interest of collectively providing peerless healthcare to their service community. The strategies offered throughout the text include the "why, what, and how" necessary to solve specific problems and challenges encountered by healthcare managers and leaders. Instruction is provided not only with text, but with diagrams and other resources specifically designed to demonstrate sequential thinking and the progressive application of solutions. With this book in hand, healthcare leaders will be able to confidently select, train, guide, and assess their staff. They will also be able to negotiate, plan, resolve problems, manage change and crisis, and handle the thousand and one other challenges that come their way on a daily basis.




Community-based Rehabilitation


Book Description

Volume numbers determined from Scope of the guidelines, p. 12-13.




America's State Governments


Book Description

This timely and important new work takes a critical look at government in the American states and illustrates the disconnect between state government institutions and their constituents. The text illuminates three basic political problems of state governments: weak constitutional and institutional foundations; a lack of civic engagement; and long histories of unchecked public corruption. In addition, the book explains why some states did and others did not respond promptly to the COVID-19 pandemic and examines America's long-standing problem of police and prosecutorial misconduct–providing a context for understanding the demonstrations and protests that rocked American cities in the summer of 2020. For students and citizens of state politics, the book concludes with a proposal aimed at civic literacy and action




The Public and Its Problems


Book Description

"An annotated edition of John Dewey's work of democratic theory, first published in 1927. Includes a substantive introduction and bibliographical essay"--Provided by publisher.




Making Politics Work for Development


Book Description

Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.