Local Government Books - Page 6

Making Government Work

Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings, Fritz Hollings

Amazon Price: $21.86 List Price: $29.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of South Carolina Press Amazon Marketplace: 43 new & used starting at $10.96

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Performance is better than promise" has long been the motto of Ernest F. "Fritz" Hollings, a former Governor of South Carolina and six-term U.S. Senator who has distinguished himself as a stalwart advocate of fiscally responsible progressive programs. In this political memoir, Hollings takes aim at our increasingly flawed political system and a government that has gone "into the ditch." As remedy he pulls antidotes from anecdotes about his personal experiences in making government work in spite of itself for the past half century.

Hollings's long political career speaks volumes about the untapped potential of the elected and the electorate to use government for the good of all. As South Carolina's Governor in the early 1960s, Hollings oversaw the social transition of the state into the civil rights era and from an agriculture-based economy to an industry-based system with international partnerships. In the U.S. Senate from 1966 to 2005, he took point on shepherding new policies to address hunger, environmental conservation, energy consumption, communications, international trade, campaign finance, the federal budget, space exploration, and national defense. Hollings's instructive recollections of these efforts form a user's manual for our representative democracy as he shares compelling--and often candidly colorful--accounts of the smart stewardship of resources and authority needed to enact policies that make positive differences in the lives of Americans.

Confrontational at times toward those issues and institutions he cites as responsible for knocking government off course, Hollings lays out clearly his deep commitment to improving our system of government, strengthening regulations on free trade, countering dependence on campaign contributions, and enhancing our communications and education programs to compete better in an information-driven global marketplace. This prescriptive compendium of sound thinking from an experienced agent of change serves as a call to action for those who would lead well and those who would be well led to reinvigorate a floundering system and call good people and good ideas back into the service of America's bright future.

Bitter Fruit: Black Politics and the Chicago Machine, 1931-1991

William J. Grimshaw

List Price: $29.95 By: University Of Chicago Press Amazon Marketplace: 11 new & used starting at $9.44

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Complex 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

It's insightful. It's dry. It's daedal (not a typo) and complex and surprisingly interesting.

My professor wrote it and my professor assigned it. He says that Ch.2 is embarrassing and skipped it.

Editorial Review:

William Grimshaw offers an insider's chronicle of the tangled relationship between the black community and the Chicago Democratic machine from its Great Depression origins to 1991. What emerges is a myth-busting account not of a monolithic organization but of several distinct party regimes, each with a unique relationship to black voters and leaders.

Collaborative Leadership: How Citizens and Civic Leaders Can Make a Difference (Jossey Bass Nonprofit & Public Management Series)

David D. Chrislip, Carl E. Larson

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Editorial Review:

Creating civic will by engaging citizens on the toughest public problems helps break legislative and bureaucratic gridlock and restores trust in public institutions. This book shows you how to do it.
--The Honorable Federico Pena, U.S. Secretary of Transportation

The leaders who are most effective in addressing public issues are those who have the credibility to bring together the right people to create visions and solve problems. Drawing on their extensive research, as well as on the advice and guidance of the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, David Chrislip and Carl Larson show how elected officials and other civic leaders can generate the civic will to break through legislative and bureaucratic gridlock, deal with complex issues, and engage frustrated and angry citizens. They also describe how to design, initiate, and sustain a constructive, collaborative process. This groundbreaking book provides insight and answers to the major challenges facing communities today.

City Limits

Paul E. Peterson

List Price: $33.00 By: University of Chicago Press Amazon Marketplace: 2 new & used starting at $42.38

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Yeah it's dry 3 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Paul Peterson makes an obvious point: there are limits to the service obligations cities can safely take on. However, it is substantially more complex than that commonsensical point.

Cities face a dilemma, they must balance the requirements they have to provide services with the tax loads they can adequately impose on their citizens. Provide too little in the way of services and the quality of life in the city suffers. Provide too many or too varied a service mix and the taxing requirements to fund these services will drive the productive population beyond the physical limits of the city.

Cities must provide services to the poor. If they do not, the social pathologies of the poor then drive down the attractiveness of the city as a place for entrepreneurial activity. So cities must spend and tax productive populations (those consuming services in a negative ratio to the taxes they contribute) in order to fund these services. However, tax too much and provide too many services and the productive populations will exit the city to more tax friendly areas. Due to the spatial limits of cities, cities cannot extend their taxing reach. Thus cities must provide the bare essentials and encourage economic growth.

The solution to the dilemma is to allow the federal government to provide the majority of redistributive (aid to the poor) services and focus, as a city, on the provision of distributive (road repair, police) and regulatory services (health, sanitation).

Not a ringing cry to help your fellow man, but a cogent analysis of the fiscal demands and limitations facing urban America.

Urbanists, planners and public administration scholars will encounter this book somewhere in their professional training.

John C. McKee

Editorial Review:

Winner of the 1981 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs.

"City Limits radically reinterprets urban politics by deriving its dominant forces from the logic of the American federal structure. It is thereby able to explain some pervasive tendencies of urban political outcomes that are puzzling or scarcely noticed at all when cities are viewed as autonomous units, outside the federal framework. Professor Peterson's analysis is imaginatively conceived and skillfully carried through. His beautifully finished volume will lastingly alter our understanding of urban affairs in America."—from the citation by the selection committee for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award

Texas Politics

Nasser Momayezi

By: Houghton Mifflin Company Amazon Marketplace: 16 new & used starting at $0.10

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Editorial Review:

This Texas politics text encourages students to participate in government by emphasizing—through anecdotes and examples—how they can make a difference in their state and community.

Local government is covered early in the text, and important policy issues such as criminal justice, health and human services, education, and the budget are discussed in separate chapters.

• Texas in Context boxes in every chapter outline similarities (or differences) between Texas and other large states.
• Chapter-opening vignettes highlight Texans who have made a difference in state and local politics.

Texas Government: Policy and Politics (9th Edition)

Neal Tannahill

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Editorial Review:

This lively introduction to Texas government and politics offers an extremely readable writing style and an abundance of useful study aids in every chapter to make the material accessible to students of every level. Emphasizing public policy throughout, it shows students the impact that government has on their lives, thus making the material relevant and engaging.

 

To further engage students, each chapter features an active learning exercise and, in the Eighth Edition, new “Getting Involved” boxes that encourage civic participation. This insightful and sometimes humorous critique of Texas government has been thoroughly updated to include coverage of the 2003 legislative session, recent issues in the state, and much more.

Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond

David Runciman

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

What kind of hypocrite should voters choose as their next leader? The question seems utterly cynical. But, as David Runciman suggests, it is actually much more cynical to pretend that politics can ever be completely sincere. The most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. Political Hypocrisy is a timely, and timeless, book on the problems of sincerity and truth in politics, and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy ourselves. Runciman tackles the problems through lessons drawn from some of the great truth-tellers in modern political thought--Hobbes, Mandeville, Jefferson, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Orwell--and applies his ideas to different kinds of hypocritical politicians from Oliver Cromwell to Hillary Clinton.

Runciman argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics, but without resigning ourselves to it, let alone cynically embracing it. We should stop trying to eliminate every form of hypocrisy, and we should stop vainly searching for ideally authentic politicians. Instead, we should try to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies and should worry only about its most damaging varieties.

Written in a lively style, this book will change how we look at political hypocrisy and how we answer some basic questions about politics: What are the limits of truthfulness in politics? And when, where, and how should we expect our politicians to be honest with us, and about what?

Varieties Of Social Explanation: An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Social Science

Daniel Little

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent discussion 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book is one of the best discussions of the philosophy of social science that I've ever read. Little is an excellent writer. As a teacher of statistics and research methodology classes at the college level I have long lamented the fact that most statistics and methodology texts entirely leave out any substantive discussion of the inference of causation. This is a shame, given how much fallacious research is floating around in the media and the social sciences in which causal statements are based on correlational data. Little's discussion of causal inference would be good reading for almost any student of statistics or methodology in the social sciences. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

Professor Little presents an introduction to the philosophy of social science with an emphasis on the central forms of explanation in social science: rational-intentional, causal, functional, structural, materialist, statistical and interpretive. The book is very strong on recent developments, particularly in its treatment of rational choice theory, microfoundations for social explanation, the idea of supervenience, functionalism, and current discussions of relativism.

The New Politics of the Old South: An Introduction to Southern Politics

Charles S. Bullock III

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Editorial Review:

The last presidential election showed without a doubt the prominence of the Southern states in the national political landscape. When it first appeared in 1998, The New Politics of the Old South broke new ground by examining Southern political trends at the end of the twentieth century. Now in its third edition, with all chapters extensively revised and updated to cover events up through the 2004 elections, the authors continue their unique state-by-state analysis of political behavior. Written by the country's leading scholars of Southern politics, and designed to be adopted for courses on Southern politics (but accessible to any interested reader), this book traces the shifting trends of the Southern electorate and explains its growing influence on the course of national politics.

The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda (Minnesota)

Paul David Wellstone

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Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From his earliest childhood memories to the college classroom, from rural Minnesota farm fields and the defense of workers' rights to his 1990 election campaign promises of politics for the benefit of the people, The Conscience of a Liberal candidly discusses Wellstone's life experiences and the coming-of-age of his political views. What emerges is an intriguing inside look at Wellstone's crusade to assert an unabashedly liberal agenda.

From the moment he was elected, Wellstone has passionately articulated a path to economic and social justice for all citizens, justice not contingent on the size of a person's bank account or their political influence. A call for personal politics and deep commitment to beliefs, Wellstone's tenure as a U.S. senator has been a vigorous, at times outraged, and always active fight for support for farmers, working families, and other Minnesotans; for decent jobs, improved health care, a good education, and retirement security.

At once responding to the conservative hijacking of compassion as a political yardstick and explaining his own political record, Wellstone engagingly elucidates what contrasts conservative and liberal interests and, as always, rouses progressives to influence the future of American politics.

"Wellstone promised to be what Washingtonians always say their city desperately needs: a colorful character. No one was disappointed. He still considers himself an activist, and his book reads like the work of an activist." Wall Street Journal

"Wellstone relishes the role of the lonely hero taking on powerful bullies, and irritates his jaded colleagues with his stubborn stand on principles." Washington Monthly

"A call to arms aimed at politically like-minded Americans, time and again The Conscience of a Liberal argues that a grassroots movement of progressives can defy the odds." National Journal

Senator Paul Wellstone was a professor of political science at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, for twenty-one years before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1990.