Rethinking Democratic Accountability

Rethinking Democratic Accountability PDF Author: Robert D. Behn
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 9780815708629
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
Behn examines the weaknesses in our current systems of accountability for finances, fairness, and performance, and suggests a new model of accountablity for public management.

Rethinking Democratic Accountability

Rethinking Democratic Accountability PDF Author: Robert D. Behn
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780815798101
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
Traditionally, American government has created detailed, formal procedures to ensure that its agencies and employees are accountable for finances and fairness. Now in the interest of improved performance, we are asking our front-line workers to be more responsive, we are urging our middle managers to be innovative, and we are exhorting our public executives to be entrepreneurial. Yet what is the theory of democratic accountability that empowers public employees to exercise such discretion while still ensuring that we remain a government of laws? How can government be responsive to the needs of individual citizens and still remain accountable to the entire polity? In Rethinking Democratic Accountability, Robert D. Behn examines the ambiguities, contradictions, and inadequacies in our current systems of accountability for finances, fairness, and performance. Weaving wry observations with political theory, Behn suggests a new model of accountability—with "compacts of collective, mutual responsibility"—to address new paradigms for public management.

Patrons, Clients and Policies

Patrons, Clients and Policies PDF Author: Herbert Kitschelt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521865050
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
A study of patronage politics and the persistence of clientelism across a range of countries.

Constructivist Turn in Political Representation

Constructivist Turn in Political Representation PDF Author: Lisa Disch
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474442625
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
This volume traces the roots of the constructivist turn in the distinct (and competing) traditions of Continental and Anglo-American Western political thought. Divided into three thematic parts, these 13 newly commissioned essays develop the constructivist turn as a central concept. They advance the insight that there can be no democratic politics without representation; constituencies or groups exist as agents of democratic politics only insofar as they are represented.

Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education

Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education PDF Author: Marilyn Cochran-Smith
Publisher: Teachers College Press
ISBN: 0807759317
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
"1. The book offers teacher educators and stakeholders an overview of accountability in the era of education reform and embraces teacher education accountability as a lever for reconstructing its targets, purposes, and consequences in keeping with the larger democratic project. 2. The book introduces a framework, eight dimensions of accountability, for interrogating dimensions of accountability policy and practice by revealing an accountability initiative's operation but also exposing underlying values and principles, theory of change, and relationship to larger political and policy agendas. 3. Using the authors' framework, eight dimensions of accountability, the book deconstructs four of the most visible education reform initiatives relevant to teacher educators and education stakeholders. The book proposes a rallying call to teacher educators and stakeholders to reclaim accountability using a new approach: democratic accountability in teacher education" --

Pencils Down

Pencils Down PDF Author: Wayne Au
Publisher: Rethinking Schools
ISBN: 094296151X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
This powerful collection from the groundbreaking Rethinking Schools magazine takes high-stakes standardized tests to task. Despite overwhelming evidence that the tests are invalid ways to measure teaching and learning -- and continuing signs of their unjust effects on students and teachers -- "reformers" and policymakers continue to force high-stakes tests into the public schools. Through articles that provide thoughtful and emotional critiques from the frontlines of education, Pencils Down deconstructs the damage that standardized tests wreak on our education system and the human beings that populate it. Better yet, it offers visionary forms of assessment that are not only more authentic, but also more democratic, fair, and accurate.

Open Democracy

Open Democracy PDF Author: Hélène Landemore
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691212392
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Hélène Landemore demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, more than ever, urgently needed. -- Cover page 4.

Why Bother?

Why Bother? PDF Author: S. Erdem Aytaç
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108475221
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
Using surveys, experiments, and fieldwork from several countries, this book tests a new theory of participation in elections and protests.

Monitoring Government

Monitoring Government PDF Author: Paul Charles Light
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 9780815752554
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
This volume offers the first systematic evaluation of the offices of inspector general (OIG) and examines the government-wide investment in the OIGs concept. Despite their increasingly prominent, often controversial, role in the internal oversight of government, very little is known about their institutional or operational problems.

Rethinking Comparison

Rethinking Comparison PDF Author: Erica S. Simmons
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108967086
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
Qualitative comparative methods – and specifically controlled qualitative comparisons – are central to the study of politics. They are not the only kind of comparison, though, that can help us better understand political processes and outcomes. Yet there are few guides for how to conduct non-controlled comparative research. This volume brings together chapters from more than a dozen leading methods scholars from across the discipline of political science, including positivist and interpretivist scholars, qualitative methodologists, mixed-methods researchers, ethnographers, historians, and statisticians. Their work revolutionizes qualitative research design by diversifying the repertoire of comparative methods available to students of politics, offering readers clear suggestions for what kinds of comparisons might be possible, why they are useful, and how to execute them. By systematically thinking through how we engage in qualitative comparisons and the kinds of insights those comparisons produce, these collected essays create new possibilities to advance what we know about politics.