More than ever before, citizens are looking for leaders at all levels of government that they can trust to genuinely represent their aspirations for their communities. Perhaps there is no better environment for this desire to be fulfilled than at the most local level. The process of building that trust starts with taking the time to fully understand what residents desire from their local government and then putting an effective plan into action that delivers on those expectations. Community-based strategic planning is the process of moving from resident aspirations to an actionable plan that local government leaders can work to execute. In this book, Rick Davis and Dan Griffiths lay out their combined decades of experience with local government to outline the ins and outs of a community-based approach to strategic planning. This isn't a book about what might work in theory. Instead, it outlines a practical approach that has been employed by local governments throughout the world. Using stories and examples from real communities where they have worked, Rick and Dan offer a systematic process that can be applied by cities, towns, counties, school districts, and other municipal governments. Whether a municipal manager, elected official, or even an involved citizen, this book will serve as a guide for developing a strategic plan for your community.

Confidence in American government has been declining for three decades. Leading Harvard scholars here explore the roots of this mistrust by examining the government's current scope, its actual performance, citizens' perceptions of its performance, and explanations that have been offered for the decline of trust.

This dissertation project tries to answer the following question: How is collective political trust generated from individual political trust across federal and local levels? As a function of maintaining democracy, political trust has been examined since survey research started. The extant literature has discovered the mechanisms shaping trust in government but focuses only on trust in federal government. To grasp the entire picture of trust in government, it is important to analyze the interaction between trust in subnational and national governments. Specifically, I focus on a puzzle in the literature on a relationship between political trust and civic engagement. Despite the expectations of the extant theoretic work on social capital, there is little empirical evidence of a relationship between individual political trust and civic engagement. To solve this puzzle, I examine the effects of social trust on individual political trust not only at the federal level but also at the local level. The central argument of my dissertation is that the mechanisms shaping citizens' trust in each level of government are different. I argue that trust in local government largely stems from civic engagement while trust in federal government is mainly a function of citizens' perception of government performance. The dissertation starts by constructing a formal model and demonstrates that other information sources available to citizens prevent the government from manipulating information. This suggests that civic engagement works as another information source in local politics differently than in national politics. Following this model, I examine the effects of civic engagement on trust in national and local government. The first empirical chapter demonstrates the different effects of aggregate civic engagement on trust in the national and local governments using Bayesian vector autoregression models. The second empirical chapter examines the relationship between civic engagement and trust in the national and local government at the individual level using a multivariate multilevel model. This chapter also tries to explain the covariance between national and local political trust at the individual level. The results presented in the dissertation lead to the following conclusions: (1) Civic engagement does not affect political trust. (2) The movement of civic engagement affects the movement of trust in local government more strongly than trust in the federal government. (3) Community-level civic engagement affects individual's trust in local and national government. In sum, civic engagement collectively affects trust in local government more closely than trust in the federal government. By examining the relationship between political trust in each level of government and civic engagement using time-series and multivariate-multilevel models, we can learn how the hierarchical structure of democracy contributes to its stability. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/155079

American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. An overwhelming majority of citizens—Republicans and Democrats alike—hold negative perceptions of the government and believe it is wasteful, inefficient, and doing a generally poor job managing public programs and providing public services. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that the government has the ability to respond effectively. It’s a serious problem, argues Amy E. Lerman, and it will not be a simple one to fix. With Good Enough for Government Work, Lerman uses surveys, experiments, and public opinion data to argue persuasively that the reputation of government is itself an impediment to government’s ability to achieve the common good. In addition to improving its efficiency and effectiveness, government therefore has an equally critical task: countering the belief that the public sector is mired in incompetence. Lerman takes readers through the main challenges. Negative perceptions are highly resistant to change, she shows, because we tend to perceive the world in a way that confirms our negative stereotypes of government—even in the face of new information. Those who hold particularly negative perceptions also begin to “opt out” in favor of private alternatives, such as sending their children to private schools, living in gated communities, and refusing to participate in public health insurance programs. When sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision. In this way, citizens’ beliefs about government can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with consequences for all. Lerman concludes with practical solutions for how the government might improve its reputation and roll back current efforts to eliminate or privatize even some of the most critical public services.

Trust is a crucial facet of social functioning that feeds into our relationships with individuals, groups, and organizations. The Psychology of Interpersonal Trust: Theory and Research examines existing theories, frameworks, and models of trust as well as the methods and designs for examining it. To fully examine how interpersonal trust impacts our lives, Rotenberg reviews the many essential topics trust relates to, including close relationships, trust games, behavioural trust, and trust development. Designed to encourage researchers to recognize the links between different approaches to trust, this book begins with an overview of the different approaches to interpersonal trust and a description of the methods used to investigate it. Following on from this, each chapter introduces a new subtopic or context, including lying, adjustment, socialization, social media, politics, and health. Each subtopic begins with a short monologue (to provide a personal perspective) and covers basic theory and research. Rotenberg’s applied focus demonstrates the relevance of interpersonal trust and highlights the issues and problems people face in contemporary society. This is essential reading for students, researchers, and academics in social psychology, especially those with a specific interest in the concept of trust.

From Kleptocracy to Democracy: How Citizens Can Take Back Local Government provides students with a critical examination of the large-scale political corruption that looted Bell, California between 1993 and 2010. For 17 years, some city officials paid themselves more than a million dollars a year, using the police department as a "for profit" vehicle for collecting fines, and issuing over $100 million in bonds. They turned the city into their own private cash machine. Residents of the poor, immigrant community are still struggling to repay the city's exorbitant debt. The book draws on interviews with more than 50 people connected to the Bell scandal to provide a compelling, in-depth look at how waves of factory closings, economic shifts, and immigration pressures gutted the structures that are essential to civic health, opening the way for grifting politicians. The book analyzes the seemingly minor breakdowns in civic life that invite corruption, and offers students and interested citizens tools for analyzing the health of their own communities. Apathy killed democracy in Bell for almost two decades, but the press--and the dogged political activism of young Latinos and Muslims in the Dreamers generation-- brought it back. The book makes a clear connection between civil complacency and the resulting damage to American democracy. It demonstrates how citizens can actively resist political corruption by remaining involved and informed in local government. From Kleptocracy to Democracy inspires informed citizenship. It is an excellent supplementary resource for courses in local government, public administration, sociology, Chicano studies, urban politics, law and society, and ethics studies. Fred Smoller, a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register, earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington, his M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and his B.A. from State University New York, College of Fredonia. He is an associate professor of political science at Chapman University in Orange, California, where he teaches courses on public administration and state and local politics. His key area of professional interest is American politics, with a specific emphasis on media and politics, local government, and public administration.