Election campaigns in small and mid-sized electoral districts have been run from the grass roots from the beginning of the republic. Yard signs, door-to-door canvassing, and soap-box oratory have characterized state and local elections for years, and many predict their persistence into the 21st century. This book looks at new trends in small-town politics, tracking the infiltration of sophisticated communications technology, the use of political consultants, and the increase in fundraising and campaign expenditures. Original surveys, interviews, and in-depth case studies lead the author to conclude that the new tactics are with us to stay, but that their potentially negative effects--rising campaign budgets and diminished citizen participation--may be mitigated by creative approaches to reform. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Study conducted at Nalgonda and Mahaboobnagar districts of Andhra Pradesh, India.

Whereas most of the literature on migration focuses on individuals and their families, this book studies the organizations created by immigrants to protect themselves in their receiving states. Comparing eighteen of these grassroots organizations formed across the world, from India to Colombia to Vietnam to the Congo, researchers from the United States, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Spain focus their studies on the internal structure and activities of these organizations as they relate to developmental initiatives. The book outlines the principal positions in the migration and development debate and discusses the concept of transnationalism as a means of resolving these controversies.

This book explores the process of grassroots innovation in the context of the Global South. It explains why these bottom-up solutions developed by common people are generated due to a lack of available or affordable technology to meet their needs and how they are included in the mainstream imagination of the economy by studying these innovations in India. It analyses the grassroots innovation process from idea generation to its implementation. Detailing both theoretical and practical dimensions of grassroots innovation, the book provides a holistic understanding of the phenomenon by tracing its history in the pre-independence discourse on development to the present-day policies for institutionalizing these innovations in the mainstream. It will provide the readers with a bottom-up commentary on innovation and development in the context of the Global South in general and India in particular. It adopts a qualitative research design with a wide range of data collected through interviews, participant observations, and field notes. The book contains seven chapters to describe the discourse, policy perspectives, and current practice of grassroots innovations in general. The interdisciplinary, timely book provides thoughtful analysis for scholars and upper-level students in the fields of technology and innovation management, development studies, and public management.

This book describes the emergence of the free health clinic from its roots in the late 1960s and early 1970s, created by medical and lay social activists for young, alienated persons with substance abuse problems and by African American social activists for racial and ethnic minority groups. However, in the mid to late 1980s and 1990s, a second generation of free clinics began to develop rapidly in many different communities throughout the country, shifting their focus to the working poor and the uninsured. This growth has occurred with relatively little public attention and almost no scholarly investigation. This book fills this gap in academia by delving into both the history of the free health clinic and the stories of the volunteers, staff members, and patients of the modern free health care clinic. Through countless research and hundreds of hours of recorded interviews, this book gives the reader a view into the free health care community, represented by 45 clinics—old, new, big and small—spread throughout 10 states and the District of Columbia. The book includes many quotations from the many interviews conducted by the author to provide an honest, passionate view of the free health care clinic from the frontlines.