An Institutional Framework for Policymaking offers a new approach to the study of institutions and adds to the growing body of literature in the field of 'new institutionalism.' Dr. Matt Evans utilizes previous characterizations of institutions to analyze the framework affecting policymaking and the tools used for policy implementation. In examining the effect of institutional change on public policy, this book compares the implementation of population dispersal policy in Israel over two fifteen-year periods. The first period, which includes the years between 1951 and 1965, was characterized by limited electoral competition and societal values that emphasized collective over individual interests. By contrast, the period from 1988 to 2002 constituted a framework of heightened political competition and public policies geared toward individual and group interests. An Institutional Framework for Policymaking provides a critical examination of the role of coercion in public policy, and provides insight into the relevance of national plans and their effectiveness in modern governance. The research in this book will appeal to scholars of political science, public policy, and urban planning.

This unique, absorbing biography of Jerusalem brings to light its overlooked histories and diverse contemporary voices. In Jerusalem, what you see and what is true are two different things. The Old City has never had “four quarters” as its maps proclaim. And beyond the crush and frenzy of its major religious sites, many of its quarters are little known to visitors, its people ignored and their stories untold. Nine Quarters of Jerusalem lets the communities of the Old City speak for themselves. Ranging from ancient past to political present, it evokes the city’s depth and cultural diversity. Matthew Teller’s highly original “biography” features the Old City’s Palestinian and Jewish communities, but also spotlights its Indian and African populations, its Greek and Armenian and Syriac cultures, its downtrodden Dom Gypsy families, and its Sufi mystics. It discusses the sources of Jerusalem’s holiness and the ideas—often startlingly secular—that have shaped lives within its walls. It is an evocation of place through story, led by the voices of Jerusalemites.

Here is a passionate and eclectic collection of essays, poems, and scholarship that brings to life Jerusalem, that most enigmatic and compelling of cities, in its embattled, contemporary guise as well as in its ancient history. The book begins in the immediacy of today’s Jerusalem—with its dispossessions and laws, its bloody conflicts and massive skyscrapers—and moves backward in time to Classical Jerusalem, working to disentangle the knots of the three great monotheistic religions, and finally comes to rest in a section that is a testament to the physical facts of Jerusalem: its monuments and alleys, its smells, its music, its people. Throughout it all, the Jerusalem that emerges is, as Mureed Barghouthy puts it, “the Jerusalem of the people,” for it is the people who live or have lived there, who know the “Jerusalem of houses and cobbled streets and spice markets… of our neighbor the nun and her neighbor the muezzin, who was always in a hurry.” Tellingly, the anthology begins and ends with the words of poets: “I’m not interested in / Who suffered the most,” writes Naomi Shihab Nye in the introductory poem. “I’m interested in /People getting over it.” This book is about a beloved Jerusalem whose intricacies and human inventions are ultimately larger than the current conflict.