During the past fifty years, the Congresses and presidents of the United States have made many efforts to improve the performance of the federal government. In this book, a leading expert in public management examines the most important reform statutes passed and concludes that the problem is not too little reform but too much. Paul Light explains that Congress and the presidency have never decided whether they trust government and its employees to do their jobs well, and so they have moved back and forth over the decades between four reform philosophies: scientific management, war on waste, watchful eye, and liberation management. These four philosophies, argues Light, operate with different goals, implementation strategies, and impacts. Yet reform initiatives draw on one or another of them almost at random, often canceling out the potential benefits of a particular statute by passing a contradictory statute soon afterward. Light shows that as the public has become increasingly distrustful of government, the reform agenda has favored the war on waste and watchful eye. He analyzes the consequences of these changes for the overall performance of government and offers policy recommendations for future reform approaches.

This new edition argues that, in both Mao and Deng periods, China has evolved in ways quite different from the Soviet model and from other developing countries. Like its predecessor, the book's approach is interdisciplinary and comparative. Professor Blecher analyzes China by introducing appropriate theories and concepts from historical and political sociology, economic development and political science. He explores China from two comparative perspectives: developing countries (including the newly industrializing countries of East Asia) and historical state socialist regimes. The book's chapters cover: imperial collapse, republican failure and communist triumph; a chronological overview since 1949; the state and politics; socialism and society; rural political economy; urban political economy; China and the Pacific Rim; the crisis of reform; and the future of Chinese economic development and politics. From PETRA: Blecher's new edition will revise and update the first, adding a new section on international economic factors to the political economy chapters - to include the WTO, gloablization, foreign investment etc. It will address new policy problems such as the spread of AIDS in China and will look at Hong Kong and Macau's return, and at the relationship with Taiwan. The Chinese diaspora is also covered.

"This Policy Analysis previews the case for more decisive US economic engagement of Pakistan and suggests that a US-Pakistan FTA could reinforce existing reforms and push the envelope in economic areas where Pakistan (and South Asia more generally) have lagged. In keeping with the Institute's extensive research agenda on prospective US FTAs, we present a detailed analysis of the costs and benefits of a US-Pakistan FTA for the signatory countries, for regional integration, and for the world trading system."--Preface.

Winner of the 2019 Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Conference on Latin American History This is a book about the links between politics and literacy, and about how radical ideas spread in a world without printing presses. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Spanish colonial governments tried to keep revolution out of their provinces. But, as Cristina Soriano shows, hand-copied samizdat materials from the Caribbean flooded the cities and ports of Venezuela, hundreds of foreigners shared news of the French and Haitian revolutions with locals, and Venezuelans of diverse social backgrounds met to read hard-to-come-by texts and to discuss the ideas they expounded. These networks efficiently spread antimonarchical propaganda and abolitionist and egalitarian ideas, allowing Venezuelans to participate in an incipient yet vibrant public sphere and to contemplate new political scenarios. This book offers an in-depth analysis of one of the crucial processes that allowed Venezuela to become one of the first regions in Spanish America to declare independence from Iberia and turn into an influential force for South American independence.

A story of the wise and the shortsighted, the bold and the timid, the generous and the grasping men and women who have been the stuff of American reform.

In The Age of Reformation, first published in 1955, E. Harris Harbison shows why sixteenth-century Europe was ripe for a catharsis. New political and social factors were at work-the growth of the middle classes, the monetary inflation resulting from an influx of gold from the New World, the invention of printing, the trend toward centralization of political power. Against these developments, Harbison places the church, nearly bankrupt because of the expense of defending the papal states, supporting an elaborate administrative organization and luxurious court, and financing the crusades. The Reformation, as he shows, was the result of "a long, slow shifting of social conditions and human values to which the church was not responding readily enough. The sheer inertia of an enormous and complex organization, the drag of powerful vested interests, the helplessness of individuals with intelligent schemes of reform-this is what strikes the historian in studying the church of the later Middle Ages." Martin Luther, a devout and forceful monk, sought only to cleanse the church of its abuses and return to the spiritual guidance of the Scriptures. But, as it turned out, western Christendom split into two camps-a division as stirring, as fearful, as portentous to the sixteenth-century world as any in Europe's history. Offering an engaging and accessible introductory history of the Reformation, Harbison focuses on the age's key individuals, institutions, and ideas while at the same time addressing the slower, less obvious tides of social and political change. A classic and long out-of-print synthesis of earlier generations of historical scholarship on the Reformation told with clarity and drama, this book concisely traces the outlines, interlocked and interwoven as they were, of the various phases that comprised the "Age of Reformation."

Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize Shortlisted for the Arthur Ross Book Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A "powerful and cogent" (Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post) account of the twentieth-century battle for immigration reform that set the stage for today’s roiling debates. The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia. In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, from the indefatigable congressman Emanuel Celler and senator Herbert Lehman to the bull-headed Nevada senator Pat McCarran, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law. Through a world war, a refugee crisis after the Holocaust, and a McCarthyist fever, a coalition of lawmakers and activists descended from Jewish, Irish, and Japanese immigrants fought to establish a new principle of equality in the American immigration system. Their crowning achievement, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, proved to be one of the most transformative laws in the country’s history, opening the door to nonwhite migration at levels never seen before—and changing America in ways that those who debated it could hardly have imagined. Framed movingly by her own family’s story of immigration to America, Yang’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is a deeply researched and illuminating work of history, one that shows how Americans have strived and struggled to live up to the ideal of a home for the “huddled masses,” as promised in Emma Lazarus’s famous poem.