Good Government Good Citizens

Author : Russell J. Dalton
Publisher : CQ Press
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2020-06-23
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781544395821

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The Good Citizen by Russell J. Dalton Pdf

There has been a growing chorus of political analysts with doomsday predictions of an American public that is uncivil, disengaged, and alienated. And it′s only getting worse with a younger generation of Americans who do not see the value in voting. The good news is that the bad news is wrong. In this Third Edition of The Good Citizen, Russell Dalton uses current national public opinion surveys, including new evidence from 2018 Pew Center survey data, to show how Americans are changing their views on what good citizenship means. It′s not about recreating the halcyon politics of a generation ago, but recognition that new patterns of citizenship call for new processes and new institutions that reflect the values of the contemporary American public. Trends in participation, tolerance, and policy priorities reflect a younger generation that is more engaged, more tolerant, and more supportive of social justice. The Good Citizen shows how a younger generation is creating new norms of citizenship that are leading to a renaissance of democratic participation. An important comparative chapter in the book showcases cross-national comparisons that further demonstrate the vitality of American democracy.

Author : Donald J. Savoie
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2015-08-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780773597952

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What Is Government Good At? by Donald J. Savoie Pdf

Recent decades have shown the public's support for government plummet alongside political leaders’ credibility. This downward spiral calls for an exploration of what has gone wrong. The questions, "What is government good at?" and "What is government not good at?" are critical ones - and their answers should be the basis for good public policy and public administration. In What Is Government Good At?, Donald Savoie argues that politicians and public servants are good at generating and avoiding blame, playing to a segment of the population to win the next election, embracing and defending the status quo, adding management layers and staff, keeping ministers out of trouble, responding to demands from the prime minister and his office, and managing a complex, prime minister-centred organization. Conversely, they are not as good at defining the broader public interest, providing and recognizing evidence-based policy advice, managing human and financial resources with efficiency and frugality, innovating and reforming itself, being accountable to Parliament and to citizens, dealing with non-performers, paying sufficient attention to service delivery, and implementing and evaluating the impact of policies and programs. With wide implications for representative democracy, What Is Government Good At? is a persuasive analysis of an approach to government that has opened the door to those with the resources to influence policy and decision-making while leaving average citizens on the outside looking in.

Author : Amy J. Wan
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2014-03-30
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780822979609

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Producing Good Citizens by Amy J. Wan Pdf

Recent global security threats, economic instability, and political uncertainty have placed great scrutiny on the requirements for U.S. citizenship. The stipulation of literacy has long been one of these criteria. In Producing Good Citizens, Amy J. Wan examines the historic roots of this phenomenon, looking specifically to the period just before World War I, up until the Great Depression. During this time, the United States witnessed a similar anxiety over the influx of immigrants, economic uncertainty, and global political tensions. Early on, educators bore the brunt of literacy training, while also being charged with producing the right kind of citizens by imparting civic responsibility and a moral code for the workplace and society. Literacy quickly became the credential to gain legal, economic, and cultural status. In her study, Wan defines three distinct pedagogical spaces for literacy training during the 1910s and 1920s: Americanization and citizenship programs sponsored by the federal government, union-sponsored programs, and first year university writing programs. Wan also demonstrates how each literacy program had its own motivation: the federal government desired productive citizens, unions needed educated members to fight for labor reform, and university educators looked to aid social mobility. Citing numerous literacy theorists, Wan analyzes the correlation of reading and writing skills to larger currents within American society. She shows how early literacy training coincided with the demand for laborers during the rise of mass manufacturing, while also providing an avenue to economic opportunity for immigrants. This fostered a rhetorical link between citizenship, productivity, and patriotism. Wan supplements her analysis with an examination of citizen training books, labor newspapers, factory manuals, policy documents, public deliberations on citizenship and literacy, and other materials from the period to reveal the goal and rationale behind each program. Wan relates the enduring bond of literacy and citizenship to current times, by demonstrating the use of literacy to mitigate economic inequality, and its lasting value to a productivity-based society. Today, as in the past, educators continue to serve as an integral part of the literacy training and citizen-making process.

Author : Ralph Ketcham
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781351495486

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Public-Spirited Citizenship by Ralph Ketcham Pdf

Any searching look at the theory and practice of citizenship in the United States today is bewildering and disconcerting. Despite earnest concern for participation, access, and "leverage," there is a widespread perception that nothing citizens do has much meaning or influence. This book argues that for American democracy to work in the twenty-first century, renewed interest in teaching the nation's young citizens a sense of the public good is imperative.All of the nation's founders, especially Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison, addressed the question of whether and how a citizen can make a difference in the American political process. This concern harkens back even farther, to Locke, Erasmus, and Aristotle. Today, one obstacle to good citizenship is the social scientific turn in political science. Leaders in civic education in the twentieth century eschewed grand ideas and moral principles in favour of a focus on behaviourism and competitive, liberal politics. Another problem is the growing belief that the government has no business promoting the public good through the support of religious, educational, or cultural efforts.Ralph Ketcham vividly depicts the relationship of private self-interest and public-spirited action as these pertain to citizenship and good government. This is an enlightening book for the general reader, as well as for students, professional social scientists, and political philosophers.

Author : James Bryce Bryce (Viscount)
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 1931
Category : Citizenship
ISBN : MINN:31951002013980G

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The Hindrances to Good Citizenship by James Bryce Bryce (Viscount) Pdf

Author : James B. Bryce
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 1993-01-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1412825121

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The Hindrances to Good Citizenship by James B. Bryce Pdf

Historian, jurist, diplomat, and member of Parliament, James Bryce (1838-1922) lived one of those remarkably full and fruitful nineteenth-century public lives that remain a wonder today. He served as ambassador to the United States from 1907 to 1913 and was one of the most knowledgeable, perceptive, and sympathetic interpreters of American civilization since Tocqueville. Bryce's writings reveal a constant and deep concern with the nature and maintenance of democracy. Hindrances to Good Citizenship, first presented as a series of lectures at Yale in 1908, addresses the special problems of civic duty in a democracy. It is an outstanding example of classic liberal thought. A society's standard of civic duty, according to Bryce, depends on a reasonable balance between the principles of obedience and independence, the submission of the individual will to other wills and the assertion of that will against other wills. He defines three essential elements in public life that may potentially upset that balance and foster bad citizenship: indolence, selfish personal interest, and party spirit. Of these he deems indolence to be the most widespread, selfish personal interest to the most pernicious, and party spirit to be the most excusable, but also the most subtle and most likely to affect those classes from which most leaders are drawn. After exploring a wide range of specific political and social contexts and expressions of these obstacles to good citizenship, Bryce conclude by offering his thoughts on what can be done to remove them by improving the practical functioning of government and increasing civic spirit of the people. Although he was writing at the turn of the century, Bryce speaks to us as if a contemporary and has much to offer as we approach the century's end. Hindrances to Good Citizenship will interest those concerned with normative theory-whether attached to political science, sociology, or American studies.

Author : David Batstone,Eduardo Mendieta
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2014-02-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781135302870

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The Good Citizen by David Batstone,Eduardo Mendieta Pdf

In The Good Citizen, some of the most eminent contemporary thinkers take up the question of the future of American democracy in an age of globalization, growing civic apathy, corporate unaccountability, and purported fragmentation of the American common identity by identity politics.

Author : Joel Westheimer
Publisher : Teachers College Press
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2015-05
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780807756355

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What Kind of Citizen? by Joel Westheimer Pdf

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Author : Joseph F. Freeman
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : Political Science
ISBN : UOM:39015024963418

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Government is Good by Joseph F. Freeman Pdf

We like to think that government is there when we want it. Voters - if they vote - have the power. Elected officials, especiamly in local government, are there to carry out the details and to take care of the humdrum nuts-and-bolts running of things. Having been a council member and mayor for a small Southern manufacturing town Hill City, the author of this book has experienced what it is like to try and make local government work. This book takes readers inside the system to show the politics as its most human level by challenging the presumption of many political scientists that an understanding of governments is necessarily technical, addressing such abstractions as memory, symbol, context and power as they work in the practice of governing.

Author : W.A. Bogart
Publisher : UBC Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2007-10-01
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780774845229

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Good Government? Good Citizens? by W.A. Bogart Pdf

Good Government? Good Citizens? explores the evolving concept of the citizen in Canada at the beginning of this century. Three forces are at work in reconstituting the citizen in this society: courts, politics, and markets. Many see these forces as intersecting and colliding in ways that are fundamentally reshaping the relationship of individuals to the state and to each other. How has Canadian society actually been transformed? Is the state truly in retreat? Do individuals, in fact, have a fundamentally altered sense of their relationship to government and to each other? Have courts and markets supplanted representative politics regarding the expression of basic values? Must judicialized protection of human rights and minority interests necessarily mean a diminished concern for the common good on the part of representative politics? To what extent should markets and representative politics maintain a role in the protection of human rights and minority interests? Will representative politics ever hold the public trust again? Good Government? Good Citizens? responds to these questions. It does so by examining the altered roles of courts, politics, and markets over the last two decades. It then examines a number of areas to gauge the extent of the evidence regarding transformations that have occurred because of these changing roles. There are chapters on the First Peoples, cyberspace, education, and on an ageing Canada. The book concludes with reflections on the “good citizen” at the dawning of the new century. Of particular interest to professors and students of law and political science, Good Government? Good Citizens? will appeal to anyone interested in the changing face of Canada and its citizens.

Author : Holly Korbey
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2019-10-21
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781475843453

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Building Better Citizens by Holly Korbey Pdf

Educating for citizenship was the original mission of American schools, but for decades that knowledge—also known as civics education—has been in decline, as schools have shifted focus to college and career, STEM, and raising reading and math scores. But over the last few years, spurred on by political polarization and a steep decline in public understanding, civics education is seeing a nation-wide resurgence, as school leaders, educators, and parents recognize the urgency of teaching young people how America works—especially young people who have been marginalized from the political system. But this isn’t your grandmother’s civics. The “new” civics has been updated and re-tooled for the phone-addicted, multi-cultural, globalized twenty-first century kid. From combatting “fake news” with fact checking in Silicon Valley, to reviving elementary school social studies in Nashville, to learning civic activism in Oklahoma City, journalist Holly Korbey documents the grassroots revival happening across the country. Along the way, she provides an essential guidebook for educators, school leaders and caregivers of all types who want to educate a new generation of engaged citizens at a critical time in American democracy.

Author : OECD
Publisher : OECD Publishing
Page : 150 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2020-06-10
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9789264725904

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Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions Catching the Deliberative Wave by OECD Pdf

Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens' Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues.

Author : Diane Ravitch,Joseph P. Viteritti
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2008-10-01
Category : Education
ISBN : 9780300129786

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Making Good Citizens by Diane Ravitch,Joseph P. Viteritti Pdf

divAmericans have reason to be concerned about the condition of American democracy at the start of the twenty-first century. Surveys show that civic participation has declined, cynicism about government has increased, and young people have a weak grasp of the principles that underlie our constitutional system. Crucial questions must be answered: How serious is the situation? What role do schools play in shaping civic behavior? Are current education reform initiatives—such as multiculturalism and school choice—counterproductive? How can schools contribute toward reversing the trend? This volume brings together leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines to probe the relation between a healthy democracy and education. Their original and provocative discussions cut across a range of important topics: the cultivation of democratic values, the formation of social capital in schools and communities, political conflict in a pluralist society, the place of religion in public life, the enduring problems of racial inequality. Gathering together the most current research and thinking on education and civil society, this is a book that deserves the attention of everyone who cares about the quality and future of American democracy./DIV

Author : Beth Simone Noveck
Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2009-08-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780815703464

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Wiki Government by Beth Simone Noveck Pdf

Collaborative democracy—government with the people—is a new vision of governance in the digital age. Wiki Government explains how to translate the vision into reality. Beth Simone Noveck draws on her experience in creating Peer-to-Patent, the federal government's first social networking initiative, to show how technology can connect the expertise of the many to the power of the few. In the process, she reveals what it takes to innovate in government. Launched in 2007, Peer-to-Patent connects patent examiners to volunteer scientists and technologists via the web. These dedicated but overtaxed officials decide which of the million-plus patent applications currently in the pipeline to approve. Their decisions help determine which start-up pioneers a new industry and which disappears without a trace. Patent examiners have traditionally worked in secret, cut off from essential information and racing against the clock to rule on lengthy, technical claims. Peer-to-Patent broke this mold by creating online networks of self-selecting citizen experts and channeling their knowledge and enthusiasm into forms that patent examiners can easily use. Peer-to-Patent shows how policymakers can improve decisionmaking by harnessing networks to public institutions. By encouraging, coordinating, and structuring citizen participation, technology can make government both more open and more effective at solving today's complex social and economic problems. Wiki Government describes how this model can be applied in a wide variety of settings and offers a fundamental rethinking of effective governance and democratic legitimacy for the twenty-first century.

Author : Russell J. Dalton
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2017-10-06
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780191053320

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The Participation Gap by Russell J. Dalton Pdf

The dilemma of democracy arises from two contrasting trends. More people in the established democracies are participating in civil society activity, contacting government officials, protesting, and using online activism and other creative forms of participation. At the same time, the importance of social status as an influence on political activity is increasing. The democratic principle of the equality of voice is eroding. The politically rich are getting richer-and the politically needy have less voice. This book assembles an unprecedented set of international public opinion surveys to identify the individual, institutional, and political factors that produce these trends. New forms of activity place greater demands on participants, raising the importance of social status skills and resources. Civil society activity further widens the participation gap. New norms of citizenship shift how people participate. And generational change and new online forms of activism accentuate this process. Effective and representative government requires a participatory citizenry and equal voice, and participation trends are undermining these outcomes. The Participation Gap both documents the growing participation gap in contemporary democracies and suggests ways that we can better achieve their theoretical ideal of a participatory citizenry and equal voice.