Suchergebnisse

One of the more interesting and under researched questions concerning university teaching deals with the impact courses have on students' cognitive knowledge and attitudes. While considerable attention has been devoted to "how to" increase cognitive knowledge, there have not been many attempts to study such changes in regularly taught courses. In similar fashion, there have been a variety of attempts to study attitudinal changes, but these attempts have often been unassociated with specific teaching methodology or course design. For instance, the political socialization literature has dealt with attitude formation and attitude change in college age youth, but there was little concern for the impact a specific course might have on those attitudes.

Students of citizen participation in public affairs disagree as to the effectiveness of such citizen involvement. Using the General Revenue Sharing program as a case study and applying techniques of both cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis, this article examines the effectiveness of one form of citizen participation, the public hearing. It is found that in the revenue-sharing program, the public hearing did have an immediate, but only short-term, impact on levels of public interest and citizen involvement. Evidence to support some short-term and some long-term effects on reported expenditure decisions is presented; however, these impacts generally are found to be inconsequential and not statistically significant. It is concluded that, as a form of citizen participation, the public hearing—at least as demonstrated in the General Revenue Sharing program—has not had much of an impact on citizen behavior or policy choices.

Modern presidents must be attentive to influences of the federal bureaucracy on their policy initiatives and all attempt some measure of bureaucratic control. This article assesses the extent of President Nixon's success in gaining some degree of management control over the bureaucracy through the manipulation of the civil service personnel system. We find that Republicans were, in fact, more likely to be selected to top career positions during the Nixon years. We find also that career executives calling themselves Independents were more likely during the Nixon years than before to resemble Republican executives in their support of Nixon's policies and goals. This is significant to presidential control because of the large number of bureaucrats calling themselves Independents. We conclude that Independent career executives may provide a president with a considerable reservoir of bureaucratic support.

Our spacecraft called the Earth is reaching its capacity. Can we not invent a way to reduce our population growth to zero?… Every human institution … should set this as its prime task.Lee A. DuBridge

The creation of a steady‐state world, which is at the same time a liveable one, is the most important and difficult problem mankind has ever faced.Roger Revelle