Suchergebnisse

School reform politics in England and the United States over the last quarter century has revolved largely around the question of performance-based accountability. Accountability school reform in both countries has entailed standardization of curricula and assessment and the spread in the use of market mechanisms in school governance. To explain how these accountability reforms have retooled local governing institutions in ways that have reduced their autonomy and lessened their capacity to administer local school systems, this article applies the analytical framework of urban governing cycles to a comparative study of school reform politics in Bristol, England, and Boston, Massachusetts.

To understand the origins of modern local governing institutions in Britain and the United States, this article examines how the forces of nineteenth-century urbanization, industrial and commercial development, nation-state consolidation, and democratization converged to form a historical context ripe for creating a public domain through a process of local state formation. The comparative-historical study also takes into account the role of political mobilization in the creation of the public domain by demonstrating that the formation of modern local state entailed highly contested political processes that produced uneven local state development between and within the two nations.

English
It has been observed that the local state in the United Kingdom and the United States has undergone fundamental restructuring since the 1970s. This transformation has been seen by some as a product of the ideological shift in national governing regimes, and by others of the reordering in the national and global political economy. Moreover, it has been contended that as a result of these changes, some convergence in patterns of local state development between the UK and the US has occurred. This article assesses the validity of these claims by tracing the changes in the size and functions of the local state by comparing local government expenditures in Britain and the US since the early 1970s.

The author develops an analytical framework for making cross-national comparisons, referred to as modes of governance, that centers on the study of how governing coalitions are built and maintained. He lays out the theoretical framework for modes of governance, which draws upon regime theory but goes beyond its conception of power structures. A primary concern is understanding the underlying causes of urban governing realignments and their impact on local strategic decision making. To illustrate the approach, the author compares politics of development in Boston, Massachusetts, and Bristol, England. Finally, the author considers the theoretical implications of the Boston/Bristol comparison.

Scholarly interest in urban politics of the Gilded Age has been both lively and enduring. A plethora of case studies and comparative analyses have produced a large body of historical knowledge about this period in urban political development. Nonetheless, little agreement about the nature of urban governance in this period exists. Indeed, the debate over who governed cities between 1870 and 1900 has intensified over the last decade. This author evaluates the political-culture, social-control, and fiscal-ideology theories of urban governance in the Gilded Age, using census data on ethnicity, urban growth, and municipal government finances.

Scholarly interest in and debate about urban political machines waxed considerably in the 1980s. What is curious about urban political machines is their appearance in the United States. Using the analytical framework of American exceptionalism, the author compares late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban political development in Germany, France, England, and the United States in an attempt to identify the distinctive features of the American context that fostered the rise of urban political machines.

The accepted wisdom about the rise of urban political machines leans heavily on sociologist Robert K. Merton's functional analysis of machine politics. Merton contended that centralized machine organizations appeared in American cities because local government, organized on the principle of separation of powers, proved too weak and fragmented to meet the "latent" needs of urban society. This argument has found its way into many, if not most, analyses of American bossism and political machines since Merton first posited it in the 1940s. This article evaluates Merton's thesis against comprehensive and comparative historical evidence.

This article develops an integrated framework for comparing urban governance cross nationally. Joining together structural, cultural, and rational actor approaches to cross-national comparison, it explains the institutional milieux of urban governance in the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. Comparison of public-private partnership arrangements in cities of these four countries is used to demonstrate the utility of this integrated framework.

There has been a marked increase in comparative research examining the dynamics of regime formation in the United Kingdom and the United States. These authors consider regime formation processes in three deindustrializing cities: Detroit, Michigan, and Birmingham and Sheffield, England. The article identifies two cross-cutting themes: the effects of national/international political and economic forces on local governance and the role of public and private interactions in regime formation. Finally, in an attempt to enlarge the scope of regime theory, the authors develop a comparative perspective on urban governance based on the concepts of governing structures and policy agendas.

Until now urban regime analysts focused almost entirely on cities in the United States. In this article the authors broaden the definition of urban regimes to fit the British urban experience, then seek to trace the formation of regimes in Birmingham and Bristol during the 1980s. The formulation and implementation of specific economic development strategies and policies for each of these two cases is detailed, and finally, an evaluation of regime capacity for each is explored.