The Real World of Interdependence of Governments and Corporations: What We Know vs. What We Teach

Once we better understand this interdependence, we can more carefully ask how the public and private sectors can and should collaborate, for what purposes, and to whose benefit. The real world political questions are not whether it will be done or how such things could happen. A more constructive real world politics will focus on how we will manage the interdependence of governments and corporations, and whose interests and values will be served by policy choices about the patterns and practices of collaboration. If we organize our public life around these questions in 2020, American politics will be much more productive and satisfying

Systemic Reform in a Federated System:Los Angeles at the Turn of the Millennium

I synthesize some of the lessons we have learned about systemic school reform in order and derive two explicit hypotheses about when such reforms are likely to be more and less successful. The first hypothesis focuses on program implementation: to achieve success, any systemic reform must overcome challenges at each stage of the policy-making process, from agenda-setting to policy choice to implementation. The second hypothesis focuses on the federated nature of education policymaking in the United States: any successful systemic reform must offer a program that aligns local efforts with state and sometimes federal policy. I derive and test more specific hypotheses related to recent systemic reform efforts in the Los Angeles region—especially the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, or LAAMP—which ran from 1995 through 2001. The case confirms the hypotheses and enables a clearer understanding of systemic school reform

The Real World of Interdependence of Governments and Corporations: What We Know vs. What We Teach

Once we better understand this interdependence, we can more carefully ask how the public and private sectors can and should collaborate, for what purposes, and to whose benefit. The real world political questions are not whether it will be done or how such things could happen. A more constructive real world politics will focus on how we will manage the interdependence of governments and corporations, and whose interests and values will be served by policy choices about the patterns and practices of collaboration. If we organize our public life around these questions in 2020, American politics will be much more productive and satisfying

The Party’s Primary Preferences: Race, Gender, and Party Support of Congressional Primary Candidates

Party support has a strong influence on candidate success in the primary. What remains unexplored is whether party actions during the primary are biased along racial and gender lines. Using candidate demographic data at the congressional level and measures of party support for primary candidates, we test whether parties discriminate against women and minority candidates in congressional primaries and also whether parties are strategic in their support of minority candidates in certain primaries. Our findings show parties are not biased against minority candidates and also that white women candidates receive more support from the Democratic Party than do other types of candidates. Our findings also suggest that parties do not appear to strategically support minority candidates in districts with larger populations of minorities. Lastly, we also find no significant differences in the effects of party support on the likelihood of success in the primary by candidate race or gender