Untangling the Concept of Adversarial Legalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 473-487
Author(s):  
Jeb Barnes ◽  
Thomas F. Burke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law And Society ◽  
Everyday Practice

The concept of adversarial legalism has been widely used by scholars of law, public administration, public policy, political science, sociology, and Law and Society, but the varying ways in which the concept has been employed raise concerns that it has become stretched to the point of incoherence. We argue that adversarial legalism entails both a style, an everyday practice of dispute resolution and policy making with distinct attributes, and a structure of governance that can be compared to other structures of authority. Untangling these aspects of adversarial legalism allows us to make sense of its different uses and identify future avenues of inquiry. Despite its wide application, adversarial legalism is in fact underutilized, especially in studies aimed at understanding consequences of judicialization, legalization, and juridification in the United States and abroad.

Defending Government: Why Big Government Works. By Max Neiman. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. 260p. $27.00 paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-218
Author(s):  
John C. Pierce
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Goal Achievement ◽  
Graduate Courses ◽  
The Public

Max Neiman provides a concise, well-written, and compre- hensive critical analysis of "the conservative attack on the public sector, especially its explanation for and evaluation of the size and growth of the public sector in the United States" (p. viii). In doing so, however, he only partially fulfills what is promised in the subtitle, namely, explaining why big govern- ment works. Rather than explicitly assess the reasons for goal achievement in a variety of policy areas, as the title implied to me, Neiman focuses on why we have big government and on the various critiques of that size. To be sure, the book is appropriate for upper division and graduate courses in political science, public policy, or public administration.

Diversifying Methodologies: A Haudenosaunee/Settler Approach for Measuring Indigenous-Local Intergovernmental Success

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Alcantara ◽  
Ian Kalman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Science Methods ◽  
Comprehensive Evaluations ◽  
The City ◽  
Partial Success

AbstractIntergovernmental agreements between municipal and Indigenous governments are rapidly expanding in number and importance in Canada and the United States, yet they remain underexamined in the literature. This article considers how to measure the success of these agreements. It takes as a case study the port divestiture agreement between the City of Cornwall (Ontario, Canada), and a neighbouring Indigenous government, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne. While the agreement represents a partial success and partial failure by conventional public policy and public administration metrics, these evaluations are different when measured against the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) principle of “one-mindedness.” Findings, which were generated using anthropological and qualitative political science methods, suggest that the use of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous frameworks are required to produce accurate and comprehensive evaluations of these agreements and the outcomes that are produced by them.

Dissertations

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (02) ◽  
pp. 461-476
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Philosophy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Doctoral Dissertations ◽  
Science Departments

APSA is pleased to include here the names of individuals who have completed their doctoral dissertations at political science departments in the United States in 2012. The list is based on data collected in the APSA member database and includes information reported by both individuals and departments. Dissertations are listed by fields of interest as labeled by APSA, American politics, comparative politics, international relations, methodology, public administration, political philosophy and theory, public lawand courts, and public policy. (See also, table 1.)

Government Corporations; a Focus of Policy and Administration, I

1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 899-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall E. Dimock
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Corporation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government ◽  
Government Corporations

The government corporation has become a familiar device of public administration all over the world; and yet in some countries, and especially in the United States, uncertainty as to its distinctive purpose and underlying principles seems to grow, rather than to diminish, as the public corporation becomes older and more extensively used. Lack of interest and research cannot be blamed, because in recent years the degree of concentration in this area has probably been relatively as great as in any other sphere of political science. The basic explanation is that administrative formulas and management principles are rarely, if ever, capable of immunization against group pressures and public policy controls, which bend administration to their own designs, sometimes in conformity with what the impartial experts consider sound principle and practice, but just as often in knowing disregard of such considerations and in a determined effort to support their own interests and economic viewpoints.

A Note on “Public Policy”

1973 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 661-664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Vaison
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
Policy Analysts ◽  
Government Body

Normally in political studies the term public policy is construed to encompass the societally binding directives issued by a society's legitimate government. We usually consider government, and only government, as being able to “authoritatively allocate values.” This common conception pervades the literature on government policy-making, so much so that it is hardly questioned by students and practitioners of political science. As this note attempts to demonstrate, some re-thinking seems to be in order. For purposes of analysis in the social sciences, this conceptualization of public policy tends to obscure important realities of modern corporate society and to restrict unnecessarily the study of policy-making. Public policy is held to be public simply and solely because it originates from a duly legitimated government, which in turn is held to have the authority (within specified limits) of formulating and implementing such policy. Public policy is public then, our usual thinking goes, because it is made by a body defined somewhat arbitrarily as “public”: a government or some branch of government. All other policy-making is seen as private; it is not public (and hence to lie essentially beyond the scope of the disciplines of poliitcal science and public administration) because it is duly arrived at by non-governmental bodies. Thus policy analysts lead us to believe that public policy is made only when a government body acts to consider some subject of concern, and that other organizations are not relevant to the study of public policy.

Public Policy Making and Public Policy Analysis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee S. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Policy Analysis ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
The United States ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Public Policy Analysis ◽  
Professional Class ◽  
The Many

This chapter reviews the development and growth of the policy-analytic profession. Historically, government decision makers have often called upon those with expertise to assist them in reaching their decisions. This chapter, however, concerns a new professional class of advisors that began developing during the 1950s in the United States. This new profession assists policy makers in understanding better their alternatives and relevant considerations for choosing among them. From here, the chapter offers some perspective on the research to date that has attempted to assess the effects of the profession—a perspective that emphasizes some important differences across the many types of governmental settings that utilize policy analysis, and the methodological difficulties that assessment efforts confront.

scholarly journals What Determines the Tenure of Cabinet Members? A Comparative Study of Korea and the United States, 1948-2013

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-51
Author(s):  
Sung Sea Young
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Public Administration ◽  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Parliamentary System ◽  
Presidential System ◽  
Cabinet Member

This article analyzes the determinants of the tenure of cabinet members in Korea and the United States from 1948 to 2013. It concentrates on three sets of factors that can affect the tenure of cabinet members: the personal characteristics of the cabinet member, his or her political characteristics, and the characteristics of the president under whom the cabinet member serves. This article finds that some of the personal and political characteristics of the cabinet member affect the length of a minister's tenure in Korea. However, these same characteristics do not affect the length of tenure of cabinet members in the United States, although the characteristics of the president do have an impact on the tenure length of cabinet members in both Korea and the United States. The mix of a presidential system with a parliamentary system in Korea perhaps accounts for difference between the two countries. Therefore, this article raises the possibility that the theories and practices of public administration and political science in the United States may not be applicable in Korea.

The competing meanings of “biopolitics” in political science: Biological and postmodern approaches to politics

2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 2-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurette T. Liesen ◽  
Mary Barbara Walsh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
American Political Science

The term “biopolitics” carries multiple, sometimes competing, meanings in political science. When the term was first used in the United States in the late 1970s, it referred to an emerging subdiscipline that incorporated the theories and data of the life sciences into the study of political behavior and public policy. But by the mid-1990s, biopolitics was adopted by postmodernist scholars at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting who followed Foucault's work in examining the power of the state on individuals. Michel Foucault first used the term biopolitics in the 1970s to denote social and political power over life. Since then, two groups of political scientists have been using this term in very different ways. This paper examines the parallel developments of the term “biopolitics,” how two subdisciplines gained (and one lost) control of the term, and what the future holds for its meaning in political science.

The competing meanings of “biopolitics” in political science: Biological and postmodern approaches to politics

2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 2-15
Author(s):  
Laurette T. Liesen ◽  
Mary Barbara Walsh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Annual Meeting ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
American Political Science

The term “biopolitics” carries multiple, sometimes competing, meanings in political science. When the term was first used in the United States in the late 1970s, it referred to an emerging subdiscipline that incorporated the theories and data of the life sciences into the study of political behavior and public policy. But by the mid-1990s, biopolitics was adopted by postmodernist scholars at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting who followed Foucault's work in examining the power of the state on individuals. Michel Foucault first used the term biopolitics in the 1970s to denote social and political power over life. Since then, two groups of political scientists have been using this term in very different ways. This paper examines the parallel developments of the term “biopolitics,” how two subdisciplines gained (and one lost) control of the term, and what the future holds for its meaning in political science.

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