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Articles 1 - 11 of 11

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Isn’T There A Better Way To Nominate Presidential Candidates?, Elaine Kamarck Feb 2024

Isn’T There A Better Way To Nominate Presidential Candidates?, Elaine Kamarck

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

This lecture examines why every four years the major political parties undertake a drawn-out, confusing series of primaries, caucuses, and conventions to determine their presidential nominees. Over the years, a number of rational and more orderly ways to select presidential nominees have been proposed but none of these ideas have been adopted. Brookings Institution scholar Elaine Kamarck, who has written extensively on the topic and served as a presidential and presidential campaign advisor, addresses these topics and more.


House Oversight Of The Executive Branch In The 116th Congress, Molly Reynolds Oct 2019

House Oversight Of The Executive Branch In The 116th Congress, Molly Reynolds

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

As part of the Brookings Scholar Lecture Series, Brookings Mountain West presents a lecture titled "House Oversight of the Executive Branch in the 116th Congress" by Brookings Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, Molly Reynolds. Democrats promised to undertake oversight of President Trump and the executive branch. This lecture answers questions about the ability of the House of Representatives to fulfill one of Congress’s duties during the Trump administration and previews whether and how this oversight activity may impact the 2020 elections.


How The Mountain West States Voted In 2016: A Post-Election Analysis Of Trends, Demographics, And Politics In America’S New Swing Region, William E. Brown, Robert E. Lang, David Damore, Benoy Jacob, Michael Green Nov 2016

How The Mountain West States Voted In 2016: A Post-Election Analysis Of Trends, Demographics, And Politics In America’S New Swing Region, William E. Brown, Robert E. Lang, David Damore, Benoy Jacob, Michael Green

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

Brookings Mountain West and the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs hosted a panel of experts in state and regional politics and history to examine election returns and exit polling and provide a first-read of the 2016 election. The Mountain West is now one of the nation’s most contested political regions. Its population growth and ever-shifting demographics make the region harder to predict and most susceptible to political swings. Five states in the Southern Mountain West – Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah – now hold more electoral votes than all individual states except Texas and California. In our current …


Public Procurement: The Achilles Heel Of Good Governance, Jeffrey Gutman Apr 2015

Public Procurement: The Achilles Heel Of Good Governance, Jeffrey Gutman

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

Development aid is defined as the financial aid given by governments and agencies to support the economic, environmental, social, and political needs of developing countries. With the government acquisition of goods, civil works, and services representing between 15-20 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for most countries, the value of procurement policy and its application are very high. Recent high profile cases in the news, ranging from the military purchase of clothing from foreign sources that raise human rights issues, to the criticism of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act website, to a range of corruption cases around the …


Fixing The U.S. Congress By Embracing Earmarks, John Hudak Oct 2014

Fixing The U.S. Congress By Embracing Earmarks, John Hudak

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

Too often, earmarks, pork barrel politics, and other types of federal spending are seen as a problem in American politics. Nothing could be further from the truth. Congress’ abandonment of earmarks, the deconstruction of the appropriations process, and the breakdown in regular order in the House and Senate has coincided with a period of intense gridlock. For decades, pork greased the wheels of the legislative process, ensuring legislators could fund local needs in exchange for support on key legislation. Returning to the politics of pork offers a possible pathway to fixing a broken legislative process and meeting mounting public needs …


Grit And Dreams: Character Strengths, Social Mobility, And The American Dream, Richard Reeves Sep 2014

Grit And Dreams: Character Strengths, Social Mobility, And The American Dream, Richard Reeves

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

The issue of social mobility is at the forefront of current political debate. President Obama has described it as ‘the defining challenge of our times.’ Paul Ryan says that the ‘engines of upward mobility have stalled.’ Most approaches to restoring the American dream focus on institutions: schools, companies, and colleges. There is growing evidence that individual character strengths -- especially grit (the capacity to stick with a task or a journey), and prudence (valuing future outcomes) - matter just as much as more tangible factors. Blending history, philosophy, and economics, in this public lecture I will argue that restoring the …


Overcoming Legislative Gridlock In The U.S. Congress: How Procedural Rules Affect Legislative Obstructionism, Molly Jackman Oct 2013

Overcoming Legislative Gridlock In The U.S. Congress: How Procedural Rules Affect Legislative Obstructionism, Molly Jackman

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

More than 90 percent of bills introduced in the U.S. House never make it to a floor vote, and far fewer are enacted into law. Since legislative gridlock is much more common than legislative action, in order to understand policy outcomes, it is critical to know why bills are obstructed. Gridlock occurs when a legislator (or group of legislators) wants to block a bill, and has the procedural right to do so. Using new data on the procedural rules in the U.S. states, this presentation will identify the chambers in which legislators can block bills from the legislative agenda. Then, …


Capitalizing In The Nation’S Capital: Matching State And Regional Resources To Administration Funding Priorities, John Hudak Mar 2013

Capitalizing In The Nation’S Capital: Matching State And Regional Resources To Administration Funding Priorities, John Hudak

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

This presentation explores the relationship between the funding and policy priorities established by presidential administrations and the financial resources provided to individual states and regions. Information gathered from a newly compiled database of all federal project grants from 1996-2008 helps illuminate the distribution of money across the 50 states. These data are complemented by field research in federal and state bureaucracies. Would you be surprised to learn that the executive branch delivers more money and grants to swing states than all other states? Furthermore, the proximity of a presidential election further enhances this preference to deliver funds to swing states. …


The Next Swing Region: Reapportionment And Redistricting In The Intermountain West, David F. Damore Sep 2011

The Next Swing Region: Reapportionment And Redistricting In The Intermountain West, David F. Damore

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

During the first decade of the 21st century no region in the nation experienced the political and demographic changes that occurred in the Intermountain West region, including the states of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. These states grew at unprecedented levels and are now demographically more diverse and increasingly urbanized. This presentation will explore the status of redistricting and reapportionment efforts, and the implications for state and national politics.


The Housing Market 'Reset' And The Future Of American Housing Policy, Alan Mallach Oct 2010

The Housing Market 'Reset' And The Future Of American Housing Policy, Alan Mallach

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

The foreclosure crisis and the collapse in housing prices that have engulfed much of the United States are fundamentally changing the ways in which the American housing market works, challenging many of the assumptions about the role of housing and the housing market that we have held for the past decades. In my lecture, I will discuss how and why those changes are taking place and how they vary across the United States and explore what they mean for American housing policy in the future, and how they are making us reconsider how we think about home ownership, rental housing, …


Deficits And Disaster, Ron Haskins Sep 2010

Deficits And Disaster, Ron Haskins

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

The nation’s deficit path is unsustainable. The public debt is likely to increase by $1 trillion per year until 2020, and then increase at an ever increasing rate after that. Far from helping the nation address its exploding deficit, the last two administrations and every congress since 2000 have taken actions that have intensified the problem. It is time for Americans to face the high probability that due most fundamentally to their continuing demand for high spending and low taxes, sometime in the next decade or so one or more catastrophes will strike America. This presentation will lay out the …