Public Policy Commons^™

The Dynamic Returns Of Descriptive Representation: A Study Of Race, Politics And Policy In Urban Governments, Stephanie Taylor Hawke

Dissertations and Theses

In 2015, 78% of Detroit's city council was African American--the highest percentage in the country. For decades, there had been an assumption in the academic and activist fields that a legislative body with such a high percentage of minority presence would produce incredible policy gains for that group (i.e. African American Detroiters). Instead, the council passed no Black racial policy. In a city where there were ostensibly no barriers for passing racial policy -- there were no subsequent policy gains. Though running contrary to existing scholarship, Detroit is not an anomaly; it is an indicator of the larger trend.

Using …

An Implementation Analysis Of The Water Resources Development Act Of 1986, James Joseph Rich

Dissertations and Theses

Implementation research, an area once largely ignored in favor of policy design and impact assessment, now constitutes a significant portion of the policy analysis literature. One of the key issues addressed by the theory building portion of that literature is the necessity of precisely identifying implementation variables, conditions, or actions that measurably contribute to the success or failure of implementation efforts over a broad range of policies and programs, and to then suggest some order of significance. In order to test the validity of a variable set proposed by the literature, a multivariate implementation model was employed as the basis …