Elevating Trust In Local Government

More than ever before, citizens are looking for leaders at all levels of government that they can trust to genuinely represent their aspirations for their communities. Perhaps there is no better environment for this desire to be fulfilled than at the most local level. The process of building that trust starts with taking the time to fully understand what residents desire from their local government and then putting an effective plan into action that delivers on those expectations. Community-based strategic planning is the process of moving from resident aspirations to an actionable plan that local government leaders can work to execute. In this book, Rick Davis and Dan Griffiths lay out their combined decades of experience with local government to outline the ins and outs of a community-based approach to strategic planning. This isn't a book about what might work in theory. Instead, it outlines a practical approach that has been employed by local governments throughout the world. Using stories and examples from real communities where they have worked, Rick and Dan offer a systematic process that can be applied by cities, towns, counties, school districts, and other municipal governments. Whether a municipal manager, elected official, or even an involved citizen, this book will serve as a guide for developing a strategic plan for your community.

Don’t permit your organization to be lulled into complacency after recovering from a tough recession. Explore what’s necessary to improve the performance of your organization, including the development of leaders at all levels who will use their full capabilities to boost collective results. The High-Performance Organization Model identifies the steps needed to diagnose what will be required to achieve the strategic outcomes you define as success. It shows which levers will move the organization in the direction you decide is critical. This book contains more than just theory; here you’ll find case studies of local governments—demonstrating how Commonwealth Centers for High-Performance Organizations’ (CCHPO) model has been applied in the past to improve performance. You will learn how employees emerged as leaders to identify and tackle problems, developed the tools needed, and organized their thoughts to work through solutions which could be applied effectively without the traditional bureaucratic hassle. These examples show how a supportive, values-based work culture can be cultivated to expand thinking power by increasing discretionary effort from all levels of the organization. Engaged employees can be leaders who refocus your services, improve your processes, save money, and solve problems. Your organization can benefit from the full range of talents, skills, and abilities that often lie untapped, but become accessible through the principles of the High-Performance Organization model. This model will be an indispensable tool for any person looking to make significant improvements throughout their organization. The detailed case studies and easy-to-follow model created by the Commonwealth Center for High-Performance Organizations make for a pleasantly informative guide that will give a special advantage to readers who implement their standards.

Confidence in American government has been declining for three decades. Leading Harvard scholars here explore the roots of this mistrust by examining the government's current scope, its actual performance, citizens' perceptions of its performance, and explanations that have been offered for the decline of trust.

American government is in the midst of a reputation crisis. An overwhelming majority of citizens—Republicans and Democrats alike—hold negative perceptions of the government and believe it is wasteful, inefficient, and doing a generally poor job managing public programs and providing public services. When social problems arise, Americans are therefore skeptical that the government has the ability to respond effectively. It’s a serious problem, argues Amy E. Lerman, and it will not be a simple one to fix. With Good Enough for Government Work, Lerman uses surveys, experiments, and public opinion data to argue persuasively that the reputation of government is itself an impediment to government’s ability to achieve the common good. In addition to improving its efficiency and effectiveness, government therefore has an equally critical task: countering the belief that the public sector is mired in incompetence. Lerman takes readers through the main challenges. Negative perceptions are highly resistant to change, she shows, because we tend to perceive the world in a way that confirms our negative stereotypes of government—even in the face of new information. Those who hold particularly negative perceptions also begin to “opt out” in favor of private alternatives, such as sending their children to private schools, living in gated communities, and refusing to participate in public health insurance programs. When sufficient numbers of people opt out of public services, the result can be a decline in the objective quality of public provision. In this way, citizens’ beliefs about government can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with consequences for all. Lerman concludes with practical solutions for how the government might improve its reputation and roll back current efforts to eliminate or privatize even some of the most critical public services.

Trust is a crucial facet of social functioning that feeds into our relationships with individuals, groups, and organizations. The Psychology of Interpersonal Trust: Theory and Research examines existing theories, frameworks, and models of trust as well as the methods and designs for examining it. To fully examine how interpersonal trust impacts our lives, Rotenberg reviews the many essential topics trust relates to, including close relationships, trust games, behavioural trust, and trust development. Designed to encourage researchers to recognize the links between different approaches to trust, this book begins with an overview of the different approaches to interpersonal trust and a description of the methods used to investigate it. Following on from this, each chapter introduces a new subtopic or context, including lying, adjustment, socialization, social media, politics, and health. Each subtopic begins with a short monologue (to provide a personal perspective) and covers basic theory and research. Rotenberg’s applied focus demonstrates the relevance of interpersonal trust and highlights the issues and problems people face in contemporary society. This is essential reading for students, researchers, and academics in social psychology, especially those with a specific interest in the concept of trust.

After 9/11, research on the perceived threat of terrorism moved in several directions. Some scholars examined the social construction of terrorism, scrutinizing the political rhetoric and media coverage associated with the threat. Other researchers investigated the public’s elevated worries about terrorism and their effect on public opinion, while still other analysts elucidated the post-9/11 changes in U.S. foreign and domestic policies. In Freaking Out: A Decade of Living with Terrorism, Joshua Woods unites these areas of research, interweaving the sociology and psychology of terrorism, to create a broader and more compelling explanation of how the attacks on 9/11 have changed American society. Offering a concise review of the shifting policy arena in the post-9/11 era, Woods chronicles not only major U.S. government actions, such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also less visible changes, such as shifts in immigration policy and the use and abuse of Homeland Security funding by state and local governments. Investigating the public’s response to terrorism, Woods examines the link between media coverage of terrorism and public perceptions of the threat, demonstrating how some news coverage elevates people’s worries more than others. The events of 9/11 influenced the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of public officials, members of the press, and ordinary people. The reactions of these groups are deeply interrelated, but the study of them has remained isolated and compartmentalized across several academic disciplines until now. Demonstrating the virtue of multidisciplinary synthesis, this book advances the growing field of terrorism studies in new directions.

Originally published in 1973, this book is a review of the established literature on local government and the mainstream studies of public policy in political science.