Public Influence

How can twenty-first-century scholars and other experts engage with wider audiences beyond their peers? In Public Influence, Mira Sucharov walks readers through the ins and outs of op-ed writing and social media engagement. Enlivened with discussions of an array of hot-button issues and sharp analysis of the delicate dynamics of social media, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to harness the opportunities of public engagement in this vital digital age.

Amidst growing dissatisfaction with the state of government performance and an erosion of trust in our political class, Competing for Influence asks: what sort of public service do we want in Australia? Drawing on his experience in both the public and private sectors – and citing academic research across the fields of public sector management, industrial organisation, and corporate strategy – Barry Ferguson argues the case for the careful selection and application of private sector management concepts to the public service, both for their ability to strengthen the public service and inform public policy. These include competitive advantage, competitive positioning, horizontal strategy and organisational design, and innovation as an all-encompassing organisational adjustment mechanism to a changeable environment. But these are not presented as a silver bullet, and Ferguson addresses other approaches to reform, including the need to rebuild the Public Sector Act, the need to reconsider the interface between political and administrative arms of government (and determine what is in the ‘public interest’), and the need for greater independence for the public service within a clarified role. This approach, and its implications for public sector reform, is contrasted with the straitjacket of path dependency that presently constricts the field.

Why policymaking in the United States privileges the rich over the poor Can a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy—but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged. Affluence and Influence definitively explores how political inequality in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how this growing disparity has been shaped by interest groups, parties, and elections. With sharp analysis and an impressive range of data, Martin Gilens looks at thousands of proposed policy changes, and the degree of support for each among poor, middle-class, and affluent Americans. His findings are staggering: when preferences of low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, there is virtually no relationship between policy outcomes and the desires of less advantaged groups. In contrast, affluent Americans' preferences exhibit a substantial relationship with policy outcomes whether their preferences are shared by lower-income groups or not. Gilens shows that representational inequality is spread widely across different policy domains and time periods. Yet Gilens also shows that under specific circumstances the preferences of the middle class and, to a lesser extent, the poor, do seem to matter. In particular, impending elections—especially presidential elections—and an even partisan division in Congress mitigate representational inequality and boost responsiveness to the preferences of the broader public. At a time when economic and political inequality in the United States only continues to rise, Affluence and Influence raises important questions about whether American democracy is truly responding to the needs of all its citizens.

As the demand and necessity for greater international and transnational cooperation increase, the bureaucratic bodies of international organizations are receiving ever more scholarly attention. However, the relevance of International Public Administrations (IPAs) for global policy-making remains neither empirically nor theoretically well understood, and yet little systematic knowledge is available about the influence international bureaucracies may have on policy-making. What makes international bureaucracies influential? Are the sources of their influence on policy-making comparable to that of national public administrations? Is there a need to reflect on other factors than known from the analysis of national bureaucracies or for re-assessing the impact of traditional factors of influence in multilevel constellations? Is there a systematic link between intra-organizational structures and the behavior of the personnel of international bureaucracies and the policy output of their organizations? What are the effects of international bureaucracies’ role for particular policies or policy constellations? The different contributions in this volume address these questions from different conceptual perspectives and focus on different tools of administrative governance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

In Public Influence, political scientist Mira Sucharov walks readers through the ins and outs of op-ed writing and social media engagement.

With contributions from Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael Fullan, Pasi Sahlberg, and Martin Carnoy, Global Education Reform is an eye-opening analysis of national educational reforms and the types of high-achieving systems needed to serve all students equitably. The collection documents the ideologically and educationally distinctive approaches countries around the world have taken to structuring their education systems. Focusing on three pairs of case studies written by internationally acclaimed experts, the book provides a powerful analysis of the different ends of an ideological spectrum----from strong state investments in public education to market-based approaches. An introductory chapter offers an overview of the theories guiding both neoliberal reforms such as those implemented in Chile, Sweden and the United States with efforts to build strong and equitable public education systems as exemplified by Cuba, Finland and Canada. The pairs of case studies that follow examine the historical evolution of education within an individual country and compare and contrast national educational outcomes. A concluding chapter dissects the educational outcomes of the differing economic and governance approaches, as well as the policy implications.

People's perceptions of the attitudes and experiences of mass collectives are an increasingly important force in contemporary political life. In Impersonal Influence, Mutz goes beyond simply providing examples of how impersonal influence matters in the political process to provide a micro-level understanding of why information about distant and impersonal others often influence people's political attitudes and behaviors. Impersonal Influence is worthy of attention both from the standpoint of its impact on contemporary politics, and because of its potential to expand the boundaries of our understanding of social influence processes, and media's relation to them. The book's conclusions do not exonerate media from the effects of inaccurate portrayals of collective experience or opinion, but they suggest that the ways in which people are influenced by these perceptions are in themselves, not so much deleterious to democracy as absolutely necessary to promoting accountability in a large scale society.

The Hollywood Connection argues that celebrity politics may matter in broader settings than previously understood. The questions presented in this collection are compelling and timely; the diverse methodologies and robust theoretical applications show the effects of fictional media on consumer audiences and implications for American politics.