Past research has clearly demonstrated that a high level of interorganizational coordination among human services agencies is extremely difficult to achieve and maintain and that the dynamics of interorganizational coordination and conflict are poorly understood. In the interest of better understanding these phenomena, this study attempted to identify measurable differences between networks of agencies that consistently coordinate well and others that consistently experience coordination problems. / The researcher used county level child protection networks as the study cases. Four networks were selected for comparison, two having a reputation for relatively well coordinated child protection services and two networks having a reputation for coordination problems. / The networks were compared based upon community demographics and workload factors, and upon network professional staff responses to survey questions. The survey sought to measure such factors as staff reported knowledge of other organizations, staff reported frequency of such activities as referral exchange, information exchange and joint meetings, as well as staff perceived quality of interprofessional communications, working relationships and services provided. / Using non-parametric, organizational level, descriptive indicators and network analysis comparisons, no patterns of differences between the "good" and "poor" coordination networks were found. Multiple Regression Correlation (MRC) analyses of individual level scores, for each survey question, did reveal a clear pattern of between group differences. These differences were interpreted as suggesting that individual professionals working in "good" coordination child protection networks tend to associate many of the independent variables more closely with the perceived quality of working relationships and perceived quality of services than do "poor" coordination network respondents. / These findings support the idea that long term patterns of "good" coordination are, to a great extent, the result of well established patterns of learned behavior that have been internalized by management and staff of the network. It was suggested that similar survey methods, once standardized, could potentially be used to evaluate the perceived quality of service coordination in other human services networks. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-11, Section: A, page: 4091. / Major Professor: Michael L. Frumkin. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1991.

One of the most important and controversial thinkers to explore the problems of aging and its diverse problems in our modern society, is Daniel Callahan. The central question raised by Callahan is whether the United States has sufficient resources to provide adequate care for the rapidly increasing aging population. Callahan proposes as a matter of government policy, that life extending medical care should be denied to elderly people over the age of seventy. He further argues that length of life is less important than the quality of life and that the government's responsibility is to help people live out their natural life span with no responsibility to actively extend life with any medical intervention or technological procedure. / This author's dissertation explores the current problems in health care, recent public policies which have been formulated in response to the issues involved in health care for the elderly. The issue of ethics and justice is argued, as well as discussion on the many alternative proposals to Callahan's chronological criterion for the allocation of health resources and rationing. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-07, Section: A, page: 2502. / Director: Richard L. Rubenstein. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

This dissertation seeks to understand patterns of systemic corruption that undermine the quality of democracy It presents a theoretical framework to explain the limits of executive accountability in weakly institutionalized presidential democracies, and explores the emergence, organization and transmission of corrupt practices under weak institutions. / Building upon a case study of Argentina, but also introducing the comparative dimension, this research examines how weak formal institutions and informal rules and practices may hinder executive accountability. The study also addresses how, under these conditions, actors sharing illicit goals are able to agree on informal mechanisms of corrupt exchange to circumvent formal norms, and aims to explain the institutionalization of political corruption. / The strength of checks on the executive is explained by focusing on legislators' willingness to defend their prerogatives against encroachment---a function of the actual workings of institutions. Legislators with low levels of institutional commitment do not effectively perform their oversight responsibilities nor invest in strengthening the legislature's capabilities. However, they use oversight mechanisms to informally bargain with the executive for particularistic benefits in exchange for not enforcing sanctions. The executive relies on both formal and informal resources to assert its authority and shrink accountability, neutralizing specialized oversight agencies and paying off legislators. While specialized oversight bodies may produce relevant information, this is hardly consequential if the linkages between different accountability agents do not work properly and legislators do not hold the executive accountable. / This research identifies the informal institutions that uphold the development of corrupt elite cartel networks, and the mechanisms that facilitate their reproduction by ensuring the impunity of corrupt officials. Actors that share illicit goals craft informal mechanisms that provide critical resources (such as iteration and reputation) to overcome the credible-commitment problems that weak institutions produce. The root causes of impunity arise from the enforcement of an informal rule that allows corruption, which shapes incentives facing accountability agents in charge of punishing corrupt practices through criminal sanctions. Among other means, corrupt practices are transmitted through episodes of rule-breaking and informal sanction. By punishing those who attempt to enforce the law, while protecting those who act within the informal rule, actors indicate the costs of noncompliance and discourage others from taking these actions. Building on this analysis, the dissertation advances recommendations for anticorruption policy reform in new democracies.

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was enacted amid much controversy and was considered by many observers to mark a major change in the direction of U.S. bankruptcy policy. The dissertation uses the law's passage as a vehicle to develop an explicit model of the integrated role of Congress, issue networks, and the courts in making policy. Following Baumgartner and Jones (1993), Sabatier (1988), and others, the dissertation tracks bankruptcy policymaking and implementation over a seventy-five year period to demonstrate that policy is made in three distinct venues: Congress; a policy community made up of lawyers, bankruptcy judges, and members of academia; and the courts. Agenda setting theory explains why policymaking authority shifts between traditionally understood venues like Congress to non-traditional ones like the courts and the policy community. The community monopolized bankruptcy policymaking from the 1930s until the mid-1990s. Its hold on policymaking was broken when pro-creditor forces successfully characterized proposed reforms as fitting within a broader congressional agenda of retrenchment in social welfare policy in favor of laws promoting particular notions of personal responsibility. / The dissertation identifies the key role of bankruptcy judges in the three-part structure: they make policy not only in their traditional juridical capacities, but also as active entrepreneurs and advocates for legislative reforms as part of the policy community. The inclusion of courts in the model places the dissertation squarely in the emerging area of interbranch scholarship. Moreover, it extends existing studies in that field through its application of agenda setting and policy implementation scholarship. The model suggests the differing policy image increases the likelihood that the new laws will not be faithfully implemented. The dissertation includes a proposal for testing its hypothesis.

As the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the United States government remains undecided as to how it should proceed against those individuals believed to be responsible for the terrorist attacks. Both the Bush and Obama administrations, as well as Congress, have made policy announcements, promulgated Executive Orders and passed legislation that would allow for the prosecution of these individuals in either an Article III court (a criminal trial in federal district court) or before a military commission, or determine whether they should remain in military detention without trial for the duration of hostilities against al Qaeda and those entities responsible for 9/11. To this day, however, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 plot, remains in U.S. military custody, the future of legal proceedings against him no more certain than they were in 2003, the year he was first detained by U.S. forces. Similarly, should Osama bin Laden or another high level al Qaeda leader be captured in the near future, no policy currently exists that would definitively determine which, if any, judicial forum is most appropriate for the disposition of their case. The lack of a coherent analytical framework that allows for consistent forum determinations when assessing the merits of a case against an overseas terrorist suspect has led to inconsistent decision-making and has fostered a growing credibility gap in U.S. counterterrorism policy. By applying a set of proposed criteria to individual cases, it is possible for policymakers to assess whether an Article III prosecution should be pursued in a given case or whether application of the criteria mitigates toward an alternative disposition, such as military commission or preventive detention.

With panel data from 1981 to 2008 covering 105 countries, this paper investigates the impact of explicit deposit insurance generosity on financial systemic risk. The deposit insurance generosity is measured by the effective deposit coverage limit to GDP per capita ratio. While preliminary results from basic regressions suggest that the correlation between deposit coverage generosity and systemic risk might be U-shaped---an appropriate increase in coverage generosity can reduce systemic risk by building public confidence in the banking system, but may increase systemic risk when policies become too generous, because of moral hazard---this is yet to be confirmed by robust and more appropriate probit analysis. This preliminary finding suggests that the tipping points of effective coverage ratio where explicit deposit insurance systems start to increase systemic risk vary by country groups, and by whether time-fixed effect is controlled for. Further research is needed for confirming the correlation between coverage generosity and systemic risk.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Steven Aragon. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-195) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: B, page: 3830. Adviser: Nicole E. Allen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-92) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> The tenets of representative bureaucracy suggest that the composition of the bureaucracy should mirror the people it serves including women in order to influence the name, scope, and implementation of public policies. Women account for the largest segment of the workforce and have attained more education and advanced education than men. Although there have been steady increases in executive leadership positions, management positions, professional and technical positions in most occupations, women are still underrepresented in mid-to-upper management in male-dominated occupations. When women are under-represented in mid-to-upper levels of management in government, there are implications regarding representative bureaucracy. </p><p> Through the use of qualitative methods, this study examined the career progression experiences of women who were successful in reaching mid-to-upper levels of management in male-dominated occupations in state government. Specifically, the study explored how women perceive various occupational factors including their rates of participation, experiences, gender, roles within the bureaucracy, interactions with their coworkers, leaders and organizational policies, personal influence, and decision-making abilities. </p><p> The findings revealed that women experience various barriers to career progression in male-dominated occupations, but find mechanisms to navigate obstacles imposed by the negative consequences of tokenism. The findings indicate that although women have been successful in reaching mid-to-upper level management in male-dominated occupations, they do so in institutions, regional, district, field or offices with fewer overall employees where they have less opportunity to have influence on overall agency-wide policy decisions. The decision-making power is limited to implementation strategies of agency-wide policies within their smaller domains or geographical area of responsibility.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines the intergenerational effects of maternal early health, the intergenerational effects of maternal education and the distributional effects of school size. </p><p> Chapter 1 is an introduction that summarizes the contributions made in this dissertation. Chapter 2 examines a new question with important implications: Does a mother's early health affect her child's human capital development? My coauthor and I use two extremely different and established methodologies to identify variation in mothers' early health: variation in early life disease environment and variation in early life economic environment. We connect children to the environments experienced by their mothers using the state, month and year of maternal birth that appears on each child's birth record. To identify children's outcomes later in life, we connect their birth records to their 3^rd through 10^th grade school records using a high quality algorithm that relies on first and last names, exact dates of birth and social security numbers. We find that a one standard deviation improvement in maternal early health improves 10^th grade test performance in the following generation by .07 to .08 standard deviations. </p><p> Chapter 3 examines the intergenerational effects of maternal education. My coauthor and I use variation in compulsory schooling laws across states and over time to identify exogenous variation in maternal education; we estimate local average treatment effects using Two-Stage Least Squares instrumental variables estimations. We connect children to the environments experienced by their mothers using the state, month and year of maternal birth that appears on each child's birth record. To identify children's outcomes later in life, we connect their birth records to their 3^rd through 10^th grade school records using a high quality algorithm that relies on first and last names, exact dates of birth and social security numbers. We find an additional year of maternal education improves 3^rd grade test performance in the following generation by .31 standard deviations on average and that this relationship is driven by children born to white mothers. </p><p> Chapter 4 uses state-wide, student-level data from Illinois to examine the distributional effects of school size. I apply two established strategies to identify variation in school size; I use population-level panels of data to identify year-to-year changes in enrollment within schools and I exploit variation induced by school openings. I find smaller schools simultaneously improve average ACT achievement in 11^th grade and close achievement gaps between more and less advantaged students. Specifically, a 20 percent decrease in school size improves students' ACT performance by 1 percent on average and improves ACT performance by 1.5 percent on average for African American students that receive free or reduced price lunch.</p>