This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The key to sustained and equitable development in Latin America is high quality education for all. However, coalitions favoring quality reforms in education are usually weak because parents are dispersed, business is not interested, and much of the middle class has exited public education. In Routes to Reform, Ben Ross Schneider examines education policy throughout Latin America to show that reforms to improve learning--especially making teacher careers more meritocratic and less political--are possible. Several Andean countries and state governments in Brazil achieved notable reform since 2000, though on markedly different trajectories. Although rare, the first bottom-up route to reform was electoral. The second route was more top-down and technocratic, with little support from voters or civil society. Ultimately, by framing education policy in a much broader comparative perspective, Schneider demonstrates that contrary to much established theory, reform outcomes in Latin America depended less on institutions and broad coalitions, but rather--due to the emptiness of the education policy space--on more micro factors like civil society organizations, teacher unions, policy networks, and technocrats.

This book examines the conditions under which new democracies succeed or fail in establishing firm and lasting civilian control of the military. David Kuehn and Aurel Croissant introduce a multi-dimensional conceptual framework to evaluate the degree of civilian control in new democracies and to trace developments over time. The theory of civilian control in new democracies that they propose integrates rationalist, structuralist, and institutionalist arguments into acoherent model to explain when, how, and through which causal mechanism new democracies succeed or fail in establishing and sustaining civilian control over the military. This theory is tested on an original dataset on civilian control over the military in 66 countries that have made the transitionfrom authoritarian to democratic rule at least once in the period from 1974 to 2010. The study traces the effects of different degrees of civilian control on the survival and democratic quality of third wave democracies, combining large-N statistical analyses with detailed case study narratives of several countries. The book establishes a comprehensive understanding of the conditions and processes under which third wave democracies succeeded or failed in establishing firm and lasting civiliancontrol of the military-and its consequences for the survival and quality of the new democratic structures, processes, and practices.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The key to sustained and equitable development in Latin America is high quality education for all. However, coalitions favoring quality reforms in education are usually weak because parents are dispersed, business is not interested, and much of the middle class has exited public education. In Routes to Reform, Ben Ross Schneider examines education policy throughout Latin America to show that reforms to improve learning--especially making teacher careers more meritocratic and less political--are possible. Several Andean countries and state governments in Brazil achieved notable reform since 2000, though on markedly different trajectories. Although rare, the first bottom-up route to reform was electoral. The second route was more top-down and technocratic, with little support from voters or civil society. Ultimately, by framing education policy in a much broader comparative perspective, Schneider demonstrates that contrary to much established theory, reform outcomes in Latin America depended less on institutions and broad coalitions, but rather--due to the emptiness of the education policy space--on more micro factors like civil society organizations, teacher unions, policy networks, and technocrats.

"Compared to other policy areas like health care, education is a relatively empty policy area because the beneficiaries--students and families, and business--are not politically active or relevant. This emptiness allows reform opponents like teacher unions and clientelist politicians to have greater impact, as well as pro-reform groups like civil society, policy networks and technocrats. Governments that managed to overhaul teacher careers took either a bottom-up electoral route (Chile and Ecuador) or a top-down technocratic route (Peru and Colombia). In other cases, machine unions (Mexico) or clientelist politicians (state of Rio de Janeiro) overturned career reforms."--

Deregulation, privatization and marketization have become the bywords for the reforms and debates surrounding the public sector. This major book is unique in its comparative analysis of the reform experience in Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Leading experts identify a number of key factors to systematically explain the similarities and differences, map common problems and together reflect on the future shape of the public sector, exploring significant themes in a lively and accessible way.

Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but children don't learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented. These achievement deficiencies reveal gaps in capabilities, and weaknesses in the process of building state capability. This book addresses these weaknesses and gaps. It starts by providing evidence of the capability shortfalls that currently exist in many countries, showing that many governments lack basic capacities even after decades of reforms and capacity building efforts. The book then analyses this evidence, identifying capability traps that hold many governments back - particularly related to isomorphic mimicry (where governments copy best practice solutions from other countries that make them look more capable even if they are not more capable) and premature load bearing (where governments adopt new mechanisms that they cannot actually make work, given weak extant capacities). The book then describes a process that governments can use to escape these capability traps. Called PDIA (problem driven iterative adaptation), this process empowers people working in governments to find and fit solutions to the problems they face. The discussion about this process is structured in a practical manner so that readers can actually apply tools and ideas to the capability challenges they face in their own contexts. These applications will help readers devise policies and reforms that have more impact than those of the past.

This book examines several major reforms in Japan - in the postal business, transportation, telecommunications and technology - and evaluates the impact of these changes since the early 1980s. Conceptually, the book presents the dual state as being a fundamental feature of the Japanese political economy that determines government reform dynamics.