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Related programs & projects | Recent publications | Archives | Taubman Center Annual Report Article Index Several programs and projects affiliated with the Taubman Center as well as some Taubman affiliates are studying efforts to make government more responsive and effective. Recent projects include studies of participatory democracy, performance-based management, public-sector use of the Internet and information technology, and public collection and dissemination of information as a way to improve environmental quality, public health and working conditions. Center faculty and affiliates have also studied the flow of funds between the states and the federal government, the use of project-based finance, and the privatization and regulation of infrastructure and other government services. Making Participatory Democracy Work
More information | Related article in the 2004 Taubman Center Report The Public Role of Political Science An important but underappreciated part of the professional responsibility of political scientists is to deliberate with fellow citizens about their political concerns, according to Robert D. Putnam, director of the Taubman Center’s Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America. In an address he delivered at the end of his term as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) that was later printed in Perspectives on Politics, Putnam lamented that many of his colleagues see scientific rigor and civic involvement as mutually exclusive. He argued that both perspectives are important and urged political scientists to use both tools in helping further public discussions on key issues, such as declining public trust in government. More information | Related article in the 2004 Taubman Center Report Sprawl, Politics, and Civic Engagement Advocates of smart growth and other New Urbanist policies intended to curb urban sprawl reason that a place that looks and feels like a community and promotes face-to-face interaction should produce citizens who are more engaged in civic and political life. Thad Williamson, a Taubman doctoral fellow, reports mixed results from research intended to test that hypothesis. He examined data from both the U.S. Census and the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey—an initiative spearheaded by the Taubman Center’s Saguaro Seminar that asked nearly 30,000 people in over 40 localities detailed questions about their civic and political activities and views. Williamson found that sprawl has little impact on voting but is linked to lower participation in more demanding kinds of political activity. However, residents of low-density suburbs actually reveal higher levels of social trust. These results, he says, suggest that New Urbanists must consider whether their goal is to foster communities marked by robust political engagement—which implies social and political conflict—or to encourage tranquility and trust. Related article in the 2004 Taubman Center Report The Technology of Justice: DNA and the Criminal Justice System
More information | Related article in the 2004 Taubman Center Report E-Government: Promises and Realities
More information | Related article in the 2004 Taubman Center Report Improving Prisoner Reentry Programs Although thousands of former prisoners now return to mostly low-income urban neighborhoods every year, little research has investigated the challenge of implementing effective reentry programs, says Anne Morrison Piehl, associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School and a Taubman faculty affiliate. In a new working paper, Piehl and two colleagues use the Offender Reentry Program at the Suffolk County House of Correction in Boston to illustrate both the promise of well-designed prisoner reentry programs and the challenges of carrying them out.
Pay-for-Performance Systems Prompt More Questions than Answers
More information on The Behn Report The ABCs of Business Leadership
More information | Related article in the 2004 Taubman Center Report Power Plays: Dispelling the Myth of Home Rule
More information | Related article in the 2004 Taubman Center Report Parents, Choice, and the No Child Left Behind Act Why are so few parents taking advantage of school choice, a key provision of the federal No Child Left Behind Act? To answer that question, William Howell, an assistant professor of government at Harvard and deputy director of the Taubman Center’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, recently conducted a first-of-its kind survey of 1,000 parents in Massachusetts and found that information on school choice is simply not reaching the parents who need it most. More information | Related article in the 2004 Taubman Center Report School District Consolidation and Student Outcomes From 1930 to 1970 the nation saw the number of school districts contract dramatically, from 130,000 to just 16,000, while the average size of schools grew fivefold. Those advocating such consolidations argued they would improve the quality of schools but no one has closely studied whether this has been the case. In a paper presented at a conference on school boards convened by the Taubman Center’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), Christopher Berry, a PEPG postdoctoral fellow, found that large district size had a modest positive impact on students’ future earnings but that large schools had an even larger negative impact on earnings. More information | Related article in the 2004 Taubman Center Report Beyond Bowling Alone: Strategies for Restoring American Communities
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Each month in every neighborhood in Chicago, residents, police officers, teachers, and community groups gather to deliberate on how to improve their schools and make their streets safer. In Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy, recently published by Princeton University Press, Archon Fung, assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School and a Taubman faculty affiliate, shows how Chicago's police department and school system have become uniquely democratic urban institutions. Offering neighborhood case studies and citing citywide data, Fung explores how participatory democracy—properly designed and implemented—can make public agencies fairer and more effective, and spark creative problem solving and social change. 
DNA databases created for law enforcement may soon expand to include millions of individuals not convicted of any crime—used for everything from determining paternity to assessing predisposition to certain diseases and behaviors. In DNA and the Criminal Justice System (MIT Press, 2004), edited by David Lazer, associate director of the Taubman Center’s National Center for Digital Governance and recently published by Princeton University Press, authors debate the ethical, procedural, and economic challenges posed by the use of DNA by U.S. courts. After laying historical, legal, and scientific groundwork, the authors—including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer—consider who controls DNA databases, and weigh their promise to recalibrate the balance between collective security and individual freedom. 
Although information technologies promise to dramatically improve governance and civic affairs, they may also further surveillance, control, and disinformation more than, according to Jane Fountain, associate professor of public policy and director of the Taubman Center’s National Center for Digital Government. In an essay that appears in the Encyclopedia of Community (Berkshire Publishing Group), Fountain notes that some federal agencies and state and local governments are developing impressive web portals designed to respond to citizens’ needs. However, she warns, much political information on the Web is of murky origin, and the Internet has the potential to enhance the power of governments and wealthy interests at the expense of private citizens. 
The growing trend of rewarding the best performers in public agencies with bonuses or raises makes intuitive sense as a motivational tool. However, creating a pay-for-performance system that actually exerts the desired effect is very difficult, maintains Robert D. Behn, a Taubman faculty affiliate, in the January 2004 issue of "The Behn Report," a publication he produces on the issues, challenges, and opportunities in leadership, governance, and performance in public agencies.
The success of the Artery Business Committee—a group formed by the CEOs of major Boston employers and property owners to ensure that the city functioned during the decade-long Big Dig project and was well-served by the finished project—offers important lessons about the future of business leadership in local affairs, according to David Luberoff, who recently left his job as associate director of the Taubman Center to become executive director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. In a working paper published by the Rappaport Institute, Luberoff describes the people and motives driving the creation of ABC, analyzes the reasons for its success, and speculates on the lessons its record offers for civic leadership at a time when many once locally owned entities are becoming part of multinational firms.
Local officials in Massachusetts regularly invoke "home rule"—the legal power each locality has to direct its own destiny—as the reason they cannot solve problems that transcend municipal boundaries, such as traffic congestion and affordable housing. But in a new study recently published by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, Harvard law professors David J. Barron and Gerald E. Frug, who are also Taubman faculty affiliates, and law student Rick T. Su dispute that view. Drawing on interviews with officials in 101 Massachusetts towns and cities, they show that in fact localities have little discretion over taxes, fees, and borrowing, and only fragmented control over public schools. Meanwhile the state imposes numerous unfunded mandates and may overrule local decisions at any time. The true obstacle to regionalism, these authors contend, may not be too much home rule but too little. Barron and Frug are following up on this report with a Rappaport/Taubman study comparing Boston’s powers with those of other large U.S. cities.
In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam, a Taubman faculty affiliate who directs the center's Saguaro Seminar, described a 30-year decline in America's social institutions. The book ended with the hope that new forms of social connection might be invented in order to revive our communities. In Better Together: Restoring the American Community, recently published by Simon & Schuster, Putnam and longtime civic activist Lewis Feldstein describe some of the diverse locations and most compelling ways in which civic renewal is taking place today. In response to civic crises and local problems, they say, hardworking, committed people are reweaving the social fabric all across America, often in innovative ways that may turn out to be appropriate for the twenty-first century.