Alasdair S. Roberts

May 18

New course description for Law and Public Policy

I’ve updated the course description for LAW5724, Law and Public Policy, which will be offered in the MU School of Law in Spring 2017:

This course provides students with a framework for making decisions about the policies that governments should adopt to respond to important public problems. It takes an interdisciplinary perspective and argues that decision-makers manage four kinds of risk: litigation risk, political risk, policy risk and implementation risk. Students are introduced to techniques for identifying and minimizing such risks, and apply these techniques to real-world policy problems. Guest speakers also provide a perspective on the challenges of policy choice.

May 14

Large Forces and IT

The introduction to a symposium in the current issue of the Journal of Public Affairs Education makes reference to my monograph, Large Forces. Read the introduction. Large Forces can be obtained in electronic and print format on Amazon.

Apr 22

Pre-order “Four Crises” on Amazon

Four Crises of American Democracy is available for pre-order on Amazon. Details here.

Mar 19

Debate on open government

I was pleased to help with hosting a debate on open government at the Reynolds Journalism Institute on March 15. Video of the debate here.

Mar 3

December 1 release date for “Four crises of American democracy”

Screen Shot 2016-03-17 at 5.20.38 PM My book manuscript Four Crises of American Democracy has been accepted by Oxford University Press and will shortly be on its way to production. The anticipated release date is December 1. Details on the OUP website here.

Feb 23

“Large Forces” discussed in ARPA

My work on Large Forces is discussed in an article just published in the American Review of Public Administration. “But equally in need of buttressing [in American public administration] are the macrodynamic foundations of public administration,” write Robert Durant and David Rosenbloom. “As Alasdair Roberts has argued, although public administration is typically conceived today as a battle for ascendancy between Dwight Waldo and Herbert Simon, a third—largely abandoned—tradition studying the macrodynamics of public administration existed in the work of Leonard D. White. White’s four-volume study of the evolution of administration in the United States placed each administrative era’s focus within a larger ‘macrodynamic’ cultural, economic, technological, philosophical, and political context, much as earlier scholars had done.” Read the article.

Feb 22

“Large Forces” discussed in JPART

Professor Per Laegreid discusses my monograph Large Forces in an article just published by JPART: “There is a need for public administration to go back to its roots to address the big issues that contemporary political systems have to deal with such as climate change, migration, demographic and technological changes, and security. We have to go beyond the internal management problems and address the wicked issues that societies are currently facing in explaining the path of administration. This is an issue throughout public administration as a discipline.” Go to the article.

Feb 5

Netivist discusses LSE talk

Screen Shot 2016-02-05 at 10.37.04 AM The website Netivist.org comments on my February 4 talk at the London School of Economics: link here.

Jan 24

Eight questions that Public Management can’t answer

Here is a working list of critical questions in Public Administration that Public Management, as a domain of research, generally does not ask and cannot answer. A first cut — and open for comments below! (This is tied to the panel discussion on Public Management and the State at the upcoming PMRA conference. A set of short papers for this panel will be published by Governance in April and has informed this list.) Read more

Jan 16

Talk at LSE on February 4

Screen Shot 2016-01-16 at 4.47.14 PM I’ll be giving a talk at the London School of Economics on February 4 as part of the London public policy seminar series. Details here. The talk will be related to this project on public management and the state.