Video about Four Crises of American Democracy
A short video about my book Four Crises of American Democracy has been posted on the University of Missouri’s YouTube channel. Watch the video.
Jun 30
Panel at PMRC 2016 at Aarhus University
I participated in the special session, “Is public management neglecting the state?”, at the 2016 Public Management Research Conference at Aarhus University on June 24. The paper prepared by panelists can be downloaded here.
New ranking for Governance: #2 in PA, #5 in PS
Journal Citation Reports released its ranking data for 2015 on June 13. Governance has moved to #2 ranking in the field of Public Administration, and #5 ranking in Political Science. It is the only journal ranked in the top five in both fields. Its 2014 ranking was #4 in Public Administration and #10 in Political Science.
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.
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.
Pre-order “Four Crises” on Amazon
Four Crises of American Democracy is available for pre-order on Amazon. Details here.
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.
December 1 release date for “Four crises of American democracy”
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.
“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.
“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.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
