IMF blog reviews “Politics of Fiscal Squeeze”
An IMF blog features a review of “The Politics of Fiscal Squeeze,” an edited volume that includes my chapter on the United States’ financial difficulties in 1837-1848.
Jan 22
End of Protest now $1.99 on Amazon, intro on Medium
The introduction to The End of Protest can now be read on Medium. Cornell University Press has reduced the price on Amazon to $1.99.
New paper: why the nation-state is not dead yet
I’ve just posted a short paper on SSRN, “The Nation-State: Not Dead Yet.” It marks twenty years since the publication of several influential books (by Kenichi Ohmae, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, and Susan Strange) that predicted the end of the nation-state.
Charles Dickens and America’s First Great Depression
The Boston Globe discusses America’s First Great Depression as part of its story about Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Open secrets and dirty hands
In light of the just-released report on CIA torture, this 2012 book chapter, “Open Secrets and Dirty Hands,” might be of interest. “Complaints about secretiveness were commonplace throughout the presidency of George W. Bush. Such complaints overestimated the capacity of a contemporary President to maintain secrecy. Moreover, they overlooked the reality that information about the worst abuses of the Bush administration was generally accessible to the public. We professed ignorance about governmental kidnapping, indefinite detention, and prisoner abuse, even though details about such practices were readily available.” Read on SSRN.
This chapter was published in The Secrets of Law (Stanford University Press, 2012). Kevin Wagner reviewed the book for Law and Politics Book Review in March 2014. “Alasdair Roberts’ ‘Open Secrets and Dirty Hands’ is an excellent look back at the secrecy conflict during the Bush Administration. He effectively presents the idea of a willing ignorance as a complicit element of perceived government secrecy.” Read the review.
Meeting of Administrative Conference of United States
I’ll be attending the plenary session of the Administrative Conference of the United States in Washington on December 4-5, as one of ACUS’ public members. Details about the 61st plenary session.
Lecture on “Large Forces” at George Mason University
I’ll be discussing my monograph, Large Forces: What’s Missing in Public Administration, at George Mason University’s School of Policy, Government and International Affairs on December 2. Details about the lecture here.
Book reviews: Does democracy work?
Six reviews that I’ve written recently, on books that assess the state of democracy:
Review of Democracy in Retreat by Joshua Kurlantzick. Forthcoming in International Public Management Review. “Kurlantzick provides a detailed account of how our end-of-the-millennium exuberance about the spread of democracy dissipated so quickly. Around the world, Kurlantzick says, an unhappy middle class has slipped away from the pro-democracy camp. What can be done to draw the middle class back? This is a critical question which Kurlantick only begins to answer — and perhaps cannot be answered neatly in a work of this breadth.” Read the draft on SSRN. Read more
Brookings paper discusses openness lecture
A brief just published by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management discusses my lecture to the Accountability Network’s conference in Mexico City in October. “Roberts rightly sounds an alarm about recent claims that transparency is a cause of declining democracies and government dysfunction,” write Gary Bass, Danielle Brian and Norman Eisen. Read the brief.
Democracy: Doing better, feeling worse
A mash-up of two charts that relate to the reading I’ve been doing lately on the state of democracy. The orange line shows the number of countries that are established democracies according to Polity IV data. The blue line shows how frequently the phrase “crisis of democracy” appears in the English language corpus in Google’s Ngram.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
