School of Public Policy

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

School of Public Policy

PUBP 710.02

Topics in Public Policy:

Urban Politics and Policy

Thursdays–7:20 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

Mike Fauntroy, Ph.D.

Office Hours: Wednesday’s–2:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m.; Thursday’s–5:00 p.m. to 7:15 p.m.

Telephone:

Office:

Email: mfauntro@gmu.edu

As Harold Lasswell informed us decades ago, politics is the process of determining who gets what–when and how. Politics determines what ideas are implemented, and what ideas are prevented from becoming law. The public policy that emanates from the political process affects all aspects of human existence. America’s cities lie at the forefront of many public policy debates. Housing, public education, criminal justice, employment, and economic development are just a few of the areas in which public policy affects America’s cities. This course explores the factors that guide and affect urban politics and policy. It is designed to provide students with an introduction to the major theories and some of the significant research in urban politics and policy. The primary focus is on large American cities.

Students will be evaluated on the following: (1) two written critical interpretations of assigned literature which will be called RESPONSE PAPERS–which will be discussed in detail in a later handout– (40% of your final grade); (2) reading and active participation in seminar discussions (20%); (3) oral presentations (15%); and (4) a final examination (25%). More specific guidelines on the preparation of the response papers will be provided in a separate handout. Each student is expected to complete all of the assigned readings for each class session, and be prepared to summarize, offer critical assessments–or both–of the literature as well as the comments of fellow classmates.

Ester Fuchs, Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

Marion Orr, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999)

Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989)

William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, (New York: Vintage Press, 1996)

There also are a number of journal articles that are assigned readings. They are available in the library (on reserve) or on-line.

Mobile Phones: Please be courteous to your colleagues and instructor by turning off your mobile phone before entering the classroom.

Late Submission of Research Papers: All papers should be submitted on time. Any paper submitted after the deadline will be penalized one full letter grade (no exceptions).

Incomplete Grades: No incomplete grades will be assigned at the end of this semester, except in the case of extraordinary, officially validated emergencies.

Clarence Stone, Robert Whelan, and William Murin, “Urbanization in the United States,” in Clarence Stone, Robert Whelan, and William Murin, Urban Policy and Politics in a Bureaucratic Age, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986), pp. 1-11, (Reserve).

John Clayton Thomas and H.V. Savitch, “Introduction: Big City Politics Then and New,” in H.V. Savitch and John C. Thomas (eds.), Big City Politics in Transition, (Newbury, CA: Sage Publication, 1991), pp. 1-13 (Reserve).

John D. Kasarda, “Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 50, January 1989, pp. 27-47, (Reserve).

Richard Sauerkopf and Todd Swanstrom, “The Urban Electorate in Presidential Elections, 1920-1996,” Urban Affairs Review, Vol. 35, September 1999, pp. 72-91 (Reserve).

Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), Chapters 1 & 2.

Robert Dahl, Who Governs?, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), Chapters 2, 4, 5, & 6.

Peter Bachrach & Morton Baratz, “The Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 56, no. 4, December1962, pp. 947-952 (Reserve).

Paul Peterson, City Limits, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Chapters 1-3, 6-9, & 11.

Clarence Stone, “Systemic Power in Community Decisionmaking,” American Political Science Review, vol. 74, December 1981, pp 978-990 (Reserve)

Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1988, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), Chapters 1, 8-12.

Georgia Persons, “Racial Politics and Black Power in the Cities,” in George Galster and Edward Hill (eds.), The Metropolis in Black and White, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University

Adolph Reed, Jr. “Demobilization in the New Black Political Regime,” in Michael Peter Smith and Joe Feagin (eds.), The Bubbling Cauldron: Race, Ethnicity, and the Urban Crisis, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 182-208 (Reserve).

James Jennings, “Changing Urban Policy Paradigms: Impact of Black and Latino Coalitions,” in James Jennings (eds.), Black, Latinos, Asians in Urban America: Status and Prospects for Political and Activism, (Westport: Praeger, 1994), pp. 3-16 (Reserve).

Ester Fuchs, Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 & 8.

Norton Long, “The City as Reservation,” Public Interest 25, Fall 1971, (Reserve).

George Sternlieb, “The City as Sandbox,” Public Interest 25, Fall 1971, (Reserve).

William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, (New York: Vintage Press, 1996), Chapters 1-5.

Michael Porter, “The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1995 (Reserve).

Marion Orr, Black Social Capital: The Politics of School Reform in Baltimore, (Lawrence: University of Press of Kansas, 1999)

Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling, (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), Chapters 1-3 (Reserve).

Burchell and Listokin, “Influences on United States Housing Policy,” Housing Policy Debate, V. 6, I. 3, pp. 559-617 (Reserve).

William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Chapter 2 (Reserve).

Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk, American Unequal, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), Chapter 7 (Reserve).

Your paper should have one that includes at least the following information: paper title, your name, course name, course number, and the date. If you have a title page, there is no need to repeat the title on first page of text. Try to give your paper a relatively interesting title. "Short Paper" or "Term Paper" or "Interest Group Assignment" are dull. You can put your title in a font that is slightly larger than normal text but avoid extremely large fonts. In other words, 12-18 point fonts are fine, but 35 point fonts are too large.

You should place quotation marks around any direct quotes. If the person you are quoting quotes another source, you should use the double marks for the outer quotation marks and the single marks for the inner quotation marks. Example: Snob magazine reported: "If you aren’t vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard or The Hamptons, then you aren’t vacationing.”

If your quote is lengthy (four or more lines), you should indent the quote and use single-spaced text. You do not need to use quotation marks around indented quotes because it is clear from the context and the format.

You should always use ellipses when you remove words from a quotation. You should not use ellipses if your removal of words changes the meaning of the text. If your missing words are in the middle of sentence, you should replace theme with three dots separated by spaces as well as preceded and followed by spaces (i.e. <space>.<space>.<space>.<space>). The spaces make the ellipses look better when typed. Example: "Many older residents find that retirement communities are more . . . peaceful if children do not live on the property."

If you omit the end of sentence before going on to the next sentence in your quotation, you should use four dots instead of three with no space between the first dot and the end of the first sentence and two spaces after the fourth dot (as in the two spaces after a period). The first dot is the period. Example: "The Democrats ran a mean-spirited campaign in 1998...Their radio commercials about church burnings implied that the Republicans are racists."

The first is short for "it is" as in "It's sad to Republicans that a Democrat lives in the White House." The second is a pronoun as in "Florida suffered a terrible blow when its orange crop froze last January."

When you excerpt a quote, you may want to substitute a few words of your own for the actual words for clarification purposes. For example, you might want to replace a pronoun with the actual person or group. You need to put the words that you insert in brackets. Example: [Tom Brokaw] recently wrote a book that lauds the World War II generation. Similarly, if your quote begins in the middle of the sentence, you may capitalize the first letter, but you should put it in brackets. Example: [T]he Iraqi government objected to sanctions.

I am a stickler for proper citations. Following are various types. You are free to choose a particular style, though I prefer bibliographic citations in footnotes or endnotes. Please be consistent: use the same style throughout your paper.

Instead of footnotes, you may choose to use parenthetical citations (though footnotes are also perfectly acceptable). All works cited in parentheses must have full citations in your bibliography at the end of the paper.

The Basic Form. The basic form is really very simple: (Author Year), as in (McGillicutty 1997). If you wish to refer to a specific page in the book, the form is (Author Year: Page). Example: (McGillicutty 1997: 27). If multiple pages need citation simply use dashes or commas as necessary, as in (McGillicutty 1997: 27-32, 64). If you are referring to the author in the text, you should simply put the date, and pages if necessary, in parentheses after the reference to the author's name. Example: According to McGillicutty (1997: 9), Judge Leon Higginbotham directly contradicted Thernstrom (1987) on the applicability of Section 5 of the Voting

Multiple Sources. If you want to cite more than one work at the same time, use semi-colons to separate the cites. Example: (McGillicutty 1997; Holden 1987). If you have more than one work by the same author(s) in one year, you need to designate the work that appears first in your bibliography (the one with the title that begins with the letter that appears earlier in the alphabet)

as "a" and the second as "b" and so on. The letter designations should appear in both the bibliography and in your parenthetical citations. Example: (McGillicutty 1997a).

Multiple Authors. You should list all authors for works with three or fewer authors. The order of their names should following the order given by the authors. Example: (Fitch, Fox, and Brown 1992; Smalls and Shakur 1998). If there are more than three authors, give the author's first name and then "et al." Example: (Brown et al 1991).

No Author. Use the title in place of the author if there is no author. You should feel free to shorten it as long as it is clear and distinct. Example: (LDF Report 1994).

Books: Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1963.

Articles in Scholarly Journals: Bullock III, Charles S. 1981. "Congressional Voting and the Mobilization of a Black Electorate in the South." Journal of Politics 43 (December): 662-82.

Magazine and Newspaper Articles: Kelly, Michael. "Segregation Anxiety." New Yorker, 20 November 1995, 43-54. Swain, Carol M. "Black-Majority Districts: A Bad Idea." New York Times, 3 June 1993, A21.

Supreme Court Cases: Allen v. State Board of Elections, 393 U.S. 544 (1969). The number before the "U.S." refers to the volume; the number after is the page number. The "U.S." refers the to Supreme Court Reporter. (District and Circuit Court decisions will have something else instead of U.S. between numbers, e.g. F. 2d or F. Supp.) Even if you found your case on the internet (e.g. on Findlaw or Lexis), you should still use this format as the cite will likely give you this citation format somewhere near the beginning of the case.

There are lots of ways to cite Internet sources. I am not particular about which one you use as long as you follow certain rules:

Cite the exact URL or Internet site. Do not just cite the general home page. The point is to be able to quickly locate the exact page on which you found your information. Even though it is more lengthy and more complex, give the full cite of the page so that your reader can go directly to it. For example, if you want to cite the Christian Coalition position paper on gambling, you should cite the exact site, http://www.cc.org/issues/gambling.html, not the general Christian Coalition site, http://www.cc.org/. State the date you visited the page. "Visited 30 January 1999." or "Visited January 30, 1999." are both sufficient. Pages unfortunately change often, so it is nice to know when you visited the page. Give the title of the page as well as the Internet site. Simply giving the site or URL is not very informative. People don't speak Internet and you want your paper to be accessible to all. Many pages on the Internet are just replications of paper sources. If this is the case, you should cite it as you would the paper form. For example, if you use an article from the Washington Post, you should simply cite it as you would a normal newspaper article. Sample Bibliographic Form: "Christian Coalition Stand on Gambling." http://www.cc.org/issues/gambling.html. Visited 19 August 1999. Sample Parenthetical Citation: (Christian Coalition Stand on Gambling 1999) or http://www.cc.org/issues/gambling.html 1999). Personally, I prefer the former format as it is more informative.

Plagiarism is the representation of another person's words and ideas as one's own. This misrepresentation is a breach of ethics that seriously compromises a person's reputation. Professional careers have been ruined by revelations of plagiarism.

Researchers, therefore, must scrupulously acknowledge sources to give proper credit for borrowed materials. The following rules should be observed to make sure that the distinction between one's own words and ideas and those of others is justly maintained. (Of course, submitting a paper that is completely the work of another person is plagiarism in its most extreme form.)

1. Words, phrases, and sentences of another person should be enclosed in quotation marks and footnoted in proper form.

2. Paraphrases and summaries of the ideas of others should be indicated with a footnote. These paraphrases and summaries should not represent merely the rearrangement of sentence elements but should be rewritten in one's own style.

3. Quotations, paraphrases, and summaries should be introduced with the name of the writer being cited.

4. Every item footnoted in the paper (i.e., all sources of others' words and ideas) should appear in the bibliography in proper form.

5. Footnotes should contain all the information required by standard footnote form and specifically indicate the location of the material cited. Page numbers should be checked for accuracy before a paper is submitted; the reader must be able to find the source of the material quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.

A student who plagiarizes all or part of an assignment can expect severe penalties, ranging from failure in that assignment to being recommended for a hearing before a judiciary body of the University. In most cases, a letter will be placed in the student's permanent file.