Lance deHaven-Smith

Environmental Belief Systems Public Opinion on Land Use Regulation in Florida

Many studies have assumed that the publics apparent concern about environmental quality is rooted in one or more abstract ideologies or philosophies. In contrast, the literature on mass belief systems implies that environmental opinion is probably very crude, fragmented, and narrowly focused on mundane irritants. This article presents results from an exploratory study applying the belief systems approach to &ttitudes on land use regulation. Data for the study came from a survey (N = 388) of residents of southeast Florida. Findings from the analysis suggest that opinion toward land use regulation is grounded in a number of narrow orientations.

When Political Crimes Are Inside Jobs: Detecting State Crimes Against Democracy

Public administration theory and practice tend to overlook the possibility of state political criminality in liberal democracies. This article proposes a policy science to detect state crimes against democracy (SCADs), using social and political theory to understand when, why, how, and by whom such crimes are likely to be committed. After defining SCADs and differentiating them from other types of political crimes, the article analyzes SCADs in terms of antidemocratic tendencies posited by theories of liberal democracy. SCADs are traced to specific institutional objectives by analyzing patterns in SCAD targets, timing, and modus operandi. The role played by career civil servants in exposing government crimes and deceptions suggests that professional public administrators are a critical line of defense against the criminalization of the state.

Conjuring the Holographic State Scripting Security Doctrine for a (New) World of Disorder

No current policy paradigm, however interdisciplinary, provides an adequate and coherent account of post-9/11 security doctrine for “a war with no clear end or scope.” Like the hologram, the image of the terrorist constructed by PATRIOT and kindred legislation appears vivid while defying a definitive grasp, just as the holographic image dematerializes on the hand reaching to touch it. This article sketches etiology for a new policy analytic paradigm that is coined here, the Holographic State, and explores its suitability for policy and administrative sense making under conditions where the epistemological and ontological foundations of policy inquiry have been made profoundly unstable.

Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government

This article explores the conceptual, methodological, and practical implications of research on state crimes against democracy (SCADs). In contrast to conspiracy theories, which speculate about each suspicious event in isolation, the SCAD construct delineates a general category of criminality and calls for crimes that fit this category to be examined comparatively. Using this approach, an analysis of post—World War II SCADs and suspected SCADs highlights a number of commonalities in SCAD targets, timing, and policy consequences. SCADs often appear where presidential politics and foreign policy intersect. SCADs differ from earlier forms of political corruption in that they frequently involve political, military, and/or economic elites at the very highest levels of the social and political order.The article concludes by suggesting statutory and constitutional reforms to improve SCAD prevention and detection.

Preventing State Crimes Against Democracy

This article analyzes U.S. vulnerabilities to state crimes against democracy (SCADs). SCADs are actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty. Watergate and Iran–Contra are well‐known examples of SCADs involving top officials. SCADs in high office are difficult to detect and successfully prosecute because they are usually complex and compartmentalized; investigations are often compromised by conflicts of interests; and powerful norms discourage speculation about corruption in high office. However, liberal democracies can reduce their vulnerability to state political criminality by identifying vulnerabilities proactively and instituting policies for SCAD detection and prevention.

Evidence on the Minimal Management Principle of Program Design: Implementation of the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit

Implementation problems in the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit (TJTC) challenge the conclusion, drawn from the study of policy implementation, that programs using a market mechanism are more easily and effectively implemented than programs with heavily managed, public delivery systems. TJTC sought to expand employment opportunities for targeted individuals through a tax credit voucher system but it experienced several of the implementation problems observed in programs using public delivery systems. Implementers were unable to influence the employer response to the tax credit, lower-level bureaucrats failed to implement the instructions of their superiors, and third-party vendors absorbed program monies and successfully pressured implementers to facilitate vendor activities.

Conspiracy Theory Reconsidered Responding to Mass Suspicions of Political Criminality in High Office

This article criticizes recent proposals for covert government operations against conspiracy-theory groups and networks. The article argues that fear of secret plots by political insiders is intrinsic to America’s civic culture, legal traditions, and political institutions. The appropriate government response to conspiracy theories is not to try to silence mass suspicions but instead to establish procedures for ensuring that suspicious events are thoroughly and credibly investigated. As it stands, investigations of assassinations, defense failures, election breakdowns, and other political events with grave implications for America and the world fail to meet basic standards for transparency, independence, and objectivity.

Myth and Reality of Whistleblower Protections: Official Behavior at the Top

Reforms to laws and administrative procedures are needed to protect administrators who report state crimes against democracy. Without whistleblowers, such crimes are unlikely to be detected and investigated. The analysis describes cases of retaliation against administrators who have exposed SCADs in high office. Reforms are recommended to address witness protection, secrecy oaths, and presidential pardon powers.

Midnight in the Garden of PA

Intellectual “traditions” are traceable to and from any number of sources made salient by the prescient historiographer. Distinctive from the arts and sciences from which it draws, public administration scholarship is inextricably defined by zeitgeist; for such scholarship must, one way or the other, come to terms with “what is to be done” in the face of any number of pressing, real-time dilemmas. In this respect, the Minnowbrook “tradition” derives in major part from soul-searching efforts among public administration scholars following the revelations of the Kerner Report of 1968 into “civil disorders” occurring over the previous few years in major metropolitan areas across the United States. These “disorders” were, in fact, the eruption of profound desperation and rage surging from decades of double dealing by U.S. and state governments in matters of race and civil rights. Not mincing rhetoric, the report found

Economic Delusions and Denial

The ontology and epistemology of neoclassical economics exhibit little restraint in ideological and imperial extension to nonmarket application. The colonization of public administration by economic canon is a vexing epistemological issue, demanding critical reckoning of the “tribe,” and chorus, of economic “fellow travelers” marching to yet another sect of economics (Public Choice Theory [PCT]) and invoking a creedlike economic parable in a devoted, liturgical incantation of the virtues of the “free market.” From the mythical narrative embedded within the tablet of the “Pareto Optimum” (Pareto, 1972); the methodological fraud (Thurow, 1984) disguised within the “Theory of Revealed Preferences” (Samuelson, 1938); the cowardice of the retreat of economics into a mathematical labyrinth of “Physics Envy” (Streeten, 1999); the fiction of “principal/agent” delineations; the ideological projection of “rent seeking”; and the eschewing of any nonautogamous testing of “social realities” (Dixon, Dogan, & Kouzmin, 2004), the “Grand Inquisitorial” project of a postmodern persuasion would need to consider, as Eagleton (1996, p. 132) surmised, how “fragmented, postmodernism is susceptible to the restless, transforming and co-opting pluralism of Capitalism.” As Eagleton