The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Category: Faculty Research

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CPPA & university administration Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research Social inequality & justice

CPPA Program Wins National Social Equity Award

The Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA) has been recognized as top in country when it comes to social equity research, teaching and service.

The distinction comes from the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration. Its Social Equity Award, new this year, was created to honor a public affairs, public administration and/or public policy program with a comprehensive approach to integrating social equity into its academic and practical work.

“We are very honored to be the first program to receive this award from our professional association,” says CPPA Director M.V. Lee Badgett. “CPPA’s students, staff and faculty build a social justice component into everything we do: our courses, our research and our public engagement. We’re not here only to study public policy; we want our work to make a difference in people’s lives.”

The Center’s research spans many disciplines. Much of that scholarship examines existing social inequities, such as environmental harms, employment discrimination, health disparities, gender inequalities, marriage access inequalities, and the digital divide. But CPPA’s faculty members go beyond studying these fields; they proactively seek possible policy remedies for these inequities.

For example, political science and public policy professor Jane Fountain chaired the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government for the World Economic Forum in 2010 and 2011. She has worked with leaders from nongovernmental organizations around the world on such social equity issues as government openness and citizen engagement, as well as social enterprise models for economic development across the globe.

Badgett is widely recognized as an authority on civil rights protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. She was the first economist to publish an article identifying the gay wage gap. In 2009 Badgett’s award-winning book When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage was published, and the following year she testified as an expert witness in the federal Proposition 8 trial related to same-sex marriage in California.

Scholarship from CPPA faculty and staff also includes: examining educational equity, by Kathryn A. McDermott and Brenda Bushouse; analyzing the economics of environmental issues and class-based health disparities, by Michael Ash, Krista Harper and Sylvia Brandt; studying the role of technology in public life across the globe, by Martha Fuentes-Bautista and Charles Schweik; and looking at various forms of economic and political inequality throughout the world, by Joya Misra, Nancy Folbre and David Mednicoff.

In addition to the faculty’s research, the Center works to advance social justice goals on the UMass Amherst campus and throughout the region. Through its Springfield Initiative, CPPA lecturer Fred Rose is working with community leaders to establish an economic development process that would create worker cooperatives, offering inner-city residents well-paying entry-level jobs.

Students are also actively engaged in CPPA’s social equity endeavors. For example, they collaborate with faculty and staff on the Center’s Diversity and Social Justice Committee, which works to ensure that CPPA events and operations engage the wider community in social justice issues. The committee has helped with efforts such as recruiting a diverse student body and incorporating social justice themes in the curriculum.

Since its founding in 1998, CPPA has placed a strong focus on issues of social justice and diversity. “Our mission includes promoting social change and solving problems for the common good,” Badgett says.

The award lends prestige not only to CPPA, but also to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS), which houses the Center. “I am so proud that CPPA has won this award. Congratulations to Lee for her fine leadership,” says SBS Dean Robert S. Feldman.

CPPA is the hub of interdisciplinary public policy research, teaching and engagement at UMass Amherst. Its faculty and alumni are effective policy leaders, from the local to the global levels, in addressing topics such as family and care policy, environmental issues, emerging technologies, social inequalities and governance.

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Events Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research

CPPA Will Celebrate Faculty Books, Awards on October 27

The Center for Public Policy and Administration will celebrate two authors at a reception in the Gordon Hall Atrium on Thursday, October 27, from 4-5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Kathryn McDermott (education and public policy) will discuss her new book, High Stakes Reform: The Politics of Educational Accountability, and Brenda Bushouse (political science and public policy) will speak about her recent book, Universal Preschool: Policy Change, Stability, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, for which she has been awarded the 2011 Virginia Hodgkinson Research Prize.

McDermott’s book, which was published in September by Georgetown University Press, examines the relationship between important political and historic events and the current trend in education policy reform of performance accountability in public schools.

McDermott’s research focuses on the formation and implementation of state-level education policy and the effects of policy on educational equity. In 2001, she led a statewide study of Massachusetts’ capacity to implement the Education Reform Act of 1993, and also has examined the role of policy in providing access to higher education in New England. She is the author of Controlling Public Education: Localism Versus Equity, which critiques the current American system of local control of public schools.

Bushouse’s book explores the reasons why it recently became politically advantageous for state legislators to support universal access to preschool programs and how political and budgetary stability was achieved to spur this initiative. The Hodgkinson prize recognizes the pioneering role of Virginia Hodgkinson in research on philanthropy and nonprofit organizations. She also was instrumental in developing many of the important institutions and organizations supporting research on philanthropy, volunteering and nonprofit organizations and was a mentor to many scholars and policymakers in the field.

Professor Bushouse conducts research on the role of nonprofits in the U.S. and is an expert on the national universal preschool movement. She is a past recipient of an Ian Axford Fellowship in Public Policy (New Zealand) and has served as a researcher for Zero to Three, a national nonprofit that advocates for infants and toddlers. Her current research is on governance issues and how they impact nonprofit accountability, effectiveness, and decision-making in nonprofits. Prior to coming to UMass, she worked in economic development for both local and federal government.

Contact:
Susan Newton
Extension 7-0478
snewton@pubpol.umass.edu

University of Massachusetts Amherst
Gordon Hall
418 North Pleasant Street
Amherst, MA 01002-1735

Tel: 413.545.3940
Fax: 413.545.1108
www.masspolicy.org

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Faculty Research Policy Viewpoints Uncategorized

McDermott Publishes New Book on Education Policy

Kathryn McDermott, associate professor of education and public policy, is the author of a new book on education accountability policies.

McDermott’s book, High-Stakes Reform: The Politics of Educational Accountability, will be released by Georgetown University Press in September.

High-Stakes Reform draws on policy developments in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut to examine how testing and other forms of accountability in the schools have been shaped by important political and historical processes.  McDermott’s work is an important contribution to our understanding of such controversial issues as testing in the public schools.

A more complete description of McDermott’s book is available on the UMass website.

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Faculty Research Science, technology & society

Schweik Delivers Keynote at Open Source Conference in Atlanta

Charlie Schweik, associate professor of environmental conservation and public policy, gave an invited keynote address at the Military Open Source Software Conference in Atlanta Georgia on August 31, 2011.

Titled “Successful Internet Collaboration: A Study of Open Source Software Commons,” Schweik’s address drew on his extensive research concerning the use of open source software nationally and internationally and its potential for generating productive collaborations among researchers and others.

The purpose of the Atlanta conference was to discuss the benefits and challenges of open source technologies for military applications, and to encourage the U.S. defense and homeland security agencies to move toward “open” technology adoption policies and to share and reuse information technologies across agencies, levels of government, and between government IT contractors.

Schweik is also an associate director of the National Center for Digital Government (NCDG); an affiliated researcher with the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Initiative; and founder and co-director of the UMass Open Source Lab.  His research on open source software systems and collaborations has been supported by a prestigious NSF Early CAREER Development Grant.

Schweik’s forthcoming book on the open source movement is scheduled for publication by MIT Press in the spring of 2012.

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Faculty Research

Schweik Discusses Forthcoming Book at University of Alaska

Charles Schweik, associate professor of environmental conservation and public policy, presented a talk about his forthcoming book at the University of Alaska Anchorage on June 27, 2011.

Schweik’s book, Understanding Collaboration in the Internet Era: A Study of Open Source Software Commons, will be published by MIT Press in Spring 2012.

Schweik was hosted in Anchorage by Jim Murphy, a former faculty member at CPPA who is now the Rasmuson Chair of Economics at UAA’s College of Business and Public Policy.

In his talk, Schweik talked about a fundamental issue addressed in the book, which is how we teach and learn from one another.  The collaborations developed through open-source software development, Schweik argues, offer strategies for working out problems that have important implications for solving big, global issues.

For additional information about Schweik’s talk and the forthcoming book, please listen to the podcast.

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Environmental policy Faculty Research

Ash Co-PI for $360,000 NSF Grant

Michael Ash, associate professor of economics and public policy, is the co-principal investigator for a $360,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study environmental justice in the United States.

Ash and co-PI James Boyce (professor of economics) are co-directors of the Corporate Toxics Information Project at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) and will use the grant to employ EPA data for better understanding socioeconomic and geographic exposure to industrial toxic releases in the U.S.

Additional information about the grant is available through the UMass press release and additional information about the Corporate Toxics Information Project is available at the PERI website.

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Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research Governance Science, technology & society

Future of Government Report Launched in Vienna

Jane Fountain, professor of political science and public policy, hosted a dinner on June 7, 2011, in Vienna, Austria at which the World Economic Forum launched its new report, The Future of Government: Lessons Learned from around the World.

Fountain chaired this year’s World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government, which includes 15 innovative experts and leading government practitioners from around the world.

The report documents the best (and worst) governance practices for enhancing global innovation, including those that depend on social media and other new information and communication technologies.

About the report, Fountain states, “As the world moves forward amid economic and political change, the future of government has catapulted to center state as one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. On behalf of the Council, I am pleased to present this collection of lessons learned drawn from some of the world’s most interesting and rapidly developing settings, and from a remarkable and seasoned group of experts.”

The report will be used at the World Economic Forum’s Middle East Summit in Jordan this coming fall and throughout the next year as the Council expands its focus and work.

Fountain will move next year into the role of Vice Chair for the Council, and Karl Bildt, former finance minister of Sweden, will take over as Chair.  At UMass Amherst, Fountain also directs the National Center for Digital Government and the Science, Technology and Society Initiative.

A press release about the Future of Government Report, which contains links to the report and a video about the Council’s work, is available here.

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Faculty Research Governance Policy Viewpoints

Mednicoff Leads Workshop in Spain’s Basque Region

David Mednicoff (public policy) led a workshop from May 26-28, 2011, in Oñati, Spain on “Comparative Sociolegal Processes of Secularization: Political Variations on the Theme of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.”

The workshop, co-led by Shylashri Shankar of India and co-sponsored by the International Institute for the Sociology of Law and Princeton University, assembled a cross-national group of scholars to develop a common analytical approach to the comparative analysis of secularism, law and politics in global perspective.

The workshop was conceived as a follow-up to two earlier workshops on secularism, law and politics. The Oñati meeting used Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age as a jumping off point to consider whether and how secularity has become integrated into legal and political institutions in a wide range of cases outside the scope of Taylor’s North Atlantic focus.

Cases included China, Egypt, Indonesia, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Russia, Senegal and Turkey. Participants included authors of papers concerning the topic and several prominent discussants.

Proceedings from the workshop will appear in a forthcoming volume co-edited by Mednicoff.

The Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law was established in 1988 to create academic links and collaborations between European and non-European universities.  Since then, it has developed into an important base for the global network of scholars who work on law and social science issues.

Additional information about the Institute, which is located in the Basque province of Gipuzkoa,  is available here.

Prof. Mednicoff holds a B.A. from Princeton, and an M.A., J.D. (international law) and Ph.D. (political science) from Harvard.  He is a specialist on contemporary Middle Eastern politics and U.S. foreign policy in Arab states.

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Alumni news Faculty Research Policy Viewpoints

Carpenter, Tomaskovic-Devey ’10 Publish Report on Transnational Advocacy Networks

CPPA faculty associate Charli Carpenter (political science), CPPA alumna Anna Tomaskovic-Devey ’10, and Kyle Brownlie (PhD candidate, political science) are co-authors of a report about why transnational advocacy networks take up particular issues and not others.

The report, Agenda-Setting in Transnational Networks: Findings from Consultations with Human Security Practitioners, is based on research supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation and conducted partly during Tomaskovic-Devey’s tenure as a graduate assistant for the project.

The research used focus groups with practitioners at 39 human security organizations, along with computer-assisted analysis provided by the UMass Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) coding lab, to determine four general factors influencing the likelihood that a particular issue will receive attention:  1) the nature of the issue, 2) the attributes of the actors involved, 3) the broader political context, and 4) the structural relationships within advocacy networks.

According to the authors, the findings in the report have important implications for all “issue entrepreneurs” working for social change, including those outside of the human rights arena.

Carpenter teaches a CPPA course on global agenda-setting, which analyzes politics in the human security area and is built around the model Carpenter developed through her NSF-funded study on transnational networks.  As part of the course, CPPA students have presented findings from their research projects to relevant practitioners at nonprofits in Washington, D.C.

The full report is available here, and additional information is available at the project’s website.

Categories
Environmental policy Faculty Research Policy Viewpoints Public Engagement Project

Brandt Addresses Costs of Biomass

In a May 19, 2011, letter to the Springfield Republican, Sylvia Brandt (resource economics and public policy) questions the findings of a recent report about the impacts of a proposed biomass energy plant in East Springfield.

The report, produced by consultants hired by Palmer Renewable Energy, claims that the proposed plant will not harm public health.  Brandt, a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Council on Clean Air Compliance, argues the opposite, noting that the plant will greatly increase local pollution through higher emissions from the large-scale burning of wood and  increases in truck traffic.

Brandt cites EPA data suggesting that emissions from the plant could be anywhere from 4 to 16 times higher than that reported by the Palmer Renewable Energy consultants.

Also, according to Brandt’s calculations, “the cost of the health effects from the traffic alone would be approximately $1.53 million a year.”

Brandt calls for more extensive review of the proposed plant, noting that “[it] violates all principals of environmental justice to forgo an independent study.”

Brandt’s letter to the editor can be read in full here.