PSc 364 State and Local Government

PSCI 344 State and Local Government Learning Objectives

Professor: Jeffrey Greene
Dept. of Political Science
University of Montana

This document includes major learning objectives from the main text. Students should use this guide to help with the readings, lectures, and class discussions. The objectives serve as a guide for distinct knowledge that should be acquired during the course. This guide is used in all sections of PSCI 344. This set of Learning Objectives is based on The Essentials version of the Bowman and Kearney, State and Local Government, 4/e textbook.

Students can use any edition of the Bowman and Kearney text; the full edition is in the 7/e.

Chapter 1
New Directions for State and Local Government
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. The increased importance of the study of state and local government.
2. The factors that account for the increased capacity of state and local governments.
3. The forces at work in the drive for efficiency, effectiveness, and equity in providing services.
4. The challenges that state and local governments face in their efforts to solve problems.
5. The underlying importance of people in the study of the institutions, processes, and policies at the state and local level.
6. The importance of understanding political culture and its effect in different regions of the country.
7. The unique characteristics of the fifty-state system in the American system of federalism in the post-911 era.

Chapter 2
Federalism and the States
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. Three organizational arrangements for sovereign governments, including federalism.
2. The advantages and disadvantages of federalism.
3. The historic debates among the Framers of the Constitution of 1787 over the allocation of powers between the states and the national government.
4. The evolution of the nature of the relationship between the national and state governments and the historic events and court decisions contributing to the changes.
5. The manner in which local governments derive their powers within federalism.
6. The differences among various types of intergovernmental transfers of money.
7. The descriptive models used to portray the American federal system.
8. The forces that cause the continuing shift in the balance of power and responsibility between the national government and the states.
9. The contemporary irritants in intergovernmental relations and how they contribute to the further evolution of American federalism.

Chapter 3
State Constitutions
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. How state constitutions are increasingly becoming more favorable to civil rights and civil liberties, and the basis for judicial federalism.
2. The role of the state constitutions under the American system of dual constitutionalism.
3. The origins of early state constitutions.
4. Why legislative supremacy was written into the original thirteen states' constitutions and why power has increasingly shifted toward state governors.
5. The origins of and problems with long constitutions that follow a positive-law tradition.
6. The essential elements in a state constitution according to the National Municipal League's Model State Constitution, which reflects a higher-law tradition.
7. The methods for amending state constitutions.
8. The increased importance of judicial review by state supreme courts and their increasing role as judicial activists.
9. The status revising state constitutions since the Kestnbaum Commission Report.

Chapter 4
Citizen Participation and Elections
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. How and why people participate in American representative democracy.
2. The struggle by women and African-Americans for the right to vote and current efforts to increase voting by all citizens.
3. The variations in the primary election systems in the states and the reasons for the use of runoff elections in some states.
4. The pattern of recent outcomes in the gubernatorial and legislative elections in the fifty states.
5. The use of initiative, referendum, and recall at the state and local level.
6. The various devices employed by state and local government to increase citizen participation.

Chapter 5
Political Parties, Interest Groups, and Campaigns
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. An ideal against which political parties in the United States might be measured.
2. The organization of typical state political parties and the patterns and consequences of party competition in the states.
3. The nature of interest groups and their role in influencing state and local governments.
4. The role of lobbyists in the state capitols and efforts to establish ethical standards for them and legislators.
5. The origins of political action committees (PACs), the nature of their increasing role in the states, and the efforts made by states to limit their power.
6. The changing nature of political campaigning, the high costs of funding those campaigns, and the nature of efforts to avoid the excesses that arise from efforts to raise campaign money.
7. The problems for the states and local government portended by the changes in political parties, interest groups, and political campaigns.

Chapter 6
State Legislatures
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. The legislative functions of policymaking, representation, and oversight.
2. The ideals and reality of legislative reform efforts in the recent past, how they have changed the legislative membership, and the genesis of present efforts to institute term limits.
3. The history of drawing legislative districts and the effects of recent court decisions.
4. The basic structure of state legislatures, their leadership, and their committee makeup.
5. The motives for legislative behavior.
6. How a bill becomes law in state legislatures.
7. The nature of executive-legislative relations in the states.
8. The concept of legislative oversight and the tools available to legislature to control executive agencies.

Chapter 7
Governors
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. The newly created states' reluctance to grant power to governors, the further weakening of executive power under Jacksonian democracy, and twentieth-century efforts to empower the governor.
2. The increasing quality and level of experience of recent governors and the demands placed on them by their new role in reinvigorated states.
3. The reasons for and consequences of steadily rising gubernatorial campaign costs and the importance of incumbency and party strength in capturing the state house.
4. The various roles in state government that governors fulfill.
5. The formal powers available to governors and how they vary from state to state.
6. The informal powers available to governors and the various ways governors may enhance those powers.
7. The means by which governors can be removed from office.
8. The roles of other key elected state executive branch officials.

Chapter 8
Public Administration: Budgeting and Service Delivery
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. Why government bureaucracy has often been criticized and used as a scapegoat, although it has improved the quality and capacity of state and local governments.
2. The nature of the operating and capital budgetary processes, the traditional actors in budgeting, the five steps in the budget cycle, and the incremental nature of the budget process.
3. The origins and nature of the federal merit system and its influence on state and local government personnel systems.
4. The struggle among state and local governments to maintain a personnel merit system at the same time they meet the challenges posed by affirmative action guidelines, cope with sexual harassment infractions, and react to efforts of government employees to unionize and seek collective bargaining rights.
5. How elected political officials and career bureaucrats deal with the difficult relationship between administration and politics at the same time the civil servants are granted bureaucratic discretion, interact with clientele groups, and are expected to serve the public interest.
6. How bureaucratic responsibility may be understood in objective, subjective, and professional terms.
7. How the increase in the numbers of professionals in government provides the advantages of increased bureaucratic responsiveness and raises concerns over specialization.
8. How state and local government bureaucracies are improving as a result of efforts to "reinvent government," add to the quality of agency efforts by using Total Quality Management, encourage competition via privatization, and adopt new technologies to enhance performance.

Chapter 9
The Judiciary
Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:
1. How the state court systems are divided into three areas -civil, criminal, and administrative.
2. The structure of state court systems.
3. The nature of the structural reform of state courts in the 1960s and 1970s that led to unified court systems in many states.
4. The methods by which judges are selected and the means for their removal.
5. The nature of judicial decision making and how civil and criminal cases are decided outside the courtroom.
6. The new wave of judicial activism within the state courts.
7. The new directions in state court reform.

Chapter 10
State-Local Relations
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. The nature of authority and differing degrees to which it is granted to local governments by state governments.
2. The purposes of state mandates, the complaints made about them by local governments, and the increasing adoption by some states of mandate-reimbursement requirements.
3. The organizations created by state governments to expand state understanding of the needs of local governments.
4. The side effects of urbanization on local governments and what they and state government are doing while this is occurring.
5. The alternative forms of specialized mini-governments and regional governments or coordinating bodies that have been created to deal with sprawl associated with growing metropolitan areas.
6. The nature of the state-local interaction that takes place in dealing with contemporary problems in providing affordable housing and repairing crumbling infrastructure.
7. The variety of growth patterns in rural areas and the role that states might play in helping those with declining growth patterns.
8. The current trend in rethinking state-local government relations brought about as states recognize their own resurgence is dependent on strong local governments.

Chapter 11
Local Government: Structure and Leadership
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. The theoretical explanations for community organization that describe the evolving role of local government.
2. The difference between general-purpose and special-purpose governments.
3. The general role of counties, the possible variations based on their urban/rural nature, and the different organizational structures of that level of government.
4. How municipalities or cities are created and the three alternative structural types of city governments.
5. The pressing issues facing city governments.
6. The nature of, and problems facing, towns and townships.
7. The role of special-purpose districts, their advantages, and the basis for uneasiness about their existence.
8. The nature of the school district as a special type of single-purpose local government, its governance, and the concerns over unequal distributions of financial resources.
9. The search for means of achieving interlocal cooperation.
10. The nature of local governments and how they developed.
11. The difference between general-purpose and special-purpose governments.
12. The general role of counties, the possible variations based on their urban/rural nature, and the different organizational structures of that level of government.
13. How municipalities or cities are created and alternative structural types of city governments.
14. The role of special-purpose districts, their advantages, and the basis for uneasiness about their existence.
15. The nature of the school district as a special type of single-purpose local government, its governance, and the concerns over unequal distributions of financial resources.
16. The difference between strong and weak mayors and the requisites for success irrespective of formal power, and the mayoral types that occupy office.
17. The success of women and minorities winning elections for the mayor's office.
18. The changing nature of city councils and the increasing racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of those legislative bodies.

Chapter 12
Taxing and Spending
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to understand:

1. The interdependence and diversity of the various levels of American government in matters of finance.
2. The criteria for evaluating the various means of levying taxes.
3. The available types of state and local taxes and their advantages and disadvantages.
4. The effects that constitutional and statutorily limits in the states have on indebtedness.
5. The importance of revenue projections, the uses of rainy day funds, and the part politics and other state and local financial management practices may play in fiscal planning.
6. The means available to nonnational governments for managing long-term debt obligations.
7. The changing financial relationship between local government and the national and state governments.

Upon successful completion of PSCI 344, students should have acquired, at a minimum, the specific points listing in this document. Assessment of this material is measured via comprehensive exams.

SOURCE: Adapted from Jeffrey D. Greene, Instructor's Resource Manual with Test Items; accompanies State and Local Government: The Essentials, 4/e by Ann Bowman and Richard Kearney. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

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