As I understand him, Mead makes two arguments. First, he argues that relying on reasoning from general principles to answer practical questions of public management can be misguided if the policy analyst deliberately or inadvertently ignores available evidence. Of course he is right. As the...

There is an old bromide, often associated with former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, that says “all politics is local.” The papers under review here implicitly raise the question of whether all (or at least a good portion) of economic development is local, and what sort of strategies...

Using data on all final National Priorities List (NPL) sites, this study employs an integrated model of distributive and public interest politics to determine whether the overall pace of cleanup efforts and funding of the 8.5 billion Superfund program over the past eight years reflects...