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Repertoire: (1) a stock of plays, dances, or pieces that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform. (2) the whole body of items that are regularly performed. (3) a stock of skills or types of behavior that a person habitually uses. [https://www.google.com/#q=definition+of+repertoire.] Assessing the impact of teaching on student learning is an educational enterprise that has been going on for many years. Less common, however, is the evaluation of the impact of teaching on the instructor. That is, how does increasing teaching experience both in terms of the number of years doing it and the diversity of teaching experiences improve teaching? This is, of course, an empirical question. This paper focuses on one type of teaching experience and its overall contribution to improving instruction in public administration and policy. I draw from experience in short-term, non-degree teaching in executive programs (EEs). These programs are aimed at middle-level or senior government officials and may be as short as one day or as long as four weeks (on rare occasions longer). I show how this type of teaching can improve one's teaching repertoire much like a young professional trombonist (think of Tommy Dorsey in his early 20s) or a fledgling comedian trying to make the big time developing a professional repertoire. One's repertoire is a combination of pedagogical technique and policy and management substance. Since short-term, non-degree teaching in EEs is different from degree-based, semester-length teaching, it presents specific challenges, especially for the novice EE instructor. As the repertoire improves via EE teaching, it is likely to transfer to more conventional graduate-level professional education. Case examples come from Hungary, the USA, China, Macedonia and Singapore.

Strengthening the budgetary powers of legislatures through nonpartisan budget offices adds to the capacity-building repertoire of development donors. Budget offices are supposed to provide legislatures with information and analysis independent from the executive. The United States Agency for International Development believes that strengthening the legislature's power of the purse improves governance. We highlight USAID-funded legislative strengthening projects implemented in Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, and Afghanistan to show how these budget offices function. There is a significant potential for these units to assist members of parliament in understanding the budget process, the broad fiscal challenges facing government, and expenditure control and budgetary trade-offs that affect present and future spending. These cases demonstrate the challenges of creating and sustaining a parliamentary budget office. Finally, in an effort to make budget offices effective and sustainable, we outline several key steps that we believe are important both for donors and the legislative bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the development and implementation of intensive student consulting capstone projects in public management in the U.S. Integration of knowledge and skills learned throughout the public affairs curriculum; Use of project-based assignments that focus on current policy and management challenges faced by actual government or non-profit agencies; Aspects of group-based experiential learning.

Explains how the Bosnia commitment of the United States was made. Assessment of the commitment's legality; Primer on the defense appropriations power; Events from the breakup of Yugoslavia to the creation of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) in the immediate aftermath of the Dayton Peace Accords; Lessons about the contemporary dynamics of the elected branches in planning and implementing national security operations.

This article discusses the National Performance Review recommendations to implement mechanisms that would provide greater flexibility in United States budgeting processes, particularly in the area of national security. One of the major government reform initiatives in the industrialized democracies in the 1990s has been the new public management. In the United States, the initiative gained considerable attention when a report issued by a commission chaired by the U.S. Vice President Al Gore endorsed the development of performance-based measures in government. As prescribed by the National Performance Review (NPR, 1993), agencies should be freed from the "red tape" of detailed specifications and "micromanagement" by the U.S. Congress. Instead, agencies should be given goals and performance objectives. Among the prescriptions of the National Performance Review are recommendations to implement mechanisms that would provide greater flexibility in budgeting processes, particularly in the area of national security.

Describes a methodology for examining the impact of court orders on local government budgets in the United States. Discussion of previous studies on intervention and corrections; Determinants of local jail expenditures; Empirical analysis of jail capacity and expenditures growth; Need to reconsider the conventional beliefs on the impact of court mandates on local budgets.

Note has been made about the budgetary impact of judicial decisions. This paper looks at the budgetary effect of federal district court decisions across the states in the area of corrections. The study shows that (a) courts have affected state spending on prisons, (b) the levels of per prisoner spending in states that have had court cases are, in general, lower than in states that have not experienced prisoner rights litigation, (c) the level of per prisoner spending has not been affected by judicially mandated prison reform because of the steady increase in the prison population. The implications of the analysis are discussed. These include: (a) bureaucratic behavior, (b) redistributive aspects of judicial decisions, and (c) the erosion of the budget as a tool of popular control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the political and institutional factors that a revised theory of budgeting must incorporate if it is to provide and adequate account of budgeting in an austere fiscal environment in the U.S. Budgeting is a process that entails competing and often countervailing forces; centralization and decentralization, autonomy and interdependence, micropolitics and macropolitics. The top-down process deals with such matters as the mix of defense and domestic components of the budget, the overall size of the budget, the relation of the budget to fiscal policy and the administration's policy initiatives. The incrementalist model is built on some basic assumptions about the interactions that take place among participants in the process. The relative importance of the top-down process in federal budgeting has grown steadily over the past three administrations. Bottom-up budgeting has limited relevance to centralized fiscal management. Bottom-up budgeting is an open-ended, multi-player game that concludes with the hundreds of bargains that are ultimately included in appropriations bills.

This article discusses the policies taken by local government in the market to cope with fiscal stress in the U.S. After California voters passed Proposition 13, many local governments in that state raised and initiated user fees for selected services. Local governments have long contracted with private firms, nonprofit organizations and other jurisdictions for a range of services. The concept of competitive bureaus flies in the face of orthodox public administration theory which views coordination and centralization as superior to organizational fragmentation. An example of the inability to think market is the notion that it is inappropriate to contract some services or functions to the private sector. Market and quasi-market mechanisms, judiciously employed, have the potential to both assist management's efforts in fiscal retrenchment and, at the same time, improve the performance of the local public sector.

The thesis of government overload was based on a paradox of governance. While post-1945 economic growth in western democracies appeared to indicate political and economic health, bloated public sectors threatened the loss of political authority. The federal deficit in the United States is interpreted in light of this thesis. Responses to the deficit indicate more "top down" budgeting as a way to avoid, what has been termed by others, "political bankruptcy." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on United States public employee strikes has considered the occurrence and breadth of strikes, but seldom duration, as dimensions of the strike which merit examination. This study considers a much neglected dimension of strikes, duration, which is particularly important to public administrators and unions who become actively involved with resolving such disputes. Factors which theoretically were expected to be associated with the duration of public employee strikes -- the economic expectations of the striking workers, various characteristics of the bargaining environment, and the fiscal condition of the jurisdiction taking the strike -- were identified and considered. Results indicated that one factor in particular, the fiscal constraints of the jurisdiction taking the strike, was significantly associated with longer strikes, indicating that public employee unions may not necessarily be deterred from engaging in protracted strikes because of a precarious fiscal climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incrementalism, as the standard model of the budget process, has been under attack for several years. One line of criticism is that the concept ignores important structural characteristics of the process, thereby calling into question its descriptive and prescriptive power. Increasingly, the courts are influencing public spending; nevertheless, theoretical or empirical accounts of the roles of courts in the budget process are quite limited. This paper suggests how courts may affect budgeting- particularly at state and local levels-and the ramifications for incremental theory of judicial intervention in the budget process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a look at conditions-of-aid as a distinct type of mandate in the U.S. Conditions-of-aid mandates may be divided into two categories. The first category includes program specific or crosscutting conditions. Program specific conditions refer to the performance, implementation, and planning of a particular program. Crosscutting conditions are not necessarily related to the objectives of the specific grant-in-aid program; rather, they are imposed across a wide range of programs. Crosscutting conditions usually take the form of statutes, executive orders, or OMB circulars.

Presents information on the possible impacts of courts on the decision to expand the capacity of jail. Three adverse impacts of remedial law on public management; Implications of jail in United States; Statistics of jail capacity in United States; Factors affecting jail expansion; Impact of expansion on the changes in the capacity in the mid of 1980s; Main empirical results of the study on the jail expansion; Conclusions of the study.

Judicial decisions are one element in the erosion of local government budgetary discretion. For example, litigation concerning constitutional rights forces local government officials to allocate resources toward the rights-based population. While rights-based allocation decisions may narrow the budgetary discretion of public officials, some managers may, paradoxically, be “better-off”—defined as the ability to protect and defend their budgets — when discretion is reduced. This thesis is tested through a case study of jail overcrowding litigation in a county government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents several letters to the editor. Comments on military service as full-time public employment; Discussion on the housing needs in a community; Comments on community development.

The article presents a case study of a county government. A major preoccupation since the 1975 has been a search for strategies and tactics to shrink the size of government. There is a tendency to identify resource scarcity at the state and local level with episodes like California's Proposition 13, and U.S. President Ronald Reagan's budget retrenchment. In addition, the financial woes of New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit reinforce the concept of cutback management as a response to a specific series of events. But fiscal stress also can affect governments gradually. For one thing, public officials may find it easier to justify more radical solutions to financial problems. An illustration comes from Detroit where Mayor Coleman Young's "get tough" stance toward the municipal unions in the wake of the city's financial crisis was facilitated by the need for quick action. The mayor demanded that the unions accept a two-year wage freeze as part of an overall financial plan to bring the city back to solvency.