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Despite concern with turnover in the U.S. House of Representatives, few scholars have attempted to view turnover in historical perspective or in all its forms. Confusion over the basic facts has impeded attempts to explain and evaluate levels of turnover. We present a broad descriptive overview of turnover over the entire history of the U.S. House in terms of the levels of overall turnover, forms thereof, and patterns, particularly within party periods. The findings include that turnover has declined over the years but not in a continuous fashion and not evenly among the different forms, that general election defeat is not the primary form of turnover, that common methods of reporting turnover magnify the apparent importance of electorally based turnover, and that turnover varies systematically by party period. A research agenda is proposed for explanatory work on turnover including strategic retirement and the impact of partisan realignments on levels and forms of turnover.

This article proposes using an analytical techniques approach to teaching policy analysis in public administration programs. It is organized using questions raised by journalists: who, what, why, where, when, and how. Although most attention is devoted to the content of such an approach, the initial portion of the article provides a rationale for taking that approach. The initial portion of the article concludes with a rejoinder to those who might be tempted to dismiss the argument out of hand because the proposed view of policy analysis is not a political science one., Defining policy analysis as the study of implementation techniques rather than political science or history can lead to a more useful education for students. Administrators rarely find themselves in positions where policy analysis is useful, but often where an understanding of the techniques of policy decisions would be. Techniques should include decision-making theories, hypothesis testing, systems analysis, and cost, historical, political, ethical, legal, phenomenological, and financial analysis.

We make recommendations for ethics research in public policy based on the experience of public administration. In many ways, literature in public administration on ethics relates appropriately to public policy, albeit with specific gaps and specific peculiarities. The specific gaps apply particularly to aspects of public policy that are not especially emphasized in public administration (e.g., ethics in policy formulation and evaluation). Peculiarities include the tendency to avoid empirical and practical hands-on issues in ethics in favor of dealing with them from a theoretical and normative perspective and to assume a cohesive self-identification of public administrators with public organizations. After appropriate preliminaries, including a brief review of public administration literature on ethics, we recommend concrete and reality-oriented ethics research after the manner of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who took an empirical and practical hands-on approach to investigations.

The full range of the meaning of revenue emerges from seriously considering how people understand revenues from various perspectives. Explicit discussion of revenue meanings may contribute to improving our understanding of revenue-related phenomena. Insights can be gained from considering revenues from various perspectives. Revenue conceptualizations examined here range from the most immediate one, the notion of resources, to policy devices, mediation of relationships, measurements of political situations, and values. These discussions show that a variety of meanings are associate with revenues and that revenues are at least as fundamental to public budgeting as expenditures.

Following each recent round of redistricting, scholars have tried to determine whether that round worked to one party's advantage and whether control of the redistricting process by members of one party led to gerrymandering. They have reached mixed conclusions. Here, we examine the partisan consequences of the post-1990 redistricting for the U.S. House of Representatives. We create two sets of projections of partisan support levels for the 1990 and 1992 districts based on district-level 1988 presidential election data. One set of projections assumes an incumbency advantage, and one set assumes the hypothetical situation of all open seats, i.e., no incumbency advantage. We ask whether either party benefited and whether gerrymandering occurred. When we take incumbency into account, we find that our projections show that the two parties came out just about even in redistricting, with an increase in the number of districts evenly split between them. However, when we assume all open seats, our projections show an increase of 21 Republican districts, a decrease of 3 Democratic districts, and a decrease of 17 evenly split districts. We conclude that the Republican party gained from redistricting and that incumbency and other short-term factors obscure changes in the underlying partisan support in districts. In a state-level analysis of redistricting outcomes, we find no evidence that parties succeeded in using control of state government to gain partisan advantage through redistricting.

Public administration education has played an important role in the development of public service in the United States. Today, off-campus public administration activities by American colleges and universities constitute an important part of this relationship, important not only for the size and scope of their activities but also for their divergences from traditional patterns of behavior evidenced by American institutions, of higher education. In recent times, various governments and agencies that make up the public sector have afforded their employees a wide range of educational and training opportunities. This study reports the results of a survey of one area of public administration education: the recent extension activities of colleges and universities in the field of public administration. An operational definition of extension activities is the pursuit of off-campus activities which involve credit and non-credit classes, workshops, training programs, and technical assistance programs. In the parable of the elephant and the blind men, the perceptions of the blind men are always cited but nothing is mentioned of the elephant's perceptions. The case of public administration extension activities is like the elephant's perceptions of the various poking and prodding blind men.

This article provides a detailed explanation for the adoption of state lotteries as revenue measures. It focuses on Texas for examples. Relying on a previously published set of evaluative criteria for revenue sources, the authors explain why, despite generally negative treatment of state lotteries by revenue experts, lotteries are favored by legislatures and publics in thirty-four states and the District of Columbia. As revenue matters rather than general policy matters, lotteries are politically expedient and have sufficiently large yields to overshadow shortcomings noted by experts and critics: regressivity, high administrative costs, instability, lower than anticipated yields, and potential negative social consequences. This look at policy-maker and public evaluation of state lotteries explains their widespread utilitization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a letter to the editor on the issue of federal government leasing in the United States and its response by the author of the article.

Presents letters to the editor referencing articles and topics discussed in previous issues. "Comparative Local Government Financial Analysis," which discussed the rationale for conducting comparative financial analyses; Plausibility of conducting such analyses.