Politics

Municipal Decentralization in Buenos Aires: Creating the Municipality of Hurlingham

Publication Date: February 01, 1999

As part of its efforts to recover from hyperinflation and an oversized public sector, the government of Argentina--specifically the province of Buenos Aires--seeks to control costs and improve service in local government. To do so, the...

Twisting in the Wind? Ambassador April Glaspie and the Persian Gulf Crisis (Sequel)

Publication Date: January 01, 1999

This case chronicles the celebrated (some would say notorious) story of the actions of the US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, on the eve of the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Diplomatic cables released by Iraq appear to show that...

Cleaning up the "Big Dirties": The Problem of Acid Rain

Publication Date: November 01, 1998

Shortly after his 1989 inauguration, President George Bush confronts a seemingly intractable dispute which had simmered through the 1980s: how to legislate the clean-up of the so-called "big dirties", large coal-burning Midwest power plants...

The Widening of Ping An Avenue: Making Decisions about Historic Preservation

Publication Date: October 01, 1998

In 1997, the municipal government of Beijing began planning how to widen a congested arterial road that ran through the Chinese capital's historic center, just blocks from the palaces of the Forbidden City. This case describes the somewhat...

A Close Election

Publication Date: September 01, 1998

When a Republican state representative in the Midwest decides not to seek re-election, he is approached by a politically active, successful farmer about running for the seat. He thinks the farmer would represent the moderate wing of the party...

The US-USSR Grain Agreement

Publication Date: August 01, 1998

In July, 1975, top White House economic officials in the Ford Administration receive information that the Soviet Union, in the face of a disappointing grain harvest, might seek to purchase large amounts of wheat and corn from US suppliers. This...

Office of the Rail Regulator (Abridged)

Publication Date: March 09, 1998

This case describes the first four years of John Swift's tenure as Britain's Rail Regulator and the issues he faced in the fall of 1997. The post of Rail Regulator had been created by the Railway Act of 1993, as part of a plan to break up and...

Price Cap: The UK's Efforts to Regulate Regional Distribution Companies

Publication Date: January 01, 1998

This case focuses on the efforts by Stephen Littlechild, the United Kingdom's electricity regulator in the mid-1990s, to set performance-based rates for the country's 13 electricity distribution companies. The case allows for a class discussion...

Capitalization: The Politics of Privatization in Bolivia

Publication Date: January 01, 1998

In this case, the president of Bolivia and a team of officials grapple with questions of how to set up a model for privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In the 1980s, Bolivia, like most other Latin American countries, embraced a more...

1976 Footwear Import Decision

Publication Date: January 01, 1997

This case about decision-making at the Presidential level focuses on a question before the Ford Administration in early 1976: whether to provide some sort of relief for the beleaguered U.S. footwear (shoe) industry, then buffeted by increasingly...

Shifting the Labor Relations Paradigm: A Union-Management Partnership in Ohio State Government (Sequel)

Publication Date: January 01, 1996

Public sector unions are the fastest-growing sector of organized labor in the US, and are key players to be considered by a wide variety of elected and appointed public officials. This case, in contrast to most in both public management and...

Getting to Dayton: Negotiating an End to the War in Bosnia

Publication Date: January 01, 1996

The road to the breakthrough Dayton Peace Accords, which ushered in the prospect of a stable peace in the war-torn former Yugoslavia, is built through an intricate, high-pressure negotiation brokered by the United States and involving Serbia,...