Calls for reforming the civil rights enforcement regime often focus on individual government officers. Recent years have brought demands to abolish qualified immunity—a defense that protects individual officers from liability so long as they did not violate clearly established law—and to end...

Recent large municipal bankruptcy cases have called into question the rights of debtor-cities to impair their capital markets creditors, on the one hand, and beneficiaries of their unfunded public pension promises, on the other. As I show in a companion work, federal bankruptcy law generally...

This paper exploits a natural experiment in Hesse where a reform of the electoral rule from mayor appointment by the local council towards direct mayor elections was introduced during a phase-in period from 1993 to 1998. The end of the term of the last appointed mayor varies across...

This article asserts the importance of public participation in local government, through social action research, in order to achieve good governance. We examine how bad local governance negatively impacts the socio-economic development trajectory of communities. Based on fieldwork conducted in...

Due to social and economic factors, gender inequality persists in society requiring initiatives for women empowerment. It is vital that government policies are gender-sensitive incorporating the elements of gender-disaggregated data, gender-based demography, gender-based tasks and gender...

Achieving clean audit reports has remained a difficult task for most local municipalities in South Africa due to financial misappropriation, mismanagement, and the inability to apply legal actions against the defaulters who misuse municipal financial resources. This study explored the meaning of...