Government Is Good: Citizenship, Participation, and Power

We like to think that government is there when we want it. Voters - if they vote - have the power. Elected officials, especially in local government, are there to carry out the details and to take care of the humdrum "nuts-and-bolts" running of things. Having been a council member and mayor for a small Southern manufacturing town "Hill City", the author of this book has experienced what it is like to try and make local government work. This book takes readers inside the system to show the politics as its most human level by challenging the presumption of many political scientists that an understanding of governments is necessarily technical, addressing such abstractions as memory, symbol, context and power as they work in the practice of governing. r