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This chapter focuses on how the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2007 has been framed both within Hawai‘i and on the continent as a way to understand how the United States uses discourses of Indianness to solidify its presence in the Pacific as it develops and contorts federal law to colonize indigenous nations. It studies how the continual transformation and revision of federal Indian policy becomes a coherent and inevitable expansionist discourse orchestrated by a seemingly static United States. In the face of colonial processes that seek to hide the fractures within U.S. boundaries among American Indian nations, it is important to investigate how discourses of Indianness are used both by the imperial U.S. government and by those Native Hawaiian activists who frame “Indianness” as an infection threatening their rights and status as an internationally recognized sovereign state.

This chapter deals with the application of austerity since 2010 as a political act designed to transform the way in which local authorities in the United Kingdom operate and are funded. It explains how the local authorities have been dependent on government funding as the UK is considered as one of the most centralised states in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It also recounts how the UK government in 2010 decided that the Revenue Support Grant (RSG) funding paid to councils would be removed through annual tapering to zero by 2020. The chapter probes the intention of the UK government to replace RSG with each of the council's retention of 75 per cent of the local business rates. It analyses the system of local government funding that operated until local government reorganisation in 1974.

This chapter, which examines the establishment of the new government, along with its goals and the outbreak of corruption scandals, argues that president Alcalá Zamora himself was the main obstacle to more effective government. Despite his laudable goal of defending a centrist and liberal democratic regime, Zamora possessed a kind of messianic complex, a gigantic ego which led him to think that he possessed the right to manipulate every aspect of government as much as he wished.

This chapter examines transformations wrought during the era of coalition cabinets. With the end of LDP hegemony, the already difficult task of providing tactical direction to government policy was exacerbated by the challenge of maintaining unity in cabinets composed of ministers from multiple parties. The eight-party coalition that formed the first non-LDP government in nearly four decades made good on a promise to enact political reform by establishing a system for electing lower house MPs. Yet even after the LDP reassumed the executive helm – albeit in coalition governments – pressure for reform continued. As a result of the efforts of a series of governments, a fundamental reorganization of government organs was carried out in 2001, resulting in the establishment of a Cabinet Office and other reforms. And yet this institutional upheaval did not give birth to cabinet government. On the contrary, this period saw the rise of disjoined cabinets that failed to restore economic growth or to effectively respond to policy challenges. As Prime Minister Koizumi and his cabinet learned through their hard-won battle to privatize postal services, it is exceedingly difficult to provide executive leadership in a fragmented policymaking landscape dominated by powerful subgovernments.

This chapter describes the political controversy accompanying the decision to launch the U.S. Veterans Bureau (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) during the Harding administration in 1921, its implementation problems between August 1921 and March 1923, and its rapid shift to normalization in 1923–24. It seeks to answer the questions of how and why, in the business-oriented Harding administration of 1921, the United States established a huge government organization that developed a system of federal hospitals and health care for veterans. Government reorganization to provide business efficiency was the initial strategy. But charges against the bureau's first director, from mismanagement to corruption, deflected attention from broader questions. Under its second, business-oriented director, the bureau, with its “socialized” veterans’ hospital and health care system, was stabilized as an enduring American institution under the rhetoric of management efficiency.