Connecting Government to Community: A study of social and political connectivity at the municipal level.

通过提高公共机构对公民需求的响应能力来促进社区的加强，是全球化时代的一项核心政策挑战。该项目将通过在四个城市使用个人关系和组织联系的比较措施来阐明政治家、官僚、公民领袖和普通公民之间的联系网络，从而促进对这一问题的理论、方法和实践理解。这项研究将产生新的衡量标准，以确定哪种联系最重要，哪种联系使更孤立的群体更接近参与，以及哪种社区加强战略可能使改善治理的结果变得可行。

Facilitating community strengthening by making public institutions more responsive to the needs of citizens is a central policy challenge in the global era. This project will advance theoretical, methodological and practical understandings of this issue by using comparative measures of personal ties and organizational connectedness in four municipalities to explicate the networks linking politicians, bureaucrats, civic leaders and ordinary citizens. The study will generate new measures of which kinds of connections count most, which ties bring more isolated groups closer to engagement, and which community strengthening strategies are likely to make improved governance outcomes feasible.