Juliet Musso

Associate Professor
Director, Master of Public Policy Program

As a college student, Juliet Musso wanted to be a psychologist. Then a stint working in a poorly funded community psychiatric hospital showed her where the real problems lay—within our fragmented structure of governance. Now she’s looking for solutions.

Juliet Musso’s foray into psychiatric care came at an auspicious time for the field. It was the 1980s, and state hospitals were being closed so that mental healthcare could be provided at the community level.

"It sounded great," says Musso, "but the problem was, there was no money to do it." Patients were warehoused in places such as nursing homes that were unprepared to accommodate the mentally ill, she says. She describes scenes of filthy, inadequate facilities where patients were poorly clothed and could be seen eating garbage.

The experience provided her with something of an epiphany.

"I saw that it was policy, not treatment, that most affected patients," she says. "From there, I became interested in understanding public policy, and the tension between state responsibilities and community obligations, between centralization and localism."

Musso’s intellectual curiosity led her to the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, where she wanted to study, among other things, the effects of decentralization of government on service delivery. Armed with a master’s degree, she then went to work as a legislative analyst in Sacramento. For the next four years, she analyzed how the state and its localities were grappling with service arrangements following Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes throughout the state and capped the rate at which they could be increased.

"At the time, there was a lot of talk about making government make sense," says Musso. "I was analyzing how the allocation of service responsibilities and financial arrangements affected the state and its local governments."

All along, Musso focused on the bigger questions raised by these policies. At what point are services best supplied by central authorities, and when by communities? Who pays?

The Path to Answers

These questions brought Musso back to Berkeley, where she earned a Ph.D. in public policy.

"I liked being a legislative analyst, but I wanted to do more in-depth research than I was able to do there," she says. "I wanted to do policy research rather than policy analysis."

Musso had another reason for getting her Ph.D. "I really wanted to teach," she says. "It sounds corny, but I felt a calling."

For her dissertation, she studied communities in California that chose to form cities rather than rely on county services. Why did they do so? she asked. "There is always a tension about the relationships between the big (regions and states) and the small (localities). Who should deliver the services and how are they funded?" she says. "These are questions of federalism."

In 1994, Dr. Musso came to USC and has served as a professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development since. In her first year, she worked on projects for the National Association of State Budget Offices. She studied what the federal government was then asking states to do in the areas of immigration, health, and transportation.

Two years later, Musso became involved in a long-term research project that will continue through next year: studying Los Angeles’s often-tumultuous neighborhood council system.

Counseling the Councils

Working with colleagues Terry L. Cooper and Christopher Weare, Musso has been studying Los Angeles’s local neighborhood associations since 1996.

"We started by investigating what community organizations operated at the local level," she says. "The stereotype of Los Angeles was that there were no neighborhoods or community. But that wasn’t the case."

Also contrary to what she had expected, Musso found that the neighborhood organizations she studied were based more on geography and history rather than class or ethnicity.

"Some areas had quite a few neighborhood associations," she says. "Many organizations in east L.A., for example, are the extensions of storefront organizations funded during the War on Poverty."

Similarly, groups on the Westside had formed around environmental and land-use issues, she says. And in the Harbor area, she found a high incidence of fraternal organizations, such as the Elks. Musso’s research on the benefits of localism shifted focus when provisions were made for a neighborhood council system in 1999 as part of L.A. city charter reform.

She and her colleagues have studied the system from day one, looking at such questions as: Do the neighborhood councils actually represent the diversity of their stakeholders? How does each council operate? What local services can a council arrange? She and colleagues orient research reports toward city officials and neighborhood council leaders, and have seen some improvements implemented as a result of their work.

Despite the city’s interest in her research, Musso maintains a fiercely independent stance when it comes to her scholarship.

"We are not consultants," she says. "We get no money from the city." Organizations such as the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, and the National Science Foundation have funded much of her research. The project’s seed funding was provided by the USC Urban Initiative.

"Being independently funded gives us a position of neutrality, which lends more credence to our research," she says. "That’s the beauty of being a university researcher: we have the liberty of speaking truth to power."

The results of her work have surprised many people–including herself. She quips, "I expected the whole system to have failed by now!"

No surprise, then, that the Los Angeles Times once characterized Musso as "the world’s biggest cynic."

"It was difficult to see how the reform could get anywhere," she explains. "There has been mixed support among elected officials, and there was little funding for it. Basically, few factors for success were in place."

Musso’s next major research project, now in its nascent stages, will compare neighborhood organizations and faith-based organizations, and determine how, why, and to what extent people become involved in different types of organizations.

Schooled on Research

Amid her research activities, Musso spends much of her time teaching courses at the undergraduate, master’s degree, and doctoral levels.

"People talk about bringing research into the classroom," she says. "But I like to bring the classroom into my research." Musso employs students as research assistants and focuses her teaching on professional development—that is, teaching that develops skills and that can serve as a gateway to a profession.

But for Musso, education is about more than acquiring skills. "I want to challenge habits of thought, and foster critical thinking and analytic reasoning," she says. "Teaching should be about capacity-building."

When describing her approach to teaching, Musso recalls a bumper sticker whose message she passes on to her students each semester. The message: "Don’t believe everything you think."