Kenneth R. Mladenka

Kenneth Ray Mladenka (born September 4, 1943) is an American political scientist who spent the bulk of his academic career at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, and is known for his research on the urban political process, bureaucracy, local government, and the distribution of public services, rather than the more traditional study of parties and elections.

Background

Mladenka (pronounced MAH DEEN KA) was born to Joe Mladenka, Jr., and the former Della Valiguva in Lavaca County and reared in Sugar Land in Fort Bend County in the Houston Metropolitan Area. In 1958-1959, he was the Texas state oratory champion for high school. Mladenka is a veteran of the Vietnam War, having served as a captain in the United States Army in the 4th Infantry Division and the 716th Military Police Battalion from 1967-1968. He was stationed in Saigon during the Tet Offensive and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal. He received his master's degree from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and his Ph.D. in 1975 from Rice University in Houston. His dissertation, available full length on-line, is entitled The Distribution of Urban Public Services. After completing his graduate studies, Mladenka was appointed in 1975 as assistant professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also spent a year at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In 1979, he joined the TAMU faculty.

Scholarly work

Mladenka is the author of the textbook, The Unfinished Republic: American Government in the 21st Century, a study of the dynamic nature of politics and how the system reacts to change. With Kim Quaile Hill (born 1946), then of the University of Houston and later Texas A&M University, Mladenka is co-author of another textbook, Texas Government: Politics and Economics. He has also penned Democratic Governance in American States and Cities (ISBN 0-534-13603-6) and The Dual Republic: A Multiracial/multicultural Approach to American Government (ISBN 0-13-859679-4).

In 1977, Mladenka and Kim Hill completed the study "The Distribution of Benefits in an Urban Environment: Parks and Libraries in Houston." The researchers found that the location of parks and libraries are based on "bureaucratic rules and appear to be little affected by explicit racial and socioeconomic criteria." Mladenka and Hill in 1978 did a similar study on police services in urban areas.

Mladenka's research revealed that scholarly journals during the 1980s published fewer articles on urban politics than in the other subfields of the discipline. He found that urban scholars are not as prominent on the editorial boards of the major political science journals, and that traditional scholars, called empiricists, regard most urban research, dependent on case studies, paradigms, quantitative analysis, and theoretical perspectives, as confusing and repetitive jargon in sharp contrast to the traditional emphasis of the discipline. These urban scholars stress "local settings where global, national, and voting behavior outcomes happen at street level and where day-to-day lives are affected."

Mladenka contributed "The Political Machine, the Urban Bureaucracy, and the Distribution of Public Services" to Chicago Politics Papers, a joint effort of the University of Illinois and Northwestern University, to study the period between the two Chicago mayors named Daley.

He is a past president of the urban politics section of the American Political Science Association and editor of Urban Politics Newsletter. He published research articles in

Social Science Quarterly and the American Political Science Review. In a study of the distribution of parks and recreational opportunities in Chicago, Mladenka found that by the late 1980s class had replaced race as the determinant factor in the distribution of urban services.

Later life

After leaving TAMU, Mladenka and his wife, Linda Marie Mladenka (born 1947), moved to the resort community of Crested Butte in Gunnison County in west central Colorado. Mrs. Mladenka operates a business there called At Home in Crested Butte. The Mladenkas have two daughters, Brooke M. Mladenka (born 1976) and Lauren Elizabeth Mladenka (born 1982). The couple divorced, and Mladenka moved first to Hollywood, Florida, and later near Austin in Georgetown in Williamson County, Texas. In the fall semester of 2010, Mladenka was teaching the Texas state government course, required in most college major fields in Texas, at the Rio Grande campus of Austin Community College.