Is it possible to reverse the order of dropdowns?

I'm putting together a component at the moment that is largely doing everything that I need it to.  One remaining irritation, though, is that the filter dropdown lists (in the administration list-view interface) are listed by ID, oldest to most recent.

The same is true of foreign key dropdowns that are used when entering new data on single-item pages.

I've tried to work out how to reverse these lists (or order them by another parameter, alphabetically, for example), but I'm really struggling to work out how.  Does anyone know how to do this ..?

Thanks in advance for any help.