This book assesses the influence of bureaucracy in American politics, asking how government agencies and Congress come to know about, and understand, important policy problems confronting citizens and government officials.
Offering readable case studies and well-paired figures and tables (presented in both technical and nontechnical fashion), Bureaucratic Dynamics uses principal-agent theory to explain how the public policy system works.
This book introduces international bureaucracy as a key field of study for public administration and also rediscovers it as an essential ingredient in the study of international organisations. To what extent, how and why do international bureaucracies challenge and supplement the inherent Westphalian intergovernmental order based on territorial sovereignty? To what extent, how and why do international bureaucracies supplement the existing international intergovernmental order with a multi-dimensional international order subjugated by a compound set of decision-making dynamics? International bureaucracies constitute a distinct and increasingly important feature of public administration studies. However, the role of international bureaucracies has been largely neglected in most social science sub-disciplines. This book takes a first step into a third generation of international organisation (IO) studies. It will be of immense value to academics in politics and international relations as well as practitioners in public administration in domestic governments and international organizations.
States at Work explores the mundane practices of state-making in Africa by focussing on the daily functioning of public services and the practices of civil servants.
In Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions: The Politics of Controlling the U.S. Bureaucracy, the author argues that political control of the bureaucracy from the president and the Congress is largely contingent on an agency’s internal characteristics of workforce composition, workforce responsibilities, and workforce organization. Through a revised principal-agent framework, the author explores an agent-principal model to use the agent as the starting-point of analysis. The author tests the agent-principal model across 14 years and 132 bureaus and finds that both the president and the House of Representatives exert influence over the bureaucracy, but agency characteristics such as the degree of politization among the workforce, the type of work the agency is engaged in, and the hierarchical nature of the agency affects how agencies are controlled by their political masters. In a detailed case study of one agency, the U.S. Department of Education, the author finds that education policy over a 65-year period is elite-led, and that that hierarchical nature of the department conditions political principals’ influence. This book works to overcome three hurdles that have plagued bureaucratic studies: the difficulty of uniform sampling across the bureaucracy, the overuse of case studies, and the overreliance on the principal-agent theoretical approach.
By examining what these personnel think about politics, the environment, their budgets, and the other institutions and agencies with which they interact, this work illuminates the actions of the bureaucracy and gives it a human face."--Jacket.
First Published in 1993. Carefully using four case studies, Johnson explores relationships between federal agencies and the legislators most responsible for their oversight. This text adds to our understanding of what are often called subgovernments.