The classic book on the way American government agencies work and how they can be made to work better -- the "masterwork" of political scientist James Q. Wilson (The Economist) In Bureaucracy, the distinguished scholar James Q. Wilson examines a wide range of bureaucracies, including the US Army, the FBI, the CIA, the FCC, and the Social Security Administration, providing the first comprehensive, in-depth analysis of what government agencies do, why they operate the way they do, and how they might become more responsible and effective. It is the essential guide to understanding how American government works.
Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.
The call to "reinvent government"—to reform the government bureaucracy of the United States—resonates as loudly from elected officials as from the public. Examining the political and economic forces that have shaped the American civil service system from its beginnings in 1883 through today, the authors of this volume explain why, despite attempts at an overhaul, significant change in the bureaucracy remains a formidable challenge.
Gordon Tullock is among a small group of living legends in the field of political economics. This volume provides an entree to the mind of an original thinker. Professor Rowley provides deliberately sparse contextual introduction to each volume, opting to allow the very able and eloquent Tullock to speak for himself.
A thorough update to this well-regarded political history of American public administration. In this new edition of his provocative book Bureaucracy and Self-Government, Brian J. Cook reconsiders his thesis regarding the inescapable tension between the ideal of self-government and the reality of administratively centered governance. Revisiting his historical exploration of competing conceptions of politics, government, and public administration, Cook offers a novel way of thinking constitutionally about public administration that transcends debates about “big government.” Cook enriches his historical analysis with new scholarship and extends that analysis to the present, taking account of significant developments since the mid-1990s. Each chapter has been updated, and two new chapters sharpen Cook’s argument for recognizing a constitutive dimension in normative theorizing about public administration. The second edition also includes reviews of Jeffersonian impacts on administrative theory and practice and Jacksonian developments in national administrative structures and functions, a look at the administrative theorizing that presaged progressive reforms in civil service, and insight into the confounding complexities that characterize public thinking about administration in a postmodern political order.
This encyclopedic reference/text provides an analysis of the basic issues and major aspects of bureaucracy, bureaucratic politics and administrative theory, public policy, and public administration in historical and contemporary perspectives. Examining theoretical, philosophical, and empirical interpretations, as well as the intricate position of b
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.
Author Ludwig von Mises was concerned with the spread of socialist ideals and the increasing bureaucratization of economic life. While he does not deny the necessity of certain bureaucratic structures for the smooth operation of any civilized state, he disagrees with the extent to which it has come to dominate the public life of European countries and the United States. The author's purpose is to demonstrate that the negative aspects of bureaucracy are not so much a result of bad policies or corruption as the public tends to think but are the bureaucratic structures due to the very tasks these structures have to deal with. The main body of the book is therefore devoted to a comparison between private enterprise on the one hand and bureaucratic agencies/public enterprise on the other.
