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.
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.
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.
Hybrid organizations, governmental entities that mix characteristics of private and public sector organizations, are increasingly popular mechanisms for implementing public policy. Koppell assesses the performance of the growing quasi-government in terms of accountability and control. Comparing hybrids to traditional government agencies in three policy domains - export promotion, housing and international development - Koppell argues that hybrid organizations are more difficult to control largely due to the fact that hybrids behave like regulated organizations rather than extensions of administrative agencies. Providing a rich conception of the bureaucratic control problem, Koppell also argues that hybrid organizations are intrinsically less responsive to the political preferences of their political masters and suggests that as policy tools they are inappropriate for some tasks. This book provides a timely study of an important administrative and political phenomenon.
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.
Corruption and ineffectiveness are often expected of public servants in developing countries. However, some groups within these states are distinctly more effective and public oriented than the rest. Why? Patchwork Leviathan explains how a few spectacularly effective state organizations manage to thrive amid general institutional weakness and succeed against impressive odds. Drawing on the Hobbesian image of the state as Leviathan, Erin Metz McDonnell argues that many seemingly weak states actually have a wide range of administrative capacities. Such states are in fact patchworks sewn loosely together from scarce resources into the semblance of unity. McDonnell demonstrates that when the human, cognitive, and material resources of bureaucracy are rare, it is critically important how they are distributed. Too often, scarce bureaucratic resources are scattered throughout the state, yielding little effect. McDonnell reveals how a sufficient concentration of resources clustered within particular pockets of a state can be transformative, enabling distinctively effective organizations to emerge from a sea of ineffectiveness. Patchwork Leviathan offers a comprehensive analysis of successful statecraft in institutionally challenging environments, drawing on cases from contemporary Ghana and Nigeria, mid-twentieth-century Kenya and Brazil, and China in the early twentieth century. Based on nearly two years of pioneering fieldwork in West Africa, this incisive book explains how these highly effective pockets differ from the Western bureaucracies on which so much state and organizational theory is based, providing a fresh answer to why well-funded global capacity-building reforms fail—and how they can do better.
In Changing Bureaucracies, international experts provide an unparalleled look at how public sector bureaucracies can better adapt to the reality of unprecedented levels of uncertainty and complexity, and how they can better respond to the emerging needs and demands of citizens and beneficiaries. In particular, they discuss in detail how evaluation can play an important role in aiding bureaucracies in adapting, while noting that the value of evaluation is not at all automatic. Written in a clear and accessible prose, the contributors identify stability as a strength of bureaucratic structures, although adaptability is required in order to remain relevant. They also emphasize the need for bureaucratic rules and practices to be open to examination, such as through evaluation, noting that these rules may take on a life of their own, increasing distrust and conflicting with a meaningful focus on how outcomes and impacts benefit citizens. The book concludes with guidance for both evaluators and for public sector leaders about steps that they can take to improve the responsiveness and relevance of public sector organizations. Pioneering the provision of reflections on how evaluation can play an important role in aiding bureaucracies in adapting, Changing Bureaucracies is an important acquisition for public sector leaders, evaluators, evaluation managers and commissioners and academics alike.