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.
Black & white print. American Government 3e aligns with the topics and objectives of many government courses. Faculty involved in the project have endeavored to make government workings, issues, debates, and impacts meaningful and memorable to students while maintaining the conceptual coverage and rigor inherent in the subject. With this objective in mind, the content of this textbook has been developed and arranged to provide a logical progression from the fundamental principles of institutional design at the founding, to avenues of political participation, to thorough coverage of the political structures that constitute American government. The book builds upon what students have already learned and emphasizes connections between topics as well as between theory and applications. The goal of each section is to enable students not just to recognize concepts, but to work with them in ways that will be useful in later courses, future careers, and as engaged citizens. In order to help students understand the ways that government, society, and individuals interconnect, the revision includes more examples and details regarding the lived experiences of diverse groups and communities within the United States. The authors and reviewers sought to strike a balance between confronting the negative and harmful elements of American government, history, and current events, while demonstrating progress in overcoming them. In doing so, the approach seeks to provide instructors with ample opportunities to open discussions, extend and update concepts, and drive deeper engagement.
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 Bring Back the Bureaucrats, John J. DiIulio Jr., one of America’s most respected political scientists and an adviser to presidents in both parties, summons the facts and statistics to show us how America’s big government works and why reforms that include adding a million more people to the federal workforce by 2035 might help to slow government’s growth while improving its performance. Starting from the underreported reality that the size of the federal workforce hasn’t increased since the early 1960s, even though the federal budget has skyrocketed. The number of federal programs has ballooned; Bring Back the Bureaucrats tells us what our elected leaders won’t: there are not enough federal workers to work for our democracy effectively. DiIulio reveals that the government in America is Leviathan by Proxy, a grotesque form of debt-financed big government that guarantees terrible government. Washington relies on state and local governments, for-profit firms, and nonprofit organizations to implement federal policies and programs. Big-city mayors, defense industry contractors, nonprofit executives, and other national proxies lobby incessantly for more federal spending. This proxy system chokes on chores such as cleaning up toxic waste sites, caring for hospitalized veterans, collecting taxes, handling plutonium, and policing more than $100 billion annually in “improper payments.” The lack of competent, well-trained federal civil servants resulted in the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the troubled launch of Obamacare’s “health exchanges.” Bring Back the Bureaucrats is further distinguished by the presence of E. J. Dionne Jr. and Charles Murray, two of the most astute voices from the political left and right, respectively, who offer their candid responses to DiIulio at the end of the book.
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.
Richardson offers a careful analysis of US federal agencies examining the interaction between executive and legislative branches of government, combining Austrian economics, Public Choice and Evolutionary methodology in his approach.
To be effective, government must be run by professional managers. When decisions that should be taken by government officials are delegated to private contractors without adequate oversight, the public interest is jeopardized. Verkuil uses his inside perspectives on government performance and accountability to examine the tendencies at both the federal and state levels to 'deprofessionalize' government. Viewing the turn to contractors and private sector solutions in ideological and functional terms, he acknowledges that the problem cannot be solved without meaningful civil service reforms that make it easier to hire, incent and, where necessary, fire career employees and officials. The indispensable goal is to revitalize bureaucracy so it can continue to competently deliver essential services. By highlighting the leadership that already exists in the career ranks, Verkuil senses a willingness, or even eagerness, to make government, like America, great again.
This book addresses a seemingly simple question: Just how many people really work for the federal government? Official counts show a relatively small total of 1.9 million full-time civil servants, as of 1996. But, according to Paul Light, the true head count is nearly nine times higher than the official numbers, with about 17 million people actually providing the government with goods and services. Most are part of what Light calls the "shadow of government"—nonfederal employees working under federal contracts, grants, and mandates to state and local governments. In this book--the first that attempts to establish firm estimates of the shadow work force-- he explores the reasons why the official size of the federal government has remained so small while the shadow of government has grown so large. Light examines the political incentives that make the illusion of a small government so attractive, analyzes the tools used by officials to keep the official headcount small, and reveals how the appearance of smallness affects the management of government and the future of the public service. Finally, he points out ways the federal government can better manage the shadow work force it has built over the past half-century.
Confessions of a Civil Servant is filled with lessons on leading change in government and the military. Bob Stone based the book on thirty years as a revolutionary in government. It comes at a time when the events of 9-11 are sharpening America's demands for government at all levels that works.
