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.

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.

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 develops a new theoretical perspective on bureaucratic influence and congressional agenda setting based on limited attention and government information processing. Using a comprehensive new data set on regulatory policymaking across the entire federal bureaucracy, Samuel Workman develops the theory of the dual dynamics of congressional agenda setting and bureaucratic problem solving as a way to understand how the US government generates information about, and addresses, important policy problems. Key to the perspective is a communications framework for understanding the nature of information and signaling between the bureaucracy and Congress concerning the nature of policy problems. Workman finds that congressional influence is innate to the process of issue shuffling, issue bundling, and the fostering of bureaucratic competition. In turn, bureaucracy influences the congressional agenda through problem monitoring, problem definition, and providing information that serves as important feedback in the development of an agenda.

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.

Are political understandings of bureaucracy incompatible with Weberian features of administrative neutrality? In examining the question of whether interest groups and elected officials are able to influence how government agencies implement the law, this book identifies the political origins of bureaucratic neutrality. In bridging the traditional gap between questions of internal management (public administration) and external politics (political science), Huber argues that â€~strategic neutrality' allows bureaucratic leaders to both manage their subordinates and sustain political support. By analyzing the OSH Act of 1970, Huber demonstrates the political origins and benefits of administrative neutrality, and contrasts it with apolitical and unconstrained administrative implementation. Historical analysis, interviews with field-level bureaucrats and their supervisors, and quantitative analysis provide a rich understanding of the twin difficulties agency leaders face as political actors and personnel managers.

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.

A playbook for mastering the art of bureaucracy from thought-leader Mark Schwartz.

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.

A timely new perspective on the impact of populism on the relationship between democracy and public administration.