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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.
The Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government is an historic undertaking. It contains a wide range of essays that define the important questions in the field, evaluate where we are in answering them, and set the direction and terms of discourse for future work. The Handbook will have a substantial influence in defining the field for years to come. The chapters critically assess both the key works of state and local politics literature and the ways in which the sub-field has developed. It covers the main areas of study in subnational politics by exploring the central contributions to the comparative study of institutions, behavior, and policy in the American context. Each chapter outlines an agenda for future research.
Recent research demonstrates that the quality of public institutions is crucial for a number of important environmental, social, economic, and political outcomes, and thereby human well-being. The Quality of Government (QoG) approach directs attention to issues such as impartiality in the exercise of public power, professionalism in public service delivery, effective measures against corruption, and meritocracy instead of patronage and nepotism. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this rapidly expanding research field and also identifies viable avenues for future research. The initial chapters focus on theoretical approaches and debates, and the central question of how QoG can be measured. A second set of chapters examines the wealth of empirical research on how QoG relates to democratization, social trust and cohesion, ethnic diversity, happiness and human wellbeing, democratic accountability, economic growth and inequality, political legitimacy, environmental sustainability, gender equality, and the outbreak of civil conflicts. The remaining chapters turn to the perennial issue of which contextual factors and policy approaches—national, local, and international—have proven successful (and not so successful) for increasing QoG. The Quality of Government approach both challenges and complements important strands of inquiry in the social sciences. For research about democratization, QoG adds the importance of taking state capacity into account. For economics, the QoG approach shows that in order to produce economic prosperity, markets need to be embedded in institutions with a certain set of qualities. For development studies, QoG emphasizes that issues relating to corruption are integral to understanding development writ large.
Although everyone agrees on the need to make government work better, few understand public bureaucracy sufficiently well to offer useful suggestions, either theoretical or practical. In fact, some consider bureaucratic efficiency incompatible with democratic government. Douglas Yates places the often competing aims of efficiency and democracy in historical perspective and then presents a unique and systematic theory of the politics of bureaucracy, which he illustrates with examples from recent history and from empirical research. He argues that the United States operates under a system of "bureaucratic democracy," in which governmental decisions increasingly are made in bureaucratic settings, out of the public eye. He describes the rational, selfinterested bureaucrat as a "minimaxer," who inches forward inconspicuously, gradually accumulating larger budgets and greater power, in an atmosphere of segmented pluralism, of conflict and competition, of silent politics. To make the policy process more competitive, democratic, and open, Yates calls for strategic debate among policymakers and bureaucrats and insists that bureaucrats should give a public accounting of their significant decisions rather than bury them in incremental changes. He offers concrete proposals, applicable to federal, state, and local governments, for simplifying the now-chaotic bureaucratic policymaking system and at the same time bolstering representation and openness. This is a book for all political scientists, policymakers, government officials, and concerned citizens. It may well become a classic statement on the workings of public bureaucracy.
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.
Classic from the year 2008 in the subject Philosophy - Philosophy of the 19th Century, - entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Those who have done me the honour of reading my previous writings will probably receive no strong impression of novelty from the present volume; for the principles are those to which I have been working up during the greater part of my life, and most of the practical suggestions have been anticipated by others or by myself. There is novelty, however, in the fact of bringing them together, and exhibiting them in their connection; and also, I believe, in much that is brought forward in their support. Several of the opinions at all events, if not new, are for the present as little likely to meet with general acceptance as if they were. It seems to me, however, from various indications, and from none more than the recent debates on Reform of Parliament, that both Conservatives and Liberals (if I may continue to call them what they still call themselves) have lost confidence in the political creeds which they nominally profess, while neither side appears to have made any progress in providing itself with a better. Yet such a better doctrine must be possible; not a mere compromise, by splitting the difference between the two, but something wider than either, which, in virtue of its superior comprehensiveness, might be adopted by either Liberal or Conservative without renouncing anything which he really feels to be valuable in his own creed. When so many feel obscurely the want of such a doctrine, and so few even flatter themselves that they have attained it, any one may without presumption offer what his own thoughts, and the best that he knows of those of others, are able to contribute towards its formation.
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.
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.
In The Fourth Branch: Reconstructing the Administrative State for the Commercial Republic Brian J. Cook confronts head-on the accumulating derangements in the American constitutional system and how the administrative state has contributed to the problems, how it has been a key force in addressing the troubles, and how it can be reformed to serve the system better. The Fourth Branch is anchored in a powerful theory of regime design that guides a freshly comprehensive account of the historical development of successive political economies and administrative states in the United States and provides the normative grounding for more far-reaching constitutional change. Cook calls for a decisive, pattern-breaking response in the form of a constitutional redesign to accommodate a fourth branch, an administrative branch. The Fourth Branch shows that the creation of a fourth administrative branch is consistent with the history and traditions of American constitutionalism. Far more than that, however, the addition of a fourth branch could enhance American constitutionalism by making the separation of powers work better, increasing the likelihood that deliberative lawmaking will occur, strengthening civic capacity and public engagement in governance, and improving both accountability and coordination in the administrative state. By stressing that the administrative state in its current form is both biased toward business and seriously undermined by subordination to the three constitutional branches, Cook contends that neither abandoning the administrative state nor more deeply constitutionalizing or democratizing it within the existing constitutional structure is sufficient to fully legitimate and capitalize on administrative power to serve the public interest. Rather, Cook argues that it is imperative to confront the reality that a fundamental reordering of constitutional arrangements is necessary if the American commercial republic is to recover from its growing disorder and progress further toward its aspirations of liberal justice and limited but vigorous self-rule.