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.

The bureaucracy in the United States has a hand in almost all aspects of our lives, from the water we drink to the parts in our cars. For a force so influential and pervasive, however, this body of all nonelective government officials remains an enigmatic, impersonal entity. The literature of bureaucratic theory is rife with contradictions and mysteries. Bureaucrats, Politics, and the Environment attempts to clarify some of these problems. The authors surveyed the workers at two agencies: enforcement personnel from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and employees of the New Mexico Environment Department. By examining what they think about politics, the environment, their budgets, and the other institutions and agencies with which they interact, this work puts a face on the bureaucracy and provides an explanation for its actions.

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.

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.

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.