Politics, Policy, and Organizations

Politics, Policy, and Organizations bridges the gap between studies of public administration and the broader field of political science by highlighting the vital role that bureaucracies play in shaping public policy. With this landmark volume, leading scholars develop a new organizations approach to the study of public bureaucracy, linking bureaucratic choice to public policy-making through scientific inquiry.

Politics, Policy, and Organizations goes beyond the traditional, passive view of administrative agencies to describe the vital role of bureaucratic organizations in a functioning democracy. By placing the agencies front and center, the authors make a powerful case that bureaucracy is really a fourth branch of government—albeit one that generally goes unnoticed except in times of emergency or deep national division. This groundbreaking work provides a new and more accurate guide to the interactions of bureaucracies with other political institutions and the public at large. This work is essential for students and scholars in the field of public policy and public administration.

George A. Krause is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Kenneth J. Meier is Charles Puryear Professor of Liberal Arts and Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University.

Praise / Awards

• "Each of the remarkable essays in this volume brings to bear a new theoretical insight or a powerful new form of data analysis to some classic problem in the study of bureaucracy. Together, they provide convincing evidence that the study of public bureaucracy has reached the same level of theoretical and methodological sophistication as the study of legislative institutions or voting behavior."
  —Gary Miller, Washington University, St. Louis
  
• ". . . a convincing rebuttal to those who believe that government is too complex to be understood by social science theories and methods. These essays by a stellar group of authors, whose uniformly high quality and originality are rare for an edited volume, show how rigorous theoretical reasoning and sophisticated empirical research can enrich our appreciation of what we need to know, and what we can know, about bureaucratic government."
  —Larry Lynn, Texas A&M University