In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the U.S. Federal Executive available in Paperback
In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the U.S. Federal Executive
- ISBN-10:
- 081570061X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780815700616
- Pub. Date:
- 05/01/2000
- Publisher:
- Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
- ISBN-10:
- 081570061X
- ISBN-13:
- 9780815700616
- Pub. Date:
- 05/01/2000
- Publisher:
- Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the U.S. Federal Executive
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780815700616 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2000 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 242 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.55(d) |
About the Author
Joel D. Aberbach, former senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, is professor of political science and director of the Center for American Politics and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Bert A. Rockman is professor and head of the department of political science at Purdue University.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Reforming the
Bureaucracy
MOST PEOPLE THINK of bureaucracy as a downright dull subject. Yet for thirty years the American federal executive has been awash in political controversy. From George Wallace's attacks on "pointy headed bureaucrats," to Richard Nixon's "responsiveness program," to the efforts of Al Gore and Bill Clinton to "reinvent government," the people who administer the American state have stood uncomfortably in the spotlight.
Time and again, the American federal executive has been caught in the web of politics. This book covers the turmoil and controversy swirling around the bureaucracy since 1970, when the Nixon administration was trying to tighten its control of the executive branch. Drawing on interview data, documentary evidence, and analysis of the politics of the period, we aim to understand the reasons for the controversy about administration and what can (and can't) be done about it.
We focus on three major themes of the era. The first is often called the "quiet crisis" of American administration: a hypothesized decline in the quality and morale of federal executives. The second, which we call the "noisy crisis," refers to the large question of bureaucrats' responsiveness to political authority. Administrators are important people in the policy process. Presidents and members of Congress want to control what goes on in the bureaucracy because that has much to do with who gets what from government. Political leaders also find it convenient to blame bureaucrats when things go wrong. As aresult,administrators of federal agencies often find themselves in the thick of the political debate, whether they like it or not. When this natural controversy is exacerbated by intense disagreements about what government ought to do and who ought to decide what it should do, great conflicts involving administration are likely to follow.
The third theme is the movement to "reinvent" American government. At least overtly, the reinventors reject the notion that there is a problem with the people in the federal government. They do, however, believe government is broken and needs fixing, and they argue that one way to do this is to introduce a variety of private sector techniques into public administration, such as making federal agencies more responsive to the preferences of what they call customers—that is, individuals and groups directly affected by public agencies. They also argue that government should "cut back to basics." In the end, the vital questions of what government should do and to whom it should respond are central to the debate about administration.
We examine these themes and their linkages in some detail as we progress through the book. We look in detail at why these issues arise and at their validity. And we consider changes that might make the federal government's administration work better. But our underlying argument is that much of the debate about the administration of government is really a debate about what government ought to do. Bureaucrats are convenient targets in contemporary political battles, but in the end it is up to elected leaders to reach agreement on what they want done and how they want policy carried out. If they can do that, our evidence suggests that American federal executives will carry out the authorities' political will (assuming they are given adequate support and realistic policies to implement). Without such agreement, the federal executive will be caught in a web of controversy that is essentially political rather than administrative.
Reform in Perspective
Reports and commissions come and go detailing the purportedly grim state of some aspect or other of the U.S. federal executive and its organization. Different diagnoses are issued. Reform efforts big and small are made. A few, such as the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, have lasting effects. In the 1960s, the emphasis of reform proposals was on representativeness, responsiveness to new participants, and systems thinking. In the 1990s, the emphasis was on efficiency, markets, and even on transforming citizens into "customers." At each point, the bureaucracy was thought to be resistant to new tidings.
Trying to make government work better is a long-standing feature of American public life. Some of this may well have to do with the democratic culture that infuses American politics and the popularized Jeffersonian belief that any system needs to be shaken up from time to time. The presumption is that a system undisturbed for long may prove to be uncontrollable. This long-standing populist impulse is reflected today in citizens' general attitudes about the bureaucracy and in their views of career politicians.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Progressive movement attempted to bring two disparate forces together: direct popular democracy and proficient government. Proficiency in government, the Progressives believed, required honesty, legality, and selection to service by merit. It required, above all, eliminating the influence of political parties and party patronage in staffing public administration. Eliminating the corrupting influences of political parties was also seen as the way to restore the vitality of American democracy. Professionalism in public administration and direct popular participation in making policy choices were the two capstones of the Progressive movement. The underlying assumption was that policymaking and administration were distinctly different activities, an assumption known as the politics-administration dichotomy.
Upon examination, however, this stark dichotomy fails to hold up. Politics and policy cannot be held in a watertight compartment separated from the administrative sector. It is true, of course, that politicians and civil servants tend to engage policymaking in different ways. Politicians tend to think in broader brush strokes and bureaucrats in terms of specifics, seeking technically appropriate solutions to more precisely defined problems. However, neither the role of the bureaucracy nor the views of administrative officials can be kept free from the political debate or from political machinations, as the Progressives had hoped they could be.
In our view, reformers will not get very far if they define administrative problems only as apolitical matters. What underlies a management or personnel reform crafted in response to government's problems are more fundamental issues: Who exercises power? How much discretion and judgment should administrators have? Who is legally responsible for government actions? And to whom in a system of separated and often divided powers should bureaucratic agents respond? Bureaucracy is very much about power; it is thus eminently political. It is therefore not surprising that the U.S. federal executive is controversial, since the government it serves has been steeped in controversy. Norton Long argued many years ago that administrative activity was energized by power, and that power was the product of the clarity of signals sent from political principals to administrative agents. Other observers have noted that administration is itself a form of power. The fact is that administration is a crucial mechanism for achieving policy intentions or for thwarting them. Political leaders, consequently, often fear the ability of administrators to circumvent their will.
Because bureaucracy is enmeshed in politics, so too are administrative reform efforts. While we do not dismiss the value of reform, we cast a skeptical eye at the panaceas many reforms promise. In the long term, reforms always have unforeseen consequences. Reformers are kept in business by tending to the consequences of previous reforms. This is because reform solutions tend to be driven by the problem of the day, which is not the problem of every day. However they are rationalized over the short run, reform proposals typically reflect self-interested behavior on the part of supporting interests. Riding the hobbyhorse of administrative reform is often useful to some set of political actors for stoking their political ambitions, gaining advantages in political power, and furthering their policy goals. This also means that other political actors will find any particular set of reforms that disadvantage their interests worth resisting.
If the issue is not just the bureaucracy, but the politics in which it is embedded, then it is relevant to ask not only how the U.S. federal executive system is changing, but also how American politics is changing. It is necessary, among other things, to note the ways in which the federal executive adapts to such changes in the political system as well as what forces in the political environment are working to change the nature of government—its operations, scope, and activities.
The changing political context in which the federal executive functions and the alteration in the fundamental problems it and government in general face are central to our book. Thus we examine the environment of the federal executive over time as well as the composition and nature of the federal executives themselves. The raw ingredients of this investigation are the characteristics, perceptions, views, and beliefs of America's top federal civil servants and subcabinet-level political appointees in the agencies. We are primarily concerned with domestic policy across three Republican presidential administrations from 1970 through the early 1990s. The data were gleaned from extensive face-to-face interviews with these officials during the second year of the first Nixon administration (1970), at the midpoint of the second Reagan administration (1986-87), and toward the end of the Bush administration (1991-92). We supplement these data with other sources of evidence, particularly in chapter 7 on reinventing government where we make extensive use of documents and of various surveys of government officials.
Numerous issues affect the bureaucracy as a whole, including recent emphases on customer satisfaction, downsizing, and employee morale and training. It is, however, at the top levels of the bureaucracy where leadership is demanded and where attention to issues of representativeness, quality, morale, responsiveness, and adaptability is especially crucial. What happens throughout the administrative system is strongly affected by top leadership. Signals and cues are important in organizations. Clarity in them does not ensure that they will be followed, but a lack of clarity or the presence of contradiction ensures that there will be many interpretations about what policy is.
Politics, policy, and expertise meet uneasily at the top of the bureaucracy. A presidential administration's ambitions (and its political appointees) join there with a senior career civil service that is not invested in these ambitions. Presidential administrations demand responsiveness from career officials, but career officials must balance neutrality with helpfulness. The tensions between political direction and skepticism bred from experience are notable at the top levels of any administrative system. Because of the institutional features of the American system of government, these tensions are particularly strong at the top of the federal bureaucracy. Not everything important to the functioning of the federal bureaucracy, of course, occurs at the top levels, but most everything ultimately reverberates from the top. Therefore, we have chosen to focus our attention on the top layers of the bureaucracy—the politically appointed officials of presidential administrations and the senior career executives.
History tends to have little standing in Washington, and some may dismiss this work as merely history—perhaps, as history goes in Washington, even ancient history. While in one sense, this is indeed history, the issues the data help us address are very much alive and relevant now. The discussion about altering the traditional contours of the administrative state in the United States and elsewhere continues today. Some of this discussion has even been translated into action, though to date more outside of the United States than in.
Why the Quest for Administrative Reform?
Why have so many and varied attempts been made to reform the federal bureaucracy? Why has so much attention been focused on it and on those who fill high positions within it? Why has so much energy been expended in the last thirty years on getting the management of the federal executive "right"?
The rush toward reform of the bureaucracy over the past three decades reflects a combination of factors. We believe these factors can be boiled down to five broad considerations. One is the growth in the complexity of government. A second factor is the increasing level of populistic democratization in public life. A third has to do with the growth of "management science," which is always on the prowl for something "new and better." The displacement of older political coalitions by newer ones is a fourth consideration. Who controls the administrative apparatus of government was always important, especially in the heyday of party patronage and political machines. Although political machines are no longer what they once were, the bureaucracy remains a vital resource for politicians. In fact, the bureaucracy is probably far more important now, even though it can no longer supply legions of party campaigners. Its importance as a resource for political leadership is bound up in the growing complexity of government but also in a fifth reason behind the rush to reform—namely, a perceived bureaucratic resistance to change.
Governmental Complexity
The New Deal regime of Franklin Roosevelt created an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies designed to soften the negative externalities associated with the unrestrained play of free markets. This accelerated a process that had been going on for some time. Rapid expansions of industrialization and commerce brought regulatory responses from government. While the growth of the regulatory state began earlier, it found a justificatory theory in the positive state doctrines of the New Deal.
New problems emerged, especially as scientific advances showed that nearly every aspect of living was in some way dangerous to the health or well-being of the citizenry. From pesticides to automobiles that either would not work (lemon laws), or were dangerous if they did (the ill-fated Corvair), or spewed noxious by-products, a range of problems was placed on the public agenda for solution. The solution was typically to write a law, establish an agency, and set the agency to do its regulatory work. But the work of the agencies would often prove contentious, whether the agencies were coming to terms with the negative by-products of an increasingly complex economy or with problems that stemmed from patterns of social behavior and discrimination. If all of these activities were controversial, there is no doubt that the regulation of social behavior was especially so. The civil rights revolution of the mid-1960s, for example, spawned laws leading to many regulations that were unpopular with large segments of the population. Activist courts also promoted regulations, with little visible public demand driving them other than the zealous support of advocacy groups.
Government was becoming more complex and, inevitably, more intrusive. Not all of this was a product of Democratic hands. At its outset, Richard Nixon's presidency invigorated older regulatory agencies and espoused new regulatory causes such as environmentalism. Most regulatory crusades are popular when they begin, except with those who know they will be adversely affected. Only later do broader segments of the population become aware of the costs they will incur. That typically is when regulations become unpopular or at least controversial.
The important thing to point out is that it is the bureaucracy that carries the burden of enforcing regulations, popular or not. It may be, of course, that bureaucrats are inclined to carry out unpopular regulations as strictly as popular ones. That, naturally enough, would lead to their being targets of hostility or ridicule. Politicians can then have it both ways: produce regulations to satisfy some constituencies, and then rail against their enforcement to other constituencies.
The American citizenry seems, at the very least, ambivalent about the regulatory state. It is not uncommon for the public to desire public goods that may be most easily produced through regulation, such as cleaner air and water, better public health, or equal treatment. It also is not uncommon for the public to complain when generally desirable outcomes require specific do's and don'ts. Some regulations are relatively popular because they seem to involve costs for only a few concentrated interests, while purportedly achieving a larger public good. If successfully articulated in public propaganda campaigns, however, the intense opposition of the concentrated interests may sour the regulatory climate over time. Regulations will be especially controversial, though, when broader publics find themselves adversely affected—for example, on issues such as school busing or centralized inspections for automobile emissions. In such cases, authority itself becomes controversial, and the bureaucracy is seen as insensitive to public concern. This, we believe, is one reason there has been such attention to administrative reform in the contemporary era. Yet while distrust of government grew along with the growth of the regulatory state, administration per se is only a small part of the problem. Rather, the fundamental causes lie in deceptive or illegal practices by leaders such as Presidents Johnson and Nixon and in disagreements about what government should be doing.
More Democracy
Along with other institutions during the 1970s, bureaucracies democratized their procedures. Some of this was achieved by statutory law and some by court edicts. For the most part, as William Gormley has shown, the 1970s saw the expansion of procedural rights and participatory claims throughout the bureaucracy. Gormley, in fact, regards the 1970s as a decade of inspired governmental reforms. These reforms, he argues, increased the accountability of bureaucratic agencies through such mechanisms as impact statements. They also purportedly increased the representativeness of agencies' staffs and their responsiveness to citizen (which may also be read as interest group) claims. The possibility, of course, is that all of these efforts at reform created other, maybe even larger, problems. One thing the reforms began to do was to tie agencies up in an avalanche of paperwork and internal regulations to meet new criteria of accountability and procedural responsiveness.
The democratization of government, the increasingly active role of Congress and the courts in governing agency behavior, a tremendous growth in the number of advocacy groups, and the declining level of citizen confidence in government are possible contributors to an erosion of bureaucratic legitimacy. Increasingly assertive publics have little reason to defer to authorities whom they distrust. The idea that the problems of governing could be blamed on bumbling bureaucrats and an oppressive bureaucracy is now widespread. In a culture of democratic populism, the federal (and any other) bureaucracy becomes an easy target for the perceived ailments of government, which are often characterized by the catch phrase "fraud, waste, and abuse." Accordingly, the citizenry believes that the answer to broad-scale policy problems, such as balancing the budget, lies not in trade-offs between cutting popular expenditures or raising taxes, but in eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse.
While none of these factors alone provide the definitive reason for a growing quest for reform of the bureaucracy, all of them together have contributed substantially to perceptions of a ponderously inefficient and unresponsive bureaucracy—inefficient and unresponsive in part, ironically, because of the accumulation of demands that were themselves the product of reform.
Organizational Engineering
The development of management science and industrial engineering as a response to large-scale organizational management promotes the belief that there is always a better way to do things. Organizational and procedural rearrangements can be designed and implemented amidst a sea of otherwise uncontrollable factors, though their consequences are not always foreseeable. Nevertheless, an understandable tendency (particularly in a world where humankind has mastered many of its problems through industrial organization) is to look for engineering solutions to problems, even to problems that have few definitive answers. If no one believed in the efficacy of management science, business schools and schools of public administration would lose their raison d'être.
Techniques for organizational engineering come and go with remarkable rapidity. New techniques come into fashion and old ones go out, much like the outfits modeled in Paris, Milan, and New York. Today it is New Public Management (NPM); yesterday it was Program, Planning, Budgeting, Systems (PPBS). John Kingdon's description of how policies are made is applicable to the streams of management reform and why some are chosen at any given point. A set of promoters of a technique come together with a set of "buyers" at key moments, joining problems and solutions in ways that satisfy their immediate needs. Key buyers are presidential administrations, most of which feel the need to look proficient at managing the government.
While our language here is skeptical about the reasons presidential administrations buy into management techniques and other organizational prescriptions, we are willing to grant that some presidents (Carter certainly) may themselves have great faith in "management science." But if presidents have higher motives, they also clearly have political ones. Aside from the benefits that accrue to them for touting how they will make government work more efficiently and effectively, presidential administrations clearly have an interest in strengthening their political leverage and advancing their policy goals. The bureaucracy can be central to facilitating or impeding these objectives. Understandably, presidents want the bureaucracy to work well—for them. This point is elaborated shortly, but, in the meantime, it is worth observing that Ronald Reagan, the recent president who for good or ill probably had the largest impact on the bureaucracy, used mostly blunt instruments—targeting people, budgets, and programs. He had little reason to hide his schemes behind the facade of management science. His administration, nonetheless, was helped by the Civil Service Reform Act bequeathed by Carter, which allowed the Reaganites to manipulate the personnel system to accord with the strong policy preferences they and their leader held.
To some extent, there is a contagion effect in bureaucratic reform. Something that seems to work somewhere (the private sector, a different level of government, another government) is likely to lead to its adoption somewhere else. These days, the contagion is international, and reforms of a similar nature have spread extensively around the globe, suggesting that the industrialized democracies are coping with similar problems. These reforms are reflected in the National Performance Review in the United States, but they have been in some ways more extensively implemented elsewhere, under the general rubric of New Public Management. A Norwegian observer describes the main emphases of NPM as "market orientation, efficiency, flexibility, merit pay, [and] consumer orientation." This should sound familiar.
Displacement of Political Coalitions
One powerful motive for bureaucratic reform is to ensure the responsiveness of the system and its executives to the reigning political coalition. The fact that the American system divides authority across political institutions invites a struggle for responsiveness. "Responsive competence" is language that came into fashion during the Reagan administration to replace the ideal of "neutral competence." The idea of responsiveness, however, was not intended by the Reagan administration to mean responsiveness to those in Congress or even to the courts. The intent was for the bureaucracy to be exclusively responsive to the White House and its key appointees.
All presidential administrations, to a greater or lesser degree, believe that the civil service they inherit reflects the biases of the previous administration, particularly when that previous administration, as is usually the case, was of the opposite party. The longer the previous party was in power, the greater the level of suspicion. Even the moderate Eisenhower administration was initially convinced that its predecessor left office after ensconcing many of its patronage appointments into the career service. The Nixon administration grew increasingly attentive to what it perceived to be a disloyalty problem, largely because the career service was, in Nixon's view, more committed to the programs of the previous Kennedy-Johnson administrations than it was to the Nixon priorities. Whatever the truth of that perception, Nixon's priorities were to have his political interests served, even when these violated lawful procedure.
The stronger an administration's policy objectives and the more these contrast with those of the status quo, the more attention that administration is likely to give to the bureaucracy. A Bush appointee, for example, contrasted the situation of the Bush administration, coming to office after eight years of its own party (the Republicans) holding executive power, with that of the Reagan administration, which not only succeeded a Democratic administration but also was largely at war with the policy legacy of earlier Democratic administrations:
If you are really there to make a change in a fairly dramatic way, I think the civil servants will rate you bad. There is an important value in government stability and sameness. But, on the other hand, when the political will is to make the change, you need certain kinds of people who will not be rated as high by civil servants.... In 1989 we wanted stability, and marginal adjustment, and competence. In 1981, we said, hey, let's make changes.
More generally, presidential administrations sometimes find administrative reform a tool they can use to uproot past structures, behaviors, and personnel. The extent to which administration is perceived to be an important policy resource means that presidents will also seek to make it more responsive to them, sometimes by blunt instruments, sometimes by circumvention, and sometimes by offering reform as an instrument of political control. And sometimes all three will be employed at the same time.
The Dead Hand Theory
Related to the aforementioned motivation for seeking administrative reform is the belief that bureaucrats resist change and are responsible to no one. Political leaders come to office with the desire that the bureaucracy do their will or undo the will of their predecessors. Yet the bureaucracy is grounded in notions of stability, continuity, and regularity, without which a nation of laws becomes one merely of capricious power holders. In a properly functioning system of law, bureaucrats will not chase after every stick they are told to fetch by some putative superior. By definition, bureaucracy will not be immediately transformed to suit the tastes of the day, mainly because that is not and never was its role. Nevertheless, bureaucracies do change, a matter on which we will produce ample evidence. And in changing, they tend to reflect changing political tastes and preferences.
But this change will never be speedy enough to satisfy those in political authority. Where bureaucrats perceive stability, politicians often see a lack of responsiveness. Politicians deal in a world of kaleidoscopic claims and wants, bureaucrats in a world where policy has been institutionalized. The bigger the changes the politicians want, the deader the hand that bureaucrats will be perceived to have.
This is not so much because bureaucrats necessarily oppose new political agendas; rather, in the benign version of the dead hand theory, bureaucrats tend to coast along on the prevailing inertia, feel comfortable with it, know what can be done under it, and therefore cast a skeptical eye toward novelty. Richard Rose described this phenomenon among British civil servants as "directionless consensus." From this standpoint, bureaucrats protect the status quo mainly because, in essence, it is already being done.
Looked at from this perspective, the bureaucracy is not the enemy of any given administration or of any particular set of public demands. Instead it indiscriminately resists all of them, save those that do not threaten the status quo. Robert Putnam's description of the Italian bureaucracy of the 1970s emphasizes a sclerotic civil service suspicious of political interference and of civil society alike. Presumably, the problem here is deeper than merely changing faces in high positions. Rather, in this analysis, the solution is to change the culture, which is what Margaret Thatcher attempted to do in Great Britain through deep structural reforms of the civil service and the public sector. Efforts to change the culture of public management have become more pervasive, especially but not exclusively, throughout the Anglo democracies, and have been initiated, at least as often as not, by left of center governments.
Similarly, the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act advocated by President Carter was designed to enhance the responsiveness of the higher civil service by allowing individuals to be transferred to other jobs, ostensibly to broaden their perspectives or to make better use of their talents. More likely, the idea was to provide incentives for recalcitrant or difficult individuals to leave the civil service. Carter no doubt figured that this would help his own administration, but in the end it proved to be a valuable tool for his successor.
The Clinton administration's National Performance Review is the American version of New Public Management, and it too seeks to change the culture of public management. Its emphasis is less tied to people than the Carter administration's reform had been. In fact, its claim is that good people have been harnessed to bad systems. As do NPM reforms in other countries, it seeks to alter the administrative culture by rearranging structural incentives through use of performance reviews that focus on goal attainment and similar modes of achievement tracking.
Multiple Motives
This is the story so far: First, bureaucracy has become a contentious institution for many reasons. Government's complexity and the unpopularity of some of its policies create resentment against government and its operating arm, the bureaucracy. Citizens have been primed by politicians and commentators to target their resentments toward the bureaucracy. Not that citizens required much priming. Bureaucracy and bureaucrats are not popular anywhere, despite the fact that citizens are often quite fond of the programs being administered. Second, presidents, for a variety of reasons, have tinkered with the bureaucracy. At a minimum, presidents want to appear to be proficient governors. Almost all want to exercise greater control over policy as well. In the mold of a mystery, we now have both motives and actors. All that is missing is the supplier of the weapon—namely, the idea mongers.
What particular ideas come into play? As we noted earlier, much results from fashion, and increasingly a great deal results from contagion, as ideas spread around the globe. Yet the ideas do have to fit, or at least appear to fit, a definable problem. And the nature of these problems differs dramatically over time. When Lyndon Johnson instituted PPBS in the mid-1960s, the problem was how to use the budget process for policy rationality; the solution was to rearrange budget lines to fit policy concepts. The problem thirty years later was how to cut costs and make the bureaucracy more responsive to consumer demands in an era of scarce resources—or, perhaps less charitably, how to allow the political leadership to steer the ship of state and allow the nation to remain competitive in a tough global economy while giving much responsibility but few resources to those below decks. The two main threads to contemporary reform proposals emphasize increasing bureaucratic responsiveness to the consumers of government services and increasing managerialism in a public sector that has become more austere.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Reforming the BureaucracyChapter 2: Three Decades of the Federal Executive
Chapter 3: Representation, Democratic Norms, and Quality
Chapter 4: Who Are the Federal Executives? A Longitudinal Analysis
Chapter 5: Responsiveness Dilemmas
Chapter 6: Political Responsiveness: Facts and Fables
Chapter 7: Reinventing Government
Chapter 8: The Federal Executive in the Web of Politics
Appendix: Sampling and Interviewing Federal Executives
What People are Saying About This
The all-star scholarly team of Aberbach and Rockman has again produced a high-quality analysis of our top-level public executives. Their insightful analysis reassures us about the quality and responsiveness of federal career executives, while at the same time explaining that public dissatisfaction with government stems from political judgments rather than managerial problems in government programs.
—(James P. Pfiffner, George Mason University)
This eagerly awaited volume issues from one of the few empirical studies of executive-bureaucratic politics in the federal arena over the past three decades. Its coauthors participated with Robert Putnam in a hugely important 1981 book, Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies which has proven to be the most often cited work in the field. All of this makes In the Web of Politics must reading—more so because this book presents an exquisitely crafted treatment of an American conundrum which only politicians can solve.
— (Colin Campbell, Georgetown University)
The product of meticulous scholarship, In the Web of Politics is the most important book on the federal executive branch to appear in decades. It is essential reading not only for those who seek to understand American government, but for those who try to understand the changing relationship between bureaucrats and politicians worldwide.
—(Graham K. Wilson, University of Wisconsin, Madison)