Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy

Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy
Author: Morton H. Halperin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2007-02-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815734107

The first edition of Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy is one of the most successful Brookings titles of all time. This thoroughly revised version updates that classic analysis of the role played by the federal bureaucracy—civilian career officials, political appointees, and military officers—and Congress in formulating U.S. national security policy, illustrating how policy decisions are actually made. Government agencies, departments, and individuals all have certain interests to preserve and promote. Those priorities, and the conflicts they sometimes spark, heavily influence the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. A decision that looks like an orchestrated attempt to influence another country may in fact represent a shaky compromise between rival elements within the U.S. government. The authors provide numerous examples of bureaucratic maneuvering and reveal how they have influenced our international relations. The revised edition includes new examples of bureaucratic politics from the past three decades, from Jimmy Carter's view of the State Department to conflicts between George W. Bush and the bureaucracy regarding Iraq. The second edition also includes a new analysis of Congress's role in the politics of foreign policymaking.

Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy

Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy
Author: Arnold J. Meltsner
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2024-06-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0520415000

Who advises our policy makers in Washington? What brings these advisors to the federal bureaucracy and keeps them there? And how do their clients and the bureaucratic context influence the choices they make in selecting, defining, and working on problems of public policy? In the late 1960s, professional policy advisors—called policy analysts—began to emerge in the Washington bureaucracy. Their job: to provide information and advice about the consequences of choosing different policies. Arnold J. Meltsner examines the various roles they asumed and the ways in which their priorities and methods were affected by the people they advised and the bureaucratic environment. Drawing on interviews with analysts and using his own experience as a government consultant, Meltsner shows how political and organizational considerations extended the boundaries of the advisor's role in a way that went far beyond the analyst's own notions of what policy analysis was. As the profession began to take shape, there were few standards of external organizations to set expectations for the analyst's work. As advisors on the inside, many policy analysts became adept at writing speeches and memos and making political calculations. In short, they took on the folkways of the bureaucrat. This detailed and vivid account of the experiences of analysts in a government agency is written not only for students of the subject but for all those interested in the general processes of our government. By providing a picture of the roles and behavior of the policy analyst, Meltsner points out the predicaments facing those who try to improve the effectiveness of analytical expertise within the government. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy
Author: James Q. Wilson
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2019-08-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1541646258

The classic book on the way American government agencies work and how they can be made to work better -- the "masterwork" of political scientist James Q. Wilson (The Economist) In Bureaucracy, the distinguished scholar James Q. Wilson examines a wide range of bureaucracies, including the US Army, the FBI, the CIA, the FCC, and the Social Security Administration, providing the first comprehensive, in-depth analysis of what government agencies do, why they operate the way they do, and how they might become more responsible and effective. It is the essential guide to understanding how American government works.

Street-Level Bureaucracy

Street-Level Bureaucracy
Author: Michael Lipsky
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 263
Release: 1983-06-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1610443624

Street-Level Bureaucracy is an insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs.

Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions

Bureaucracy’s Masters and Minions
Author: Eleanor L. Schiff
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2020-07-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498597785

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.

Bending the Rules

Bending the Rules
Author: Rachel Augustine Potter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2019-06-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022662188X

Who determines the fuel standards for our cars? What about whether Plan B, the morning-after pill, is sold at the local pharmacy? Many people assume such important and controversial policy decisions originate in the halls of Congress. But the choreographed actions of Congress and the president account for only a small portion of the laws created in the United States. By some estimates, more than ninety percent of law is created by administrative rules issued by federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services, where unelected bureaucrats with particular policy goals and preferences respond to the incentives created by a complex, procedure-bound rulemaking process. With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be but rather an intensely political activity in its own right. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often at the bidding of affected interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate their proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Tracing the rulemaking process from when an agency first begins working on a rule to when it completes that regulatory action, Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process. This exercise reveals that unelected bureaucrats wield considerable influence over the direction of public policy in the United States.

The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy

The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy
Author: Daniel Carpenter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2020-06-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691214077

Until now political scientists have devoted little attention to the origins of American bureaucracy and the relationship between bureaucratic and interest group politics. In this pioneering book, Daniel Carpenter contributes to our understanding of institutions by presenting a unified study of bureaucratic autonomy in democratic regimes. He focuses on the emergence of bureaucratic policy innovation in the United States during the Progressive Era, asking why the Post Office Department and the Department of Agriculture became politically independent authors of new policy and why the Interior Department did not. To explain these developments, Carpenter offers a new theory of bureaucratic autonomy grounded in organization theory, rational choice models, and network concepts. According to the author, bureaucracies with unique goals achieve autonomy when their middle-level officials establish reputations among diverse coalitions for effectively providing unique services. These coalitions enable agencies to resist political control and make it costly for politicians to ignore the agencies' ideas. Carpenter assesses his argument through a highly innovative combination of historical narratives, statistical analyses, counterfactuals, and carefully structured policy comparisons. Along the way, he reinterprets the rise of national food and drug regulation, Comstockery and the Progressive anti-vice movement, the emergence of American conservation policy, the ascent of the farm lobby, the creation of postal savings banks and free rural mail delivery, and even the congressional Cannon Revolt of 1910.

Politics and the Bureaucracy

Politics and the Bureaucracy
Author: Kenneth J. Meier
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780155055230

This best-selling textbook is unique because of its focus on the political side of bureaucracy. Designed to present bureaucracy as a political institution, this book provides coverage of the controls on bureaucracy and how bureaucracy makes policy.

Policy Bureaucracy

Policy Bureaucracy
Author: Edward C Page
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2005-08-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019928041X

Policy making is not only about the cut and thrust of politics. It is also a bureaucratic activity. Long before laws are drafted, policy commitments made, or groups consulted on government proposals, officials will have been working away to shape the policy into a form in which it can be presented to ministers and the outside world. Policy bureaucracies - parts of government organizations with specific responsibility for maintaining and developing policy - have to be mobilizedbefore most significant policy initiatives are launched.This book describes the range of work policy officials do. The 140 civil servants interviewed for this study included officials who helped originate policies which were subsequently taken over as manifesto commitments by the Labour Party; officials who helped devise the formula by which billions of pounds are allocated to local government in grants; and also officials who recommended to the Secretary of State that a controversial publisher be allowed to take over a national newspaper. Thebackground and career paths of middle-ranking officials show them to be a diverse group who do not tend to develop long-term subject specialisms. The instructions to which these officials work - whether coming from ministers or senior officials - are often very broad and leave much to personalinterpretation.Policy Bureaucracy goes on to examine how ministers and senior officials affect the work of middle ranking officials and the cues policy bureaucrats use to develop policy. The analytical approach adopted in the book is derived from Alvin Gouldner's Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy and his elaboration of Max Weber's notion that hierarchy and expertise place a fundamental tension at the heart of modern bureaucracies. In the UK this tension is handled by combining 'invited authority'with 'improvised expertise'. The book also explores other models of handling this tension in political systems in Europe and the USA.