Anthony Bertelli

What is public administration and what does it do? Though government bureaucracy is much maligned, could the modern state exist without it? Why is public administration and bureaucracy so misunderstood? By invoking enduring ideas about representation and democracy, Anthony Bertelli sheds light on these ellusive questions in a concise but nuanced narrative that relates the history of the modern bureaucratic state to contemporary efforts to treat government more like a business. The idea of a principal-agent relationship is the book's guiding theme to help readers understand the ongoing debates about how best to manage public affairs in a democracy. Bertelli begins by explaining how a principal-agent relationship can describe the democratic connection between citizens and administrators through their elected representatives. He then confronts the question of efficiency by considering the experience of the New Public Management movement, which focused on introducing incentives and market competition into public management, in the United States and internationally. The book next turns to the political sport of big-government-bureaucracy-bashing and how it misinterprets modern public governance structures, explaining the latter as the essay progresses. The book concludes with a discussion of how contemporary public administration scholars and public intellectuals do not do an effective job of countering such arguments and how this was quite different in the work their counterparts before World War II. Public administration, Bertelli argues, has lost its pragmatism in the face of political attacks.

What is public administration and what does it do? Though government bureaucracy is much maligned, could the modern state exist without it? Why is public administration and bureaucracy so misunderstood? By invoking enduring ideas about representation and democracy, Anthony Bertelli sheds light on these ellusive questions in a concise but nuanced narrative that relates the history of the modern bureaucratic state to contemporary efforts to treat government more like a business. The idea of a principal-agent relationship is the book's guiding theme to help readers understand the ongoing debates about how best to manage public affairs in a democracy. Bertelli begins by explaining how a principal-agent relationship can describe the democratic connection between citizens and administrators through their elected representatives. He then confronts the question of efficiency by considering the experience of the New Public Management movement, which focused on introducing incentives and market competition into public management, in the United States and internationally. The book next turns to the political sport of big-government-bureaucracy-bashing and how it misinterprets modern public governance structures, explaining the latter as the essay progresses. The book concludes with a discussion of how contemporary public administration scholars and public intellectuals do not do an effective job of countering such arguments and how this was quite different in the work their counterparts before World War II. Public administration, Bertelli argues, has lost its pragmatism in the face of political attacks.

This book addresses one of the enduring questions of democratic government: why do governments choose some public policies but not others? Political executives focus on a range of policy issues, such as the economy, social policy, and foreign policy, but they shift their priorities over time. Despite an extensive literature, it has proven surprisingly hard to explain policy prioritisation. To remedy this gap, this book offers a new approach called public policy investment: governments enhance their chances of getting re-elected by managing a portfolio of public policies and paying attention to the risks involved. In this way, government is like an investor making choices about risk to yield returns on its investments of political capital. The public provides signals about expected political capital returns for government policies, or policy assets, that can be captured through expressed opinion in public polls. Governments can anticipate these signals in the choices they make. Statecraft is the ability political leaders have to consider risk and return in their policy portfolios and do so amidst uncertainty in the public's policy valuation. Such actions represent the public's views conditionally because not every opinion change is a price signal. It then outlines a quantitative method for measuring risk and return, applying it to the case of Britain between 1971 and 2000 and offers case studies illustrating statecraft by prime ministers, such as Edward Heath or Margaret Thatcher. The book challenges comparative scholars to apply public policy investment to countries that have separation of powers, multiparty government, and decentralization.