B. Guy Peters: Policy Capacity in Public Administration

The majority of the policy work of government is done through the organizations that constitute the public bureaucracy. Indeed, these organizations make a good deal of policy on their own through their delegated capacity to make secondary legislation (Page, 2012; Kerwin, 2014). But even when the administrative organizations are acting more as agents for political leaders they have a number of important roles to play in making policy and in making policies perform as intended by the actors who had designed them. Although some policy capacity can be found in almost any public bureaucracy there are variety of factors that influence the capacity for public administration to shape public policy.

This paper will first discuss the policy tasks of bureaucracies, and their “policy work” (Colebatch, Hoppe, and Noordegraaf, 2010) from the perspective of the organizational and structural characteristics of these institutions. There is a tendency, in both academic and popular discourse to speak of “The Bureaucracy” as if it were an integrated whole. While there may some institutional features and some commonality within the public bureaucracy of any country, it is generally a highly differentiated structure with numerous organizations that believe they are more or less autonomous. Further, these organizations have political connections of their own with clientele groups that provide them with support in their political battles with other organizations, and with their nominal political masters.

The policy role of organizations within the public bureaucracy has some stable foundations but also has been influenced significantly by continuing patterns of reform. Reforms have been endemic in the public bureaucracy but the period beginning in the early 1980s has had an unusually high level of reform activity.[1] Although much of reform in administrative organizations is oriented toward improving efficiency, it also has had significant consequences for public policy. [2] Lester Salamon argued (1981) that attempting to achieve efficiency through administrative reform was a “will of the wisp” but that policy change was more achievable through organizational change.

The Policy Resources of Public Administration

As they must engage in the policy process they bring with them a number of important resources. These resources are available not only to the organizations themselves but also more generally available to the public sector as a whole. This dual role for bureaucracies is crucial for understanding how these organizations function and the political dynamics that will define their role in governing. On the one hand they are specialized organizations designed to deliver a relatively narrow range of services and to develop expertise in a particular policy area. On the other hand they are part of a larger institution, and a larger government, that is meant to provide a full range of services and to do so in as coordinated a manner as possible (see Bouckaert, Peters and Verhoest, 2010).

As implied by the above, one significant resource that bureaucratic agencies possess is their expertise, and for policymaking that expertise may be of two sorts. The first is actual technical knowledge of the policy domain within which they work. The division of the bureaucracy into a large number of separate domains enables these organizations to have a focus on a specific policy, as well as a commitment to that policy. Goodsell (2011) refers to this combination of expertise and commitment as a “mission mystique” for the organizations.

The second dimension of the expertise of bureaucracies is their knowledge of their clients and conditions in the policy domain that they serve. Public bureaucracies are the link between State and society. The field staffs of organizations–the street level bureaucrats -- see first hand the effects of policies and the changing conditions within which the policies are being implemented. This intelligence can then be fed back into subsequent rounds of policymaking and with good fortune can lead to improved policies (Carter, 2012). The structures of bureaucracies, public or private, may be a barrier to the effective flow of that information (Wilsensky, 1968), but in principle the linkage can guide policy and implementation.

A second major resource for bureaucracies in the policymaking is that they are the masters of process. Bureaucratic organizations typically know how to make things happen in government, and hence can expedite action if they are committed to the policies in question. For the organizations within the public sector, however, slowing policy change may be as important as expediting that change. Organizations do have commitments to policies, and often consider the ideas for change coming from the temporary inhabitants of political office as misguided at best. Therefore, they can use their resources to prevent policies from being made as well as to have them made and implemented.

Public organizations are also permanent, or nearly so. ( ). While many citizens and political leaders consider this stability to be an impediment to good governance and good policy, it remains a resource for the organization The government of the day may be just that, but public organizations persist and further have some collective memory that can guide their actions and also inform other actors in the process. They can also take a longer term perspective on policy than is generally possible for politicians who must begin preparing for the next election almost as soon as they are elected (Jacobs, 2011).

Finally, organizations in the public bureaucracy have their own political resources. Although in principle dependent upon political actors for their budgets, their legal authority and their very existence, these organizations have political power in their own right. Part of that power derives from their connections with their clients, and the ability if needed to mobilize those clients to bring pressure on political decision-makers. Likewise, if in disagreement with their nominal political masters organizations can choose to shirk (Brehm and Gates, 1997), and not provide the advice and the support that the minister and other political leaders should expect.[3]

Further, as implied above, information and expertise is also a major political resource. In any organization, and especially in government that is dependent upon information, knowledge is power. Several models of the behavior of public organizations argue that they trade information for the other resources they need-money, personnel, legislative time, etc.–they require to achieve their organizational goals.[4] Although these models like those of shirking by bureaucrats tend to exaggerate the self-interested behavior of those officials, the capacity to use information to pursue their own organizational and policy goals needs to be considered as one dimension of the policy behavior of public organizations.

The resources available to public sector organizations, and the existence of a number of these organizations, creates a competitive environment for these organizations. They obviously compete for money in the budgetary process (see Rubin, 2013), but also compete for legislative time. Further, many organizations are concerned with similar policy areas and they will compete for policy dominance over specific issues. For example, within the European Union an issue such as biotechnology falls between a number DGs such as agriculture, science and industry (Rhinard, 2010). [5]

In summary, public organizations are not devoted solely to “mere administration”, they are also major policy actors. Some of the policy activity is in the direct service of their political leaders, but some of that activity is more autonomously generated. These organizations may be neutral in partisan terms but they are far from neutral in policy terms. They have policy capacity that they can use to defend existing policies that they like and can also utilize those resources to promote the policy changes to which they are committed. And the permanence of these organizations provides then the opportunity to chose their battles and to wait out governments that may be birds of passage

The Policy Challenges of Public Administration

Just as public bureaucracies have a number of resources for policymaking, they also face a number of significant challenges as they attempt to exercise that power to pursue their own policy objectives. Further, they face a number of challenges as they attempt to provide more integrated policy planning and delivery across the public sector. And to some extent the resources and commitment that benefits them as individual organizations makes achieving more comprehensive governance and policymaking more difficult.

Coordination

Coordination is a continuing challenge for policymakers (Peters, 2015). The pursuit for better coordination within the public sector has been characterized as the pursuit for the holy grail, assuming that if policies are coordinated then government will be successful. That assumption is perhaps somewhat excessive, but certainly coordination can improve policy. For public organizations policy coordination is not, however, a single challenge but contains several dimensions that may in reality be contradictory.

When policy coordination is mentioned the picture that is usually evoked is one of coordinating different programs and policies generally found in different organizations. For example, if health policies are to be effective they should be coordinated with social, environmental and education programs. With those efforts to coordinate there is a better opportunity to serve the “whole client”, and to reduce duplication and lacunae in coverage. And the need for coordination is not confined to social policy but is relevant for virtually any policy domain in the public sector.

But this horizontal coordination across organizations is not the only challenge for public organizations. The vertical dimension of coordination can be equally challenging, and may be no more likely to be successful than horizontal coordination. First, vertical coordination involves linking the organization with organizations at the subnational level, or with non-governmental organizations responsible for delivering public services through contracts. Governance is increasingly interactive between the public and private sectors (Torfing, et al., 2012) and there is a need to ensure that those organizations are working together and following the policy priorities of the organization responsible for the policies being implemented.

In addition to the vertical coordination issues that exist between policy implementing organizations and the organizations with which they cooperate in their environment, there may be coordination issues within the organization itself. Just as we tend to assume incorrectly that the public bureaucracy is unitary actor, so too the tendency to assume that each organization is itself a unitary actor is questionable. Therefore, if a bureaucratic organization is to be an effective policy actor it must be able to produce internal coordination.

The principal internal challenge of coordination is that of linking the street-level of the organization with the top, “decision-making” levels of the organization. There is a good deal of evidence that the bottom of organizations develop their own perspectives on policy and may make decisions on criteria that differ from those intended at the top (Gofen, 2014). Further, these levels of the organization can also attempt to exert control over the remainder of the organization through its command of information and political links with clients, As Hood (1976) argued the organization will have to march to a single drummer it wants to be effective in making and implementing policy.

Politics

In most contemporary democracies the public bureaucracy is composed primarily of career officials recruited on the basis of merit. Their role is defined as having the capacity to serve any political master equally, and to provide frank and fearless advice to those political leaders. That is a noble definition of the nature and role of the public servant, and in many ways it is also a true representation of how these individuals function. But this partisan neutrality belies the fundamentally political environment within which public sector bureaucrats function, and also belies the need for these officials to understand that politicized environment in order to be able to do their jobs effectively (see Peters and Pierre, 2004)..

Public policy is the final output of government activity and policies are inevitably political. They are the products of political activity and they also have political consequences. Therefore, as they perform their tasks public administrators are performing political tasks. Some of those tasks, such as policy advice to ministers are overtly political. Even though the role of the policy advisor is in the words of the Society for Friends and then Aaron Wildavsky “speaking truth to power”, that advice to be effective may have to be tailored to the preferences and goals of the political leadership.

And even when performing what may be considered simply administrative tasks, the activities of the public bureaucracy cab still have profound political consequences. The effectiveness of a program depends upon its effective implementation, so that if the political leadership want to gain credit for services delivered they must also ensure implementation. And effective administration is also potentially a means of avoiding blame for policy failure (Hood, 2011). Thus, as well as having pressures for coordination up and down the organization there will be pressures for performance coming from the top as well.

The partisan pressures for policy change may also clash with the agenda of the public organization itself. Even if an organization is not ideologially or professionally committed to a policy regimen, it is likely to be committed to the status quo. Policy change is hard work for any public organization, involving work from the mundane such as designing new forms to more demanding tasks such as retraining employees about the policy and potentially about a new set of values that is driving the policy. Having said that public organizations and their members do not necessarily shirk when performing their tasks, they may still be less than excited about embarking on the new policy. And even less excited when change follows change as frequently happens in the world of public policy.

The public organization is therefore in a somewhat awkward position as it performs its administrative tasks and manages–and makes–policy. On the one hand its formal position is apolitical and presumably a neutral instrument for the political leaders. On the other hand organizations in the public sector are not entirely neutral about policies even if they might be about political parties. They have policy ideas, commitments to clients, and established routines all of which they may want to defend against pressures for change. Perhaps even more than for their political masters for the organizations politics is definitely about policy.

Given the above there is little reason to wonder why there are rather intense pressures to politicize public organizations (Peters and Pierre, 2004; Neuhold, Vanhoonacker and Verhey, 2012). Political leaders are elected to make policy, and in less than fully democratic systems believe even more strongly that they should be in a position to control policy. Therefore, when confronted with permanent and expert organizations that are advancing their own policy agendas, these leaders feel the need to attempt to control those organizations. But even then, the policy resouces held by the organizations produce a rather complex and subtle bargaining process attempting to produce control without losing the necessary commitment of the bureaucratic organization and its members.

Reform, Public Organizations, and Policy

To this point I have been developing a somewhat generic discussion of the role of public organizations in policymaking. For many reformers of the public sector this generic model is too well institutionalized and requires significant change, That may be so, but the problem for the reformers and for the organizations that are the object of their reforms is that there are at least two diametrically opposed visions of how change should occur, and further those two visions have both been implemented during the past several decades.

The New Public Management has been the dominant strand of reform in public administration beginning in the 1980s and carrying on, if in a diminished form, until the present. While this approach to public administration, and to governance more gneerally, has a number of features for my purposes here the most important is the emphasis on the autonomy of public sector organizations (Roness, 2009). The underlying assumption was that managers in the public sector could, if permitted the autonomy and given the resources, do a better job of providing services than could their political leadership. This approach to governance therefore advocated a dimiinished role for the political leadership in management and even in policymaking.

One variant of the general New Public Management approach argued for “deregulating” the public sector. This argument did not refer to economic deregulation for the market but rather to internal deregulation of the public sector itself (DiIulio, 1994). As well as reducing controls over administrative behavior, this internal deregulation was designed to allow policy entrepreneurship by the managers and their organizations. Again, the assumption was that if public sector managers were allowed the autonomy to pursue good policy they could a more effective publi sector than can the poltiical leadership.

A second important element of the New Public Management affecting the policy role of public organizations is the emphasis on performance management. While public administration has always attempted to promote efficient management, performance management attempts to develop quantitative means of assessing that performance and linking rewards for individuals and organizations to outcomes on those measures. If individuals are not capable of reaching their performance targets they may be sanctioned or even fired, and if organizations do not they may lose some part of their funding.

There are numerous questions about the performance approach to management within the public sector (Radin, 2005) but for understanding the policy role of organizations the most important element may be the time dimension. Public organizations, lacking the need to produce results by the time of the next election could have a longer time horizon than elected politicians. But performance targets are generally annual or even semi-annual, so that bureaucrats began to have an even shorter time frame than do the politicians. This change in the time dimension may reduce at least one dimension of conflict between politicians and bureaucrats but it may also lead to less effective public policies.

The decentering reforms associated with the New Public Management produced some improvements in governing, but also produced a number of problems for making and implementing policy. Perhaps the most significant of these problems has been making the problem of coordination within the public sector even more difficult. The creation of numerous more or less autonomous agencies (Egeberg and Trondal, 2009) and diffusing the ideology of autonomy for public managers, exacerbated the underlying difficulties in coordination. Although most governments retained some mechanisms for control over the agencies, for example control over some budget lines (see Jensen, 2003) the existence of the agencies were greater barriers to coordination than more integrated executive departments.

A send and associated problem has been some general loss of policy capacity within the public sector. Somewhat paradoxically, in an information age in which the internet provides seemingly endless supplies of information there appears to be less detailed policy analysis. This is in part because performance management has been largely substituted for more careful policy analysis. Implicit in that assumption has been that if the program is implemented well then it is a good policy. There is relatively less concern with the content of the policies that are being implemented. Father, difficulties in the short-term performance indicators that are used to replace more in depth analysis mean that even the more superficial understanding of policy may be inaccurate or at least incomplete (see Van Thiel and Leeuw, 2002).

As is often the case in reforms within the public sector one reform begets the next, even if the first reform is perceived to be successful. The decentering reforms of the New Public Management provoked a series of reforms attempting to overcome the difficulties created by the NPM. The center of government–presidents, prime ministers, and the organizations associated with them–sought to reassert their control over the public sector (Dahlstrom, Peters and Pierre, 2011). This reassertion appears to have been done for at least two reasons. The first reason is to overcome the coordination problems created by agencification and other aspects of NPM. A number of governments have undertaken programs such as “joined up government” to attempt to ameliorate these problems (see Pollitt, 2003).

The other logic for putting greater control over public policies back into the center of government is to assert the “primacy of politics”. That is, the logic of the New Public Management reforms was to empower the bureaucracy, and even the clientele of public organizations. These shifts in power in turn reduced the capacity of presidents and prime ministers to govern, At the extreme these changes have been referred to as “presidentialization” (Poguntke and Webb, 2007), referring to the development of staffing in the center in order to increase capacity for control. Even when there is not the over presidentialization of the system there often still has been an attempt to develop increased policy capacity

Thus, the reactions to the reforms associated with the New Public Management have been to attempt to reduce the influence of public bureaucracies over public policy. Even without those NPM reforms there was an underlying tension between the bureaucratic organizations and the center of government. These organizations do have their own policy ideas and have attempted to have those ideas adopted.

Comparative Perspectives

The discussion to this point has been somewhat abstract and appears to assume that public organizations will have the same capacity for influencing policy in all political systems. While some of the generalities already made have some validity across political systems, there are also marked differences in the capacity, and the ambition, of organizations to influence public policies. While there is hardly the space to go into detail on many cases I can at least identify some of the variables that will define te capacity

Autonomy

I have discussed autonomy above in light of the reforms coming from New Public Management, but it is also a more generic concept for understanding the policy role of public sector organizations. The administrative traditions, and formal organizational structures, of different countries permit more autonomy and hence greater opportunities to be engaged in policy. For example, the long-standing use of agencies in Sweden, and to a lesser extent other Nordic countries provides significantly greater autonomy than conventional ministerial structures such as those found in many other countries in Europe. Likewise., agencies in the United States are components of cabinet departments but historically have been able to develop substantial autonomy from those departments.

Political Structures and Institutions

The structure of organizations, and especially their autonomy influences their policy capacity, but so too does the nature of the political system in which they are embedded. At the broadest level we should expect differences between presidential and parliamentary systems. In particular the presence of a more autonomous parliament provides public organizations with an alternative locus for legitimation and support. That said, the more active and autonomous parliament may be an additional source of oversight and control that will reduce the autonomy of public organizations.

In addition to the macro-level institutional differences there are somewhat more subtle differences that shape the capacity of organizations to exert control over policy. For example, the autonomy of ministries in Germany–the Ressortprinzip–provides ministrieswith some autonomy from the center of government, although the minister may still have substantial control over the bureaucracy (see Fleischer, 2011). Similarly, cabinet rules in some parliamentary systems that do not require all parties necessarily to support initiatives of ministers provides organizations more autonomy than in systems enforcing unanimity within the coalition.

Staffing

The policy capacity of public sector organizations is also influenced by the nature of the staffing within those organizations. One standard difference among public bureaucracies is the type of education and careers their personnel have (Peters, 2005, chapter3). For example, the tradition of recruiting generalists in Westminster systems, and the having those civil servants have largely generalist careers, tends to generate less policy expertise within bureaucratic organizations. For German public servants law remains a generalist background with specialization in a policy area occurring during the career.

Specialist recruitment for the civil service is perhaps seen most clearly in the American civil service. Although upper-level managers in the Senior Executive Service are more generalists, the bulk of the civil service is hired for specialized skills and knowledge. Thus, if one want a career in the Department of Agriculture it is desirable to have studied at one of the Land Grant universities, and indeed much of the civil service comes from large public universities rather than the Ivy League schools. Likewise, most American civil servants remain in the same department and even the same agency for most of their career, and hence further strengthen their specialized background. These officials therefore constitute a powerful source of policy expertise in making policy within their domain.

The nature of the staffing of public organizations must be considered in relationship to the capacity of their political masters. Some decades ago Richard Rose (1976) pointed to the relative lack of policy experience and knowledge for ministers in British government, These political leaders come from a variety of backgrounds–mostly full time politicians–and have little background in the policy areas for which they are responsible. They also move frequently among jobs, with cabinet reshuffles seemingly driven more by political concerns than the need for greater policy competence. In such a setting, even generalist civil servants may have an advantage when attempting to shape policy.

Politicization

The question of the policy capacity of ministers leads on to the question of the extent to which political leaders have the capacity to exert their control over the organizations within the public bureaucracy, and the policies emerging from the organizations. One dimension of that control is the attempt to produce coordination and coherence in policy mentioned above. But with the greater presidentialization of parliamentary systems there have been more invasive attempts to control policymaking as well. While this politicization can be to some extent justified on democratic grounds–these presidents and prime ministers were elected to make policy–it also threatens the merit system as well as perhaps the quality of policymaking.

The above having been said, not all politicization is the same. Just as ministers may have varying levels of policy expertise so too may political appointees designated by them to control public organizations. For example, at least until the administration of George W, Bush many if not most of the 4,000 appointees made by presidents were increasingly expert in their policy fields (see Lewis, 2011).[6] These appointees would have substantially greater capacity to impose a policy agenda than would any appointed just to provide jobs for political loyalists (Grindle, 2011).

Aspirations and Expectations

Finally, we need to consider the aspirations that both the members of public organizations and their nominal political masters have about policymaking. Although political leaders in general desire to control policy they may also respect the expertise of the bureaucracy and want to utilize that expertise rather than to oppose it. That pattern of cooperation may be especially evident when the political leader and the organization are members of an “epistemic community” and share some common understandings about what constitutes good policy. Likewise, conflict may be more common when the political leader is not familiar with the policy domain.

A high degree of comity between a political leader and his or her organizations may be more difficult to obtain in an era of presidentialization (see also Savoie, 2008). As political leaders attempt to exert more control over governments as a whole then the opportunities for autonomous action by organizations may also be reduced. That perceived need for control over public organizations may be ideological or it may be the more personal aspirations of the president or prime minister, but in any case those leaders want to place their own imprint on the activities of government.

Summary

The conventional wisdom is that public bureaucracies, and the individual organizations within them, are relatively inert organizations with little interest in public policy. Rather than being concerned with ideas and missions, these organizations may be conceived as the formal, legal implementers of policies made elsewhere. This paper has argued the opposite, identifying public organizations as having numerous resources that enable them to be active participants in the policy process, and in being able to make a good deal of policy on their own.

But these organizations confront a number of challenges when they attempt to utilize those resources to be effective within the policy process. The most basic of these challenges is simply having the legitimacy for action on their own, especially when faced with political actors with somewhat stronger claims for legitimacy. The tasks these organization must perform also present significant challenges to their being effective actors in the policy process.. And virtually continuous reform of the public bureaucracy also presents a number of opportunities as well as barriers to an autonomous policy role for public organizations.

Although we can make an argument that empirically public organizations are central actors in making public policy and have substantial policy capacity. But the normative argument remains more difficult to have accepted, especially in democratic political systems. Politicians believe they have been elected to make policy and are often reluctant to yield any of that authority to the public bureaucracy. But at the same time those leaders need the expertise and the information available within the bureaucracy. These tensions are very real and define much of contemporary policymaking.

References:

Blais, A. And S. Dion (1991) The Budget-Maximizing Bureaucrat: Appraisals and Evidence (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press).

Bouckaert, G., B. G. Peters, and K. Verhoest (2010) The Coordination of Public Sector Organizations: Shifting Patterns of Public Management. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan.

Brehm, J. and S, Gates (1997) Working, Shirking and Sabotage: Bureaucratic Responses to a Democratic Public (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

Carter, P. (2012) Policy as Palimpset, Policy & Politics 40, 423-43.

Colebatch, H. K., R. Hoppe, and M. Noordegraaf,(2010). Working for Policy (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press).

Dahlström, C., B. G. Peters and J. Pierre (2011) Steering from the Centre: Strengthening Political Control in Western Democracies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

DiIulio, J. J. (1994) Deregulating Government: Can Government be Improved? (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution).

Egeberg, M. And J. Trondal (2009) Political Leadership and Bureaucratic Autonomy: The Effects of Agencification, Governance 22, 673-87.

Fleischer, J. (2011) Steering from the German Centre: More Policy Coordination with Fewer Policy Initiatives, in C. Dahlström,., B. G. Peters and J. Pierre, Steering from the Centre: Strengthening Political Control in Western Democracies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

Gofen, A. (2014) Mind the Gap: Dimensions and Influence of Street-Level Divergence, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 24,473-93.

Goodsell, C. T. (2011) Mission Mystique; Belief Systems in Public Agencies (Washington, DC: CQ Press).

Grindle, M. S. (2011) Jobs for the Boys: Patronage and the State in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

Hood, C. (1976) The Limits of Administration (New York: Wiley).

Hood, C. (2011), The Blame Game: Spin, Bureaucracy and Self-Preservation in Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Jacobs, A. M. (2011), Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Jensen, L. (2003) Den Store Koordinator. (Copenhagen: Jurist og Økonomforlag).

Kerwin, C. M. (2011) Rule-making: How Government Agencies Write Law and Make Policy, 4^th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press).

Lewis, D. E. (2011) Presidential Appointments and Personnel, Annual Review of Political Science 14, 47-66.

Neuhold, C., S. Vanhoonacker and L. Verhey (2012)Civil Servants and Politics: A Delicate Balance(Basingstoke: Macmillan).

Page, E. C (2012) Policy Without Politicians: Bureaucratic Influence in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Peters, B. G. (1992) Bureaucratic Politics and the Institutions of the European Community, in A, M. Sbragia, Euro-Politics (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution).

Peters, B. G. (2005) The Politics of Bureaucracy, 6^th ed. (New York: Routledge).

Peters, B. G. (2010) The Future of Governing: Four Emerging Models ((Lawrence: University Press of Kansas).

Peters, B. G. (2015) Pursuing Horizontal Management: The Politics of Public Sector Coordination (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas).

Peters, B. G. And J. Pierre (2004) Politicization of the Civil Service in Comparative Perspecitve: The Quest for Control (New York: Routledge).

Poguntke, T. and P. Webb (2007)Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies (Oxford; Oxford University Press).

Pollitt, C. 2003. “Joined-Up Government: A Survey.” Political Studies Review 1: 34–49.

Radin, B. (2006), Challenging the Performance Movement: Accountability, Complexity and Democratic Values (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press).

Rhinard, M. (2010) Framing Europe: The Policy Making Strategies of the European Commission (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff).

Roness, P. G. (2009) Handling Theoretical Diversity on Agency Autonomy, in Change and Continuity in Public Sector Organizations: Essays in Honor of Per Laegreid (Bergen: Fakbokforlaget).

Rose, R. (1976) The Problem of Party Government (London: Macmillan).

Rubin, I. (2013) The Politics of Public Budgeting: Getting and Spending, Borrowing and Balancing (Washington, DC: CQ Press).

Salamon, L. M. (1981) The Goals of Reorganization.” In Federal Reorganization: What Have We Learned?, edited by P. Szanton. (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House

Savoie, D. J. (1994) Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney: In Search of a New Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press).

Savoie, D. J. (2008) Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Stinchcombe, A. (1990) Information and Organizations (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Torfing, J., B. G. Peters, J. Pierre and E. Sørensen (2012), Interactive Governance: Advancing

the Paradigm (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Van Thiel, S. And F. L Leeuw (2002) The Performance Paradox in the Public Sector, Public Performance and Management Review 25, 267-81.

Wilsensky, H. (1967) Organizational Intelligence: Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry (New York: Basic Books).

B. Guy Peters, Member of the Board of Trustees