16 2: Th eories of Political Control of Bureaucracy
be Madisonian. By comparison, traditional and self-aware public administration,
with its emphasis on management, expertise, and professionalism, tends to be
rather Hamiltonian in cast and perspective (Kettl 1993a).
Listing some contemporary book titles in public administration is one inter-
esting way to illustrate the control-of-bureaucracy theory’s modern popularity:
Controlling Bureaucracies by Judith Gruber (1987)
Holding Government Bureaucracies Accountable by Bernard Rosen (1989)
Taming the Bureaucracy by William Gormley (1989)
Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why Th ey Do It by James Q.
Wilson (1989)
Facing the Bureaucracy: Living and Dying in a Public Agency by Gerald Garvey
(1992)
Breaking Th rough Bureaucracy by Michael Barzelay (1992)
Controlling the Bureaucracy: Institutional Constraints in Th eory and Practice
by William West (1995)
Public Administration: Balancing Power and Accountability by Jerome McKin-
ney and Lawrence Howard (1998)
Bureaucracy and Self-Government: Reconsidering the Role of Public Adminis-
tration in American Politics by Brian J. Cook (2014)Th ere is little question that bureaucracy and the issues concerning the con-
trol of bureaucracy are presently central to modern public administration the-
ory. Because the politics-administration dichotomy is the primary assumption
in the control-of-bureaucracy theory, the next section defi nes and describes the
logic of bureaucratic control using the dichotomy. Th is is followed by an attempt
to answer the theoretical and empirical question of whether bureaucracies and
bureaucrats are responsive to their elected masters. Are they “out of control”?
Th at will be followed by a consideration of the principal-agent approach to the
control-of-bureaucracy theory.
GOALS MEANSPOLICY ADMINISTRATIONFIGURE 2.1 Traditional representation of the diff erences between politics
and administration