Edward Elgar Publishing Bureaucracy in the Modern State: An Introduction to Comparative Public Administration

Public administration is under increasing pressure to become more efficient, better geared to the demands and opinions of citizens, more open to contacts with transnational bureaucracies, and more responsive to the ideas of elected policymakers. Bureaucracy in the Modern State offers a comparative analysis of how these challenges affect public administration in France, the United States, Germany, Japan, Britain, Sweden and the developing countries of the Third World. Specialist chapters written by acknowledged experts on the public policy of each country are brought together in a comparative framework in order to assess the impact of recent changes on the relationship between policy makers and the civil service, and the organizational challenges presented by the introduction of market-based ideology. Assessing public administration from a state-society perspective, the authors focus on four basic factors which they believe determine the role of the bureaucracy in modern societies: the configuration of the state, the relationship between policymakers and the bureaucracy, the internal organizational dynamics of the bureaucracy, and the relationship between the public bureaucracy and civil society. A special analysis of the relationship between domestic and transnational bureaucracies is also included, with particular reference made to the European Union. Addressing one of the key public policy issues of our time, this book will be widely used by teachers, students and researchers who will welcome the combination of in-depth studies of selected countries, from capitalist democracies to developing countries, with an authoritative comparative analysis held together by a distinct theoretical framework.