Bureaucracy and democracy : accountability and performance / William T. Gormley, Steven J. Balla.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Bureaucracies as policymaking organizations -- Bureaucratic reasoning -- The bureaucracy's bosses -- The bureaucracy's clients -- Bureaucratic networks -- The politics of disaster management -- Why are some bureaucracies better than others?.

Given the influence and impact of public bureaucracies in policy implementation, and the accountability they owe to the American public, their performance must be assessed in a systematic manner. With this new edition, Gormley and Balla revisit their four key perspectives bounded rationality, principal-agent theory, interest group mobilization, and network theory to help students develop an analytic framework for comprehensively evaluating bureaucratic performance. Thoroughly updated, the third edition includes: new sections on education reform, the response to the financial crisis, and Obama's support for "evidence-based" decision making; new cases of government intervention in crisis with the H1N1 pandemic and the recent tornadoes in the Midwest; new material on public opinion and perceptions of government employees; expanded discussion of networks and their increasingly important role in exchanging information and delivering public services; and a new case study on the BP oil spill that systematically applies the book's four perspectives.