The central problem in any bureaucratic organization, whether in the public or private sector, is how to delegate sufficient authority to agents who have expertise and are close to sources of local knowledge, while at the same time maintaining overall control over their behavior.  In an ideal organization, the principals set the organization’s overall goals, […]

The title of this post is taken from a 1994 article by John DiIulio (Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 4(3), 1994: 277-320), which criticized the principal-agent framework being used by economists to understand organizational behavior, governance, and political corruption.Under principal-agent, organizations (whether public or private sector) are hierarchical structures in which principals have […]

In this series of posts on the nature of effective government, I want to keep the focus narrowed to questions of implementation. Many of the comments made by the governance specialists on my “What is Governance?” paper on the Governance web site criticized my effort to restrict my focus to implementation. They argued that it […]

I have not posted anything to this blog in several months because I’ve been working to complete the second volume of my book on political development, which is tentatively titled Political Order and Political Decay: From the French Revolution to the Present. It complements The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French […]

D ecember 2012 saw the passing of the great development economist, Albert O. Hirschman, at the age of 97. Development economists spend their time these days performing randomized controlled experiments, in which a particular intervention like co-payments for mosquito bed nets are introduced into one group of villages and not into another matched set. This […]

The nature of world politics has changed more rapidly in the past four years than anyone expected. From the fall of the Berlin Wall up to the financial crisis of 2008, the United States had enjoyed a unprecedented period of hegemony. A decade ago, the US defense budget by itself was larger than the combined […]

2012 saw the passing of a great development economist, Albert O. Hirschman, at the age of 97.Development economists spend their time these days performing randomized controlled experiments, in which a particular intervention like co-payments for mosquito bed nets are introduced into one group of villages and not into another matched set. This approach establishes causality […]

Expect no grand political realignment this November. Neither party has the right diagnosis for what ails America, and much less a cure.

I want to make one correction to an assertion I made in my last blog post.  In it, I said that delivery of services like education and health care is something that “states accomplish, and not the institutions that check them.”This is a big overstatement.  The checking institutions actually play a big role in improving […]

It is a curious fact that in contemporary American political science, very few people want to study the state, that is, the functioning of executive branches and their bureaucracies. Since the onset of the Third Wave of democratizations now more than a generation ago, the overwhelming emphasis in comparative politics has been on democracy, transitions […]