Americans have a love-hate relationship with government. Rejecting bureaucracy — but not the goods and services the welfare state provides — Americans are insisting government be made to run like a business. But, as Constitutional Coup shows, separating the state from its public servants,...

Where general purpose governments provide a bundle of services within their boundaries, special district governments provide specific services inside the boundaries of general purpose governments. The alternative to forming a special purpose government is providing the service within a general...

In recent years, the idea that public policy can be viewed as a horizontal and polycentric process (if not a series of interlocked processes) has become widely acknowledged in the field of public administration research. Still to be explored, however, are implications of this view for policy...

A wide range of services provided by the public sector are credence goods, i.e., services for which the producer has private information whether a certain treatment is needed or not. This paper studies how ownership affects the incentives for producers to reveal such information to public...

This paper offers a comprehensive evaluation of the welfare impact of a policy usually regarded as highly successful and vastly imitated worldwide: The privatisation policy pursued in the UK by Mrs Thatcher's government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Major's government (1990-1997) The...

Spanish Abstract: Este trabajo tiene como objetivo incorporar la noción de 'redes políticas' en el análisis de la actividad normativa, a los efectos de determinar si es posible modelar patrones de interacción entre los actores en el proceso político, no sólo en el proceso de...

The privatization literature depicts the choice whether to contract out as a tradeoff between excessive private investment in quality-reducing cost saving and inadequate public investment in cost-increasing quality improvement, under circumstances where neither the amount of investment nor the...

Critics of privatization argue that privatization encourages providers to lobby for industry expansion. I argue that this is not generally true when public-sector actors also lobby. Where the effectiveness of advocacy depends on total expenditures, some initial amount of privatization always...

Early proponents of development administration advanced a paradigm based on a search for technically superior models, the study and acceptability of cross-cultural public management experiences, and the promotion of policy management styles and structures oriented to particular ideological...

A common argument against privatization is that private providers will self-interestedly lobby to increase the size of their market. In this Article, I evaluate this argument, using, as a case study, the argument against prison privatization based on the possibility that the private prison...