Description
The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy is a major work sure to influence future understandings of progressivism, state-building, and American political development. Carpenter delves into the highly variable world of bureaucratic entrepreneurship and innovation in organization to explain the emergence of scattered pockets of administrative autonomy within the executive branch of American government. His carefully crafted analysis of the conditions under which administrators have gained control over the political authorities that ostensibly control them presents a formidable challenge to the assumptions of political scientists, and it should prompt some equally careful rethinking of the operations of American democracy more generally. -- Stephen Skowronek, Yale University Although we tend to discuss the strength, or weakness, of state autonomy as though it were the same for every agency, the fact of the matter is that autonomy varies considerably from agency to agency. In this excellent book, Daniel Carpenter is among the first to make this observation and explore its implications. -- Graham K. Wilson, University of Wisconsin-Madison Whether we regard the modern state as fair as Athena, stepping fully formed from the brow of Zeus, or as foul as Frankenstein, sutured on a scientist's table, there had to be a time of quickening when the limbs began to twitch and the brain began to spark. In a splendid reinterpretation of the classic period of American state formation, Dan Carpenter demonstrates that a self-conscious mentality emerged because career bureaucratic officials created overlapping networks between their agencies and forged public reputations that secured support from the citizenry. Thus freed them from the influence of political parties, these officials then turned on the very politicians who had created them. -- Richard Bensel, Cornell University
About the Author
Daniel P. Carpenter is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. This book is based upon his dissertation, which won the 1998 Harold Lasswell Award of the American Political Science Association, and includes a chapter that won the 1995 Herbert Kaufman Award of the AP5A.
Reviews
Winner of the Levine Memorial Book Prize Winner of the Gladys M. Kammerer Award "Carpenter's book is intellectually arresting--weaving quantitative and qualitative empiricism through an impressive array of theoretical propositions toward an attractive theory of bureaucratic autonomy in the administrative state ... [A]dmirably successful in adding to our narrative of the development of the American administrative state."--Anthony Bertelli, Public Administration Review
Awards
Winner of American Political Science Association: Gladys M. Kammerer Award 2002 and IPSA Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize 2001.
Book Information
ISBN 9780691070100
Author Daniel Carpenter
Format Paperback
Page Count 504
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 765g