Book List

Required Books

The Study of Politics and Administration

  • Michael J. Sandel. 2009. Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
  • John Dewey. 1954. The Public and Its Problems. Athens, OH: Swallow Press Books.
  • Robert F. Durant. 2014. Why Public Service Matters: Public Managers, Public Policy, and Democracy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Frank J. Goodnow. 1900. Politics and Administration. New York, NY: Macmillan.
  • James G. March and Johan P. Olsen. 1989. Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics. New York, NY: The Free Press.

The Constitutional Basis of Public Administration, Part I

  • Stephen Skowronek. 1982. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • John A. Rohr. 1986. To Run a Constitution: The Legitimacy of the Administrative State. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.
  • Anthony M. Bertelli and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. 2006. Madison’s Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Paul E. Peterson. 1995. “Functional and Legislative Theories of Federalism,” in The Price of Federalism. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.
  • William G. Resh. 2015. Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Malcom M. Feeley and Edward L. Rubin. 2000. Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America’s Prisons. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Democracy and Public Administration

  • Emmette S. Redford. 1969. Democracy in the Administrative State. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Douglas Yates. 1987. Bureaucratic Democracy: The Search for Democracy and Efficiency in American Government. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Robert D. Putnam. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
  • Sandford Borins. 2011. Governing fables: Learning from public sector narratives. IAP.

Organized Interests and the Political Economy

  • Anthony Downs. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
  • Mancur Olson. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • William A. Niskanen, Jr. 1971. Bureaucracy and Representative Government. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
  • Theodore J. Lowi. 1979. The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
  • Terry M. Moe. 1980. The Organization of Interests: Incentives and the Internal Dynamics of Political Interest Groups. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  • Francis E. Rourke. 1984. Bureaucracy, Politics, and Public Policy. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.
  • Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer. 2019. Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis. Cambridge University Press.

Public Organizations: Role, Responsibility, and Power, Part I

  • William F. West. 1985. Administrative Rulemaking: Politics and Processes. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
  • Elinor Ostrom. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • Charles T. Goodsell. 1983. The Case for Bureaucracy: A Public Administration Polemic. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers.

Public Organizations: Role, Responsibility, and Power, Part II

  • Joel D. Aberbach and Bert A. Rockman. 2000. In the Web of Politics: Three Decades of the U.S. Federal Executive. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
  • John Brehm and Scott Gates. 2002. Working, Shirking, and Sabotage: Bureaucratic Response to a Democratic Public. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
  • Daniel P. Carpenter. 2001. The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Guy Peters. 2010. The Politics of Bureaucracy: An Introduction to Comparative Public Administration. New York, NY: Routledge.
  • Herd, P. and Moynihan, D.P., 2019. Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means. Russell Sage Foundation.

The “Public” in Public Administration

  • Donald F. Kettl. 2015. The Transformation of Governance: Public Administration for the Twenty-First Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Kenneth J. Meier and Laurence O’Toole, Jr. 2006. Bureaucracy in a Democratic State: A Governance Perspective. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

What is Public? What is Private?

  • Harold Seidman. 1998. Politics, Position, and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organization. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Mark H. Moore. 1995. Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Barry Bozeman. 2007. Public Values and Public Interest: Counterbalancing Economic Individualism. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
  • George Frederickson. 2010. Social Equity and Public Administration: Origins, Developments, and Applications. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Public Administrators as Public Servants

  • Frederick C. Mosher. 1968. Democracy and the Public Service. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • H. George Frederickson. 1997. The Spirit of Public Administration. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
  • John A. Rohr. 2002. Civil Servants and Their Constitutions. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.
  • Paul Light. 1999. The New Public Service. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.