Politics and Administration at the Top: Lessons from Down Under (Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies) - Softcover

Dunn, Delmer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822956500 ISBN 13: 9780822956501

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997

Synopsis

Winner of the 1998 Charles Levine Award for best book on administration and policy

Dunn focuses on two levers of power in modern democracies, the elected party politician and the professional state bureaucrat, using Australia as his example. Dunn uses interviews with Cabinet ministers, members of their staffs, and department heads of two governments in Australia to see how ministers seek to provide political direction to the bureaucracy. He examines the extent to which they succeed and how their direction is both influenced by and acted on by the departments.
Dunn's analysis provides a rare look at high-level relationships between politicians and executive departments in one democratic government and offers insights into issues of accountability and responsibility in democratic governments. His findings, based on his in-depth look at a government that blends many features of both U.S. and British governments, reveal the fundamentals that are necessary to make this key relationship work well and are thus pertinent to public administration in all democracies.

About this title

About the Author:

Delmer Dunn is Vice President for Instruction & Regents Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Georgia.

Review:

“Delmer Dunn's important new book is a shorter, Australian version of Hugh Heclo's Government of Strangers—really more a government of friends in this case. . . .  Politics and Administration at the Top is a provocative and insightful work that should be read by scholars and practitioners.”
—The Annals, American Academy of Political and Social Science

“It is refreshing that Delmer Dunn, a well-known US public administration academic, . . .[in] a reversal of the usual process, looks at the administrative system in Australia for its implications on American government. . . . There is much value in the insights that a well-informed outsider can have and often more than insiders. For this reason, it is hoped that Politics and Administration at the Top: Lessons from Down Under gains an Australian audience as well.”
—Australian Journal of Public Administration

“The book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in efforts to improve the way in which modern democracies make and carry out policy decisions.”
—Francis Rourke, Johns Hopkins University

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0822956500
• ISBN 13: 9780822956501
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208