Turning political intent into administrative reality.
13 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Science, the Endless Frontier
Vannevar Bush · 1945
Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress and will not be adequately supported by industry alone, so the federal government should…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Science of "Muddling Through"
Charles E. Lindblom · 1959
Argues policymakers actually proceed by successive limited comparisons against the status quo rather than the comprehensive rational analysis…
+7 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory
Theodore J. Lowi · 1964
Proposes that policies can be sorted into distributive, regulatory and redistributive types, and that the type of policy determines the politics that…
+1 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Vannevar Bush
Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress and will not be adequately supported by industry alone, so the federal government should fund it without dictating its direction — the founding argument for postwar US science policy.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026National Commission on Excellence in Education
Warns that declining educational standards amount to a 'rising tide of mediocrity' threatening American competitiveness, and catalyses a wave of standards-based school reform.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University
Documents record numbers of cost-burdened renters and homeowners priced out by high prices and interest rates, arguing the housing affordability crisis has broadened from low-income renters to a much wider share of American households.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles E. Lindblom
Argues policymakers actually proceed by successive limited comparisons against the status quo rather than the comprehensive rational analysis textbooks prescribe, and that this incrementalism is often the more sensible method.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Peter Bachrach & Morton S. Baratz
Argues that power operates not only in the decisions that get made but in keeping potential issues off the political agenda altogether — a second, harder-to-observe face of power.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Donald T. Campbell
Government should treat policy reforms as experiments to be evaluated and revised rather than as political commitments that cannot be admitted to have failed, and administrators must be freed from the incentive to call every programme a success.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael Lipsky
The 1969 APSA conference discussion paper that is the direct precursor of Lipsky's 1971 Urban Affairs Quarterly article: using police, teachers and lower-court judges as cases, it develops the same three-part account — scarce resources, physical or psychological threat, and ambiguous/contradictory role expectations — that street-level bureaucrats cope with by developing routines and simplifications that become, in effect, the policy clients actually experience.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Institute of Medicine
American healthcare fails patients not through isolated errors but through a system never designed for chronic, complex care, and argues quality requires redesigning care processes around six explicit aims rather than working harder within the existing structure.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Dani Rodrik
Industrial policy should be understood as a process of discovery — eliciting information about a country's underlying costs and opportunities from the private sector — rather than as government picking winning sectors in advance.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Bank
Applies findings from behavioural science — automatic thinking, social norms, mental models — to redesign development programmes, arguing many fail because they assume purely rational actors.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Office of Management and Budget
Directs every US federal agency to justify a proposed regulation with a formal benefit-cost analysis against a clearly specified baseline, setting the methodological rules — discount rates, distributional weighting, how to treat uncertainty — that determine which regulations pass and which do not.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Theodore J. Lowi
Proposes that policies can be sorted into distributive, regulatory and redistributive types, and that the type of policy determines the politics that forms around it rather than the other way round.