Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better

✍ Scribed by Peter H. Schuck

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 484
• Edition: Course Book
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

From healthcare to workplace and campus conduct, the federal government is taking on ever more responsibility for managing our lives. At the same time, Americans have never been more disaffected with Washington, seeing it as an intrusive, incompetent, wasteful giant. Ineffective policies are caused by deep structural factors regardless of which party is in charge, bringing our government into ever-worsening disrepute. Understanding why government fails so often—and how it might become more effective—is a vital responsibility of citizenship.

In this book, lawyer and political scientist Peter Schuck provides a wide range of examples and an enormous body of evidence to explain why so many domestic policies go awry—and how to right the foundering ship of state. An urgent call for reform, Why Government Fails So Often is essential reading for anyone curious about why government is in such a disgraceful state and how it can do better.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1. Introduction
Part 1: The Context of Policy Making
CHAPTER 2. Success, Failure, and In Between
CHAPTER 3. Policy-Making Functions, Processes, Missions, Instruments, and Institutions
CHAPTER 4. The Political Culture of Policy Making
Part 2: The Structural Sources of Policy Failure
CHAPTER 5. Incentives and Collective Irrationality
CHAPTER 6. Information, Inflexibility, Incredibility, and Mismanagement
CHAPTER 7. Markets
CHAPTER 8. Implementation
CHAPTER 9. The Limits of Law
CHAPTER 10. The Bureaucracy
CHAPTER 11. Policy Successes
Part 3: Remedies and Reprise
CHAPTER 12. Remedies: Lowering Government’s Failure Rate
CHAPTER 13. Conclusion
Note
Index