In this book, Anthony M. Bertelli provides a comprehensive introduction to the formal theoretical literature about public administration. This is clearly and explicitly a theory book: While Bertelli mentions in passing some attempts to measure and study specific phenomena in a systematic, statistical framework, most of the empirical material comes from brief sketches of case studies and is meant to illustrate the theoretical insights.

The Political Economy of Public Sector Governance seems to aim at being, first and foremost, a textbook. For instance, Bertelli presents a number of results as propositions, which are then also listed in an appendix. Secondarily, the book is an introduction to the political economy approach for scholars who might have a relatively deep knowledge of the substantive topics but are not familiar with political economy and positive political theory. The ability of the book to persuade public administration scholars of the usefulness of these approaches depends, at this point, mostly on the open-mindedness of the targets: They have been provided a clear, comprehensive, and, at the same time, accessible source.

Principal-agent models, the role of informational asymmetries, moral hazard, and adverse selection are introduced using some examples in one chapter. Then, two chapters present some of the most important contributions in the literature: One covers the issue of budgeting of bureaucratic agencies, and another covers the most important models of bureaucratic delegation. In the following two chapters, Bertelli presents more original material: an application of the theoretical framework to contracting out and private–public partnerships, and an attempt to reconcile and supersede a century-old debate about the role of public-spiritedness in public governance. These two chapters deviate from mere textbook presentation, and might be of more interest for the specialist reader.

Throughout the book, Bertelli avoids introducing mathematical notation, and with the exception of a few figures, the models are presented and explained only in verbal terms. One lengthy “pencil exercise” is the closest to quantitative reasoning by the author. Clearly, the decision to present the material verbally is motivated by the desire to be accessible to many potential readers who are interested in learning about the substantive insights but might not be familiar with formal methods, or might be intimidated by the appearance of mathematical notation.

Bertelli's effort is commendable. A non-negligible part of the “traditional” literature in public administration and public sector governance has been plagued by what one might be tempted to call a reckless contempt for analytical approaches: referred to, more diplomatically, by the author as a disagreement regarding “the extent to which . . . essential features of [a] complex environment can be abstracted to gain analytical traction” (p. 16). Political economy contributions are frequently accused of reductionism and oversimplification, and criticized for “making too many assumptions.” Bertelli gets the math out of the way and focuses his effort on demonstrating in practice the richness and nuances of the results that emerge in the political economy literature, which might be a successful corrective strategy to rebut accusations of oversimplification. Similarly, showing how this literature does not make any more assumptions than competing frameworks do, but is simply more transparent about them, might persuade readers that criticizing an approach for the amount of assumptions it explicitly makes is misguided. The defensive tone adopted at times by Bertelli regarding the limitations of the political economy approach would sound unusual in other substantive subfields: In comparative politics, for instance, the apologetic verbiage no longer seems to be required. But the author knows his potential readers, I guess, and tries to be accommodating.

One of the main appeals of this book, namely, its avoidance of mathematical notation, is also, to an extent, the source of some of its shortcomings. Bertelli demonstrates why formal, mathematical approaches to theory building in the social sciences are powerful; the manipulation of abstract concepts is significantly less demanding when mathematical formalism is used. In order to avoid notation, one faces a trade-off: either simplify the material significantly, or run the risk of introducing verbal explanations that can be, at times, very hard to follow. He chooses, admirably, to compromise very little when it comes to detail, in terms of assumptions, solution steps, and implications of the models he presents. As a result, some passages become quite complex and cognitively demanding. I doubt that I am alone in finding it easier to walk through the original models than through some (to be clear, a minority) of the explanations in this book. Nonetheless, it represents a serious foundation around which a semester-long graduate course on political economy and positive political theory for policy students at the master's or Ph.D. level can be structured. Alternatively, the verbal explanations could help students make the necessary connections between theory and substance, and understand model development as part of an intellectual debate.

The book has some specific strengths. Bertelli adopts a variant of the tried-and-tested approach of popular science books: the story-study-lesson model. First, an actual case is briefly sketched. Then, the reader is reminded what theoretical results might apply, and gently shown how to connect the features of the case to the ingredients of the models from which the results are derived. This strategy might prove quite effective both in a classroom setting and with a noncaptive readership, which can be shown how to deploy the toolbox when analyzing actual policy situations.

A few choices that Bertelli made might have proven effective in the author's own classroom experience, but some readers might find them less useful. In particular, two examples are introduced in the chapter providing the methodological foundations. One illustrates hidden action problems, and how to design incentives to solve them, in the context of a physician visit. Whether a heavily regulated field that experiences substantial litigation is the best example to illustrate how performance pay can be used is an open question. The second example has to do with the screening problem of a manager, named Audrey. Some might find it weird to abruptly reencounter the Audrey character in a different chapter, stranded in the midst of discussions about presidents, congressional committees, and floor medians. Similarly, using the purchase of churros on the beach to illustrate the Hotelling model (Harold Hotelling, “Stability in Competition,” Economic Journal 39 [no. 153, 1929]: 41–57)—while in itself cute and close to the intuition of the original model—seems unnecessarily distant from the subject matter to which the spatial model is applied in this work.

In sum, The Political Economy of Public Sector Governance is an extremely valuable overview of analytical approaches in the study of public administration. Given its reliance on verbal translations of formal models, the book might have significant appeal to public administration scholars who work in other frameworks or paradigms, and are open-minded enough to have a desire to learn about the substantive insights developed in the political economy literature. For this same reason, it might be less useful to the political economy scholar who works on other substantive issues and needs to get up to speed on public administration. Given its substance-driven, nontechnical approach, the book can also be used, alone or alongside part of the original contributions, as a textbook for a graduate (or, possibly, an advanced undergraduate) course introducing analytical perspectives about public sector governance. Overall, this constitutes an impressive effort to make the contributions of the formal theoretical literature on public administration accessible to a broader audience.