In this important book, coeditors George A. Krause and Kenneth J. Meier, along with their chapter authors, make a strong case for a theoretically informed and empirically advanced social science study of government bureaucracies. Although other social science disciplines have been rigorously studying public and private organizations for some time, the study of government bureaucracies has had a somewhat marginal position in political science. The current cadre of political scientists “scientifically” studying the bureaucracy, including many of the contributors to this volume, attests to the growing prominence of this subject in the discipline.

The book is organized with sections on theory, methodological technology, and empirical studies. Meier and Krause nicely frame the chapters with succinct introductory and concluding chapters that summarize previous research, place their book in the broader context of the literature, and outline future research directions and how they might be pursued. Consequently, an important test for edited volumes is passed: The chapters are more compelling when read together than standing alone.

Most bureaucracies research during the past 20 years or so draws on principal agent theory or, lamentably, too often a version of it stripped down to fit the data on hand. This approach worked fairly well so long as the underlying normative question (if not the goal) was to have bureaucracies be responsive to their more democratically accountable overseers in the judiciary and particularly the legislative and executive branches. The comforting conclusion from many studies is that bureaucratic responsiveness does occur, if unevenly. However, a fundamental insight underlying the important theoretical contribution by McNollgast and Kathleen Bawn, among others, is not simply that administrative procedures can structure bureaucratic discretion, but also that under some conditions, bureaucratic discretion can be desirable in its own right, for example, perhaps because bureaucracies have more expertise to solve technically vexing problems. And bureaucracies may enjoy discretion not necessarily out of design but through the alignment and authorities of their political overseers, as Thomas Hammond shows in his chapter.

The theoretical chapters offer interesting perspectives on bureaucracies that go well beyond the question of responsiveness or the shirking/discretion question. The fact that bureaucracies enjoy discretion, whether by design or political circumstances, raises important questions about the ends to which they deploy their autonomy. The chapter by Krause shows that bureaucracies' preferences for autonomy are likely to be variable, depending on factors such as political and policy uncertainty, a conclusion that raises profound questions if bureaucracies can lobby their political overseers. The chapter by David Spence argues that bureaucratic policymaking can “fulfill voters' wishes irrespective of the ability of elected politicians to control what agencies do” (p. 105). Although I am not entirely convinced by his analysis, Spence's reasoned and well-researched argument would be good fodder for graduate seminar discussion.

The chapters in the methodological technology section are quite strong, though more in a general sense than for the new methods they present. Andrew B. Whitford's insightful chapter uses computational analysis to illustrate an intriguing theoretical model that might have been included with the volume's theory chapters. The chapter by John Brehm, Scott Gates, and Brad Gomez presents an analysis of police officers' time allocation based on a Dirichlet distribution, but more interesting is their focus on how managers and peers influence (literally) street-level public safety enforcement. This is precisely the type of inside-the-black-box perspective Meier and Krause call for in their concluding chapter. A sharper focus on what happens within bureaucracies leads Brehm, Gates, and Gomez to look for theoretical guidance in sociology, organizational theory, and psychology.

The empirical chapters investigate such topics as differences between federal and state policy implementation, rule making, and goal setting. Taken together, they are good examples of current bureaucracies research—technically well executed, though sometimes overly narrow in their theoretical framing and ambitions. Steven J. Balla and John R. Wright, for example, in an otherwise first-rate analysis of how consensual procedures slow down rule making, might have taken into account the agencies' political overseers and veto points, although this may have required some simplifying assumptions. Quibbling further, it would have been nice to see some more comparative studies. Kevin B. Smith's chapter comparing government and nonprofit schools provides an interesting angle that could be applied to other policy areas. Cross-national studies would also have been a valuable addition to the book.

All in all, Politics, Policy, and Organizations offers an important contribution to political studies of government bureaucracies. It deserves to be read by scholars working in the area and anyone else looking for a thoughtful primer on the state of the field, and it would be a good fit for graduate seminars. Taken broadly, Krause and Meier's book also suggests a more ambitious goal for bureaucracies scholars in political science. Bureaucratic organizations are not unique to governments, nor is their study confined to political science. As political scientists move in the empirical directions the editors propose—“getting inside the black box of bureaucracy, taking theory more explicitly,” and so on (p. 293)—they should look to sociology, public administration, economics, organizational studies, and the other fields that have been scientifically studying public and private bureaucracies for a long time. Effective political science bureaucracies research will not only learn from what these fields have accomplished but also point to where they are headed, a process that is already slowly taking place. In 10 years, I would be happy to see another Meier and Krause volume making the case for what political scientists have contributed to the scientific study of bureaucracies, not just in political science but in the social sciences in general.