Among the most common ways people come into contact with modern states is through personal encounters with street-level bureaucrats, that is, with workers who occupy the bottom of state administrative hierarches, where they apply—rather than decide—laws, rules, and policies. Examples are police officers, public school teachers, social workers, and the staff at public service agencies, such as public housing and unemployment offices. These workers have more discretion than it might, at first, appear because the mandates they follow are often indeterminate, allowing for multiple interpretations, and because, not infrequently, they must make on-the-ground decisions about how to allocate scarce resources and how to weight multiple—sometimes contradictory—aims, ends, and values. It can matter tremendously to the people whom they serve what such bureaucrats’ moral dispositions are, that is, “how they tend to perceive and interpret situations and cases . . . how their moral sentiments are mobilized, and . . . how they understand their role and responsibilities” (p. 12). Yet democratic theory tends not to concern itself with such matters. Instead, theorists focus mostly on principles of political legitimacy and on questions of institutional design.

In this insightful and well-argued book, Bernardo Zacka sets out to correct that imbalance. He argues that democratic theorists should attend to what happens—and to what ought to happen—“when the state meets the street.” In particular, his claim is that we should attend to the ethical sensibilities and dispositions that can enable street-level bureaucrats to perform their roles in ways that are consistent with democratic norms.

As part of his research for this book, Zacka spent eight months volunteering and conducting participant-observation research in an antipoverty agency in a large American city (both the agency and the city remain anonymous, to protect the privacy of the subjects). This approach helped him gain insights into the experiences and worldviews of the bureaucrats whom he aims to understand. For much of the book, this ethnographic research remains beneath the surface; in the first several chapters, the author shares with the reader vignettes that illustrate parts of his argument, but he says relatively little about his method, the larger patterns that emerged from his field notes, and how he used them to develop his central claims. However, he draws on his ethnography more in the book’s fourth, and most original, chapter, and when he does so, it pays off.

Leading up to Chapter 4, Zacka advances two principal claims. First, he argues that things go wrong when bureaucrats develop what he calls “reductive” moral dispositions, by which he means dispositions to focus on just a subset of the demands that their roles impose. He identifies three reductive dispositions: “indifference,” or the disposition to complete one’s prescribed tasks efficiently, in part by treating all of the people whom one serves exactly the same; “caregiving,” or the disposition to meet the particular needs of each of the individuals whom one serves; and “enforcement,” or the disposition to promote strict adherence to rules and regulations. Although there is nothing entirely wrong with any of these dispositions—each is valuable, up to a point—problems arise when bureaucrats embrace just one of them, to the exclusion of the others. In Zacka’s words, “The danger is one of systematic bias: if bureaucrats cannot easily revise or update their default mode of appraisal, they will tend to treat clients more indifferently, compassionately, or suspiciously than their case deserves” (p. 99).

The second of the two claims is that individual bureaucrats can and should resist such reductivism by engaging in “everyday practices of the self.” Zacka borrows this idea from Michel Foucault, who suggests that “the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self,” which “are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group” (Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, eds., The Essential Foucault, 2003). For Zacka, quotidian acts of self-examination, recollection, and moral imagination are practices of the self, through which street-level bureaucrats can revise and reshape their moral dispositions.

Zacka’s focus in Chapter 4 is on what he calls “peer-level accountability.” He makes the case for supplementing traditional forms of accountability—hierarchical accountability within bureaucratic organizations, direct accountability to clients, and professional accountability via extraorganizational bodies that develop and enforce codes of ethics—with informal, horizontal accountability among street-level bureaucrats. He uses his field research to make the case that bureaucrats engage in moral reasoning by starting with concrete cases (rather than abstract principles) and proceeding to develop “informal moral taxonomies” (p. 171), which they lean on to help them decide how to act in difficult cases. It is a good thing that street-level bureaucrats reason this way, he argues, because it helps them maintain flexibility, adjusting their approaches as new problems arise, and because it enables them to make decisions about hard cases without having to commit to, let alone agree with one another about, first principles. The moral pluralism that this mode of reasoning makes possible is key. Zacka uses his participant-observation research to show that informal relationships and exchanges among street-level bureaucrats work best when individuals in the same organization have different moral dispositions. Under such circumstances, they tend to hold one another accountable through peer-to-peer exchanges, for example, through criticisms of one another’s approaches to difficult cases.

This insight has implications for bureaucratic management and organizational design. Peer-level accountability works best when different workers are morally disposed in different directions: for example, when workers who are more attuned to the values of caretaking challenge their peers who are more attuned to the values of enforcement. It is important to foster a plurality of moral dispositions in a given workplace, then, and to ensure that each disposition has enough of a presence that its distinctive sensibilities and priorities can flourish. Bureaucratic organizations need “heterogenous clusters” (p. 190) to keep informal horizontal accountability alive. Hence, those who plan and manage them should actively foster such pluralism, for example, by hiring and promoting workers with diverse moral dispositions.

When the State Meets the Street is a thoughtful book that usefully brings the tools of political theory to bear on questions of public administration. It argues persuasively that democratic theorists need to pay attention not just to the principles and the institutions that shape our laws but also to the street-level bureaucrats who interpret and apply them.