Bureaucracy and Representative Government¶
Niskanen, W. A. (1971). Bureaucracy and Representative Government.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Manufactured Dependency for Role Capture
- Bureaucratic empire-building — a unit perpetuates problems within its remit to justify budget and headcount.
This sourceModels budget-maximizing bureaus whose units have incentive to perpetuate problems within their remit to justify budget and headcount.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Supplies the book's budget-maximization thesis (bureaus grow too large, exploit their sponsor); does not state the claim's mechanism of perpetuating problems to justify budget.
“The theory concludes that most bureaus are too large, grow too fast, use too much capital, and exploit their sponsor.”
- Bureaucratic empire-building — a unit perpetuates problems within its remit to justify budget and headcount.
- Shirky Principle
- In government agencies, control bureaucracies have budgets that scale with the prevalence of the very condition they exist to reduce.
This sourceModels bureaus as budget-maximizers, formalizing how an agency's resources scale with its workload/problem rather than its reduction — the stylized B ∝ M coupling.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Niskanen's model (as the publisher describes it) has bureaus maximize budgets and grow too fast, but says nothing of budgets scaling with the prevalence of the condition they exist to reduce.
“The theory concludes that most bureaus are too large, grow too fast, use too much capital, and exploit their sponsor.”
- In government agencies, control bureaucracies have budgets that scale with the prevalence of the very condition they exist to reduce.
Domain-specific¶
- Government Failure
- short electoral horizons, in which politicians underinvest in long-run public goods and overweight visible near-term transfers; bureaucratic budget-maximization, in which agencies expand beyond their welfare-optimal size because managers' prestige and compensation rise with budget (Niskanen 1971)
This sourceModels bureaus as budget-maximizers whose managers' salary, perquisites and reputation rise with budget, leaving bureaus too large in budget and output.
Supported in partVerified against the source
- short electoral horizons, in which politicians underinvest in long-run public goods and overweight visible near-term transfers; bureaucratic budget-maximization, in which agencies expand beyond their welfare-optimal size because managers' prestige and compensation rise with budget (Niskanen 1971)
Verification¶
Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 3 of 3 citations: 3 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
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