Building the Compensatory State

Contemporary public administration research has marginalized the importance of “taking history seriously.” With few exceptions, little recent scholarship in the field has looked longitudinally (rather than cross-sectionally), contextually, and theoretically over extended time periods at “big questions” in public administration. One such “big question” involves the evolution of American administrative reform and its link since the nation’s founding to American state building. This book addresses this gap by analyzing administrative reform in unprecedented empirical and theoretical ways. In taking a multidisciplinary approach, it incorporates recent developments in cognate research fields in the humanities and social sciences that have been mostly ignored in public administration. It thus challenges existing notions of the nature, scope, and power of the American state and, with these, important aspects of today’s conventional wisdom in public administration.Author Robert F. Durant explores the administrative state in a new light as part of a “compensatory state”—driven, shaped, and amplified since the nation’s founding by a corporate–social science nexus of interests. Arguing that this nexus of interests has contributed to citizen estrangement in the United States, he offers a broad empirical and theoretical understanding of the political economy of administrative reform, its role in state building, and its often paradoxical results. Offering a reconsideration of conventional wisdom in public administration, this book is required reading for all students, scholars, or practitioners of public administration, public policy, and politics.

This is a book that can only have been written by someone with decades of experience in researching and teaching public administration. With great care, Robert Durant traces the nature of American government since Independence. The author uses an infrastructural perspective where the state includes bureaucratically structured subnational government, private, and nonprofit actors. This is the key to this study: various actors compensate for the conscious decision to limit the visible size and administrative capacity of the federal government. Indeed, it cannot be emphasized enough that the networked state in the USA is nothing new. Students, citizens, and people working in the career civil service and in political office will benefit from reading this book. They will learn that the dominant image of stateless origins is stereotypical, and about the pervasiveness of the compensatory state. People in general have little knowledge about the stuff that Durant addresses so compellingly: namely, that the American self-conception of limited government, economic liberalism, and volunteerism leads to a system of rent-seeking contractors. This book helps anyone to see the importance of protecting democratic processes from self-serving behavior.Jos C. N. Raadschelders, The Ohio State University, USA

Robert F. Durant is Professor Emeritus, American University. He is the recipientof several lifetime achievement awards for his research, teaching, and service tothe field.