Local Bureaucracy in United States

Local Bureaucracy

Kelly M. LeRoux, in the chapter “Local Bureaucracy” of the Oxford Handbook of State and Local Government, offers some insight and critically assesses the situation and current state of scholarship on the topic. The following is a summary:Local bureaucracy is the administrative apparatus of local political jurisdictions that exists for the primary purposes of carrying out state and federal policy objectives and for planning and providing local public services. The goals of local bureaucratic actors, and thus the organizational behavior of local bureaucracies, are often driven by considerations of improving efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness in local service delivery. In principal, these goals are held to be equally important by professional public managers, yet the complex and diverse demands of the local electorate combined with the increasingly networked context of local bureaucracy dictate that public managers will confront tradeoffs in the pursuit of these objectives. This chapter examines evidence and debates related to the three key themes of efficiency, responsiveness, and effectiveness in the local bureaucracy literature. In summarizing the state of knowledge in local bureaucracy research related to these three themes, this chapter highlights a number of unanswered questions and promising theoretical developments that might serve to guide future research.

Further Reading

• “Local Bureaucracy”, The Oxford Handbook of American Politics