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...powers. rule. An independent judiciary. These are key elements of America's scheme of democratic governance, scheme so complex, with so much damn government yet so little concentrated authority to act, that it defies comprehension much less well-meaning efforts at creating coherent policies and good public management.
What happens when you lob a seemingly promising managerial concept--efficiency, scientific management, planning, productivity, program budgeting, evaluation, quality, reinvention--into the scrum of American politics? Those who long for order, adaptability, stability, and efficacy should avert their eyes. The remains of such concepts and their advocates are likely to emerge from the fray mutilated if not actually dead. Only infrequently does a recognizable, if somewhat disfigured, body part survive and get transplanted into the body politic: merit-based personnel systems, city-manager government, the executive budget, a Government Accountability Office, the Administrative Procedure Act, benefit-cost analysis, a Congressional Budget Office--and, arguably, high-stakes testing in public schools. Yet, despite the odds against them, reformers with big ideas persevere. The American weltanschauung is based on optimism that society can be improved through well-intentioned, rationally designed public effort to create good government. That's not a bad thing. Public-spirited optimism beats kleptocracy every time.
And so we are in the midst of what Beryl Radin in her new book calls "the performance movement"--surely no one can be against that--and the American political process is performing its brutalizing magic on it. She does not avert...
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