Getting What You Want from Governance

Abstract

In the ideal-type bureaucratic state governance operates by the book. Statute books contain laws stating the conditions for supplying a specific service and public agencies have teachers, nurses or civil engineers with the expert knowledge and skills to deliver it by the book. But what do people do when the state in which they live is not staffed by bureaucratic automatons behaving strictly by the book? This challenge is of immediate relevance in most countries in the world today, where public officials do not conform to the strict Weberian ideal of the modern bureaucrat. Few officials operate with the unpredictable arbitrariness of a despot or with the commitment of a Communist or Nazi ideologue. Instead, the practice of governance offers people a choice of how they get the service they want. These choices are ignored in many studies of governance.