Legitimating and Constraining American Government
| Published date | 01 September 2013 |
| Author | Philip Rocco |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12105 |
| Date | 01 September 2013 |
Book Reviews 765
Sonia M. Ospina and Rogan Kersh, Editors
Philip Rocco
University of California, Berkeley
Legitimating and Constraining American Government
Public Administration Review,
Vol. 73, Iss. 5, pp. 765–767. © 2013 by
The American Society for Public Administration.
DOI: 10.1111/puar.12105.
Philip Rocco is a doctoral candidate
at the University of California, Berkeley.
His research focuses on federalism and
the politics of policy development in the
United States.
E-mail: procco@berkeley.edu
Joanna L. Grisinger, e Unwieldy American State:
Administrative Politics since the New Deal (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 319 pp.
$85.00 (cloth), ISBN: 9781107004320.
Not long after the New Deal, in the 1940s, the
political mantle of “reform” took on a new
meaning. Instead of changing government by
creating new agencies with novel policy missions such
as poverty reduction and retirement security, reformers
attempted to manage and constrain the state created
by their predecessors. ese self-styled advocates—an
odd coalition of embattled congressional conservatives,
political scientists, public administration scholars, and
administrative lawyers—sought to place reins on many
of the New Deal’s executive agencies and independent
commissions, simultaneously entangling them in webs
of procedures, exposing them to harsher congressio-
nal scrutiny, and attempting to reorganize them into
rationalized hierarchies, with as little discretion for
mid-level bureaucrats as possible. e eff orts of conser-
vatives were largely tempered as they built a coalition
for reform, but their results were signifi cant. Crucially,
they created a more hobbled administrative state than
might have otherwise existed, in which executive agen-
cies had (on balance) less autonomy to act in ways that
political offi cials or interested parties might not have
wished them to (there are, of course, exceptions; see
Carpenter 2010). ey also helped to shift the focus of
debates over the legitimacy of the administrative state
itself.
Joanna L. Grisinger’s e Unwieldy American State:
Administrative Politics since the New Deal unravels
the origins of these constraints on the American state
by historicizing several major political attempts at
administrative reform, including the Administrative
Procedure Act (APA), the Legislative Reorganization
Act (LRA), and the recommendations of the Hoover
Commission on Organization of the Executive
Branch. In doing so, the book adds substantially to a
growing body of work on the postwar development of
the American state that suggests that even though the
state “grew” in size during the late twentieth cen-
tury, it did not necessarily gain the kind of capacity
to make policy autonomously that other developed
democracies did (see Teles 2012). As authors such as
Terry Moe (1989), Kimberley Morgan and Andrea
Campbell (2011), Christopher Howard (1997), and
Elisabeth Clemens (2006) have argued—with some
exceptions—the administrative arrangements of many
crucial U.S. public policies frequently hamstring
administrators, either placing procedural controls on
their activities or delegating authority to nonadminis-
trative actors that prevented agencies from expeditious
pursuit of their goals.
Whereas previous scholarship may have lost the forest
for the trees, focusing on the administrative outcomes
of individual policy controversies (over the creation of
Medicare, for instance), Grisinger trains her sights on
a smaller window of time, showing how reformers in
the wake of the New Deal responded to claims about
the antidemocratic excesses of the administrative state
as a whole and curtailed what could have become
a more robust governmental apparatus rather than
an outlier among advanced democracies. Grisinger’s
deep archival excavation, nothing short of masterful,
To continue reading
Request your trial