This paper examines the relationship between the legislature and the public administration in postwar Italy (understood as the period from about 1948 through 1994). Italian public administration is normally characterized as poorly designed and ine±cient. A principal-agent framework would lead one to believe that political control of the bureaucracy was inadequate in Italy, and that extensive bu...

We present a formal model explaining that US presidents strategically unionize federal employees to reduce bureaucratic turnover and ‘anchor’ the ideological composition of like-minded agency workforces. To test our model’s predictions, we advance a method of estimating bureaucratic ideology via the campaign contributions of federal employees; we then use these bureaucratic ideal point estimate...

Transitioning from waterfall to agile processes can be difficult especially for organizations lacking toplevel management support. To explore this topic, we collected qualitative and quantitative data about three projects at a government agency transitioning from a waterfall process to the IBM Rational Unified Process. The results of our analysis of this data identify some of the challenges org...