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...

Our survey of private manufacturing firms finds the size of hidden “unofficial” activity to be much larger in Russia and Ukraine than in Poland, Slovakia and Romania. A comparison of cross-country averages shows that managers in Russia and Ukraine face higher effective tax rates, worse bureaucratic corruption, greater incidence of mafia protection, and have less faith in the court system. Our f...

We describe a hybrid relational bureaucratic form with structures that embed three processes of reciprocal interrelating—relational coproduction, relational coordination, and relational leadership—into the roles of customers, workers, and managers. We show how these role-based relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect foster participants’ attentiveness to the situation...

UNLABELLED The purpose of this commentary is to describe the unintended effects ethics committees may have on research and to analyse the regulatory and administrative problems of clinical trials. DISCUSSION The Finnish law makes an arbitrary distinction between medical research and other health research, and the European Union's directive for good clinical trials further differentiates drug ...

Abstract Politicians need expertise to make public policies, and civil servants are principal proximate providers of knowledge. Yet, what constitutes relevant knowledge skills for bureaucrats is regularly contested—both by politicians bureaucrats—and subject change. How can we explain the processes contestation change in policy bureaucracies? The article presents a theoretical framework analyzi...