Political Science 290F – Organizational Dynamics: Theories of Delegation and Bureaucratic Discretion (Spring 2006)
Instructor: Ethan Scheiner
Email: escheiner@ucdavis.edu
Syllabus
Course Summary:
This course is designed to give graduate (and very advanced undergraduate) students an introduction to contemporary applications of organizational theory to political science.
The first set of readings will focus on some of the classics in the field. However, unfortunately, the constraints of the short ten week quarter force us to turn almost immediately to much more recent work.
Political science applications of organizational theory offer analyses from a number of different directions, most especially the role of formal organizations (bureaucracies being the most obvious) in shaping political life. At the same time, the literature also gives substantial attention to informal organizations and the role of norms and routines in organizations.
This course will give some attention to work within these traditions, but ultimately focuses on what is perhaps the most directly relevant direction within the organizational theory tradition in contemporary political science: delegation.
Politicians are elected to represent “the people,” but, because of the complicated nature of policy making, politicians must inevitably delegate substantial discretion to (unelected) bureaucrats, who have greater time and expertise to focus on specific issues and implement policy. A central issue for elected representatives who seek to delegate is how to maintain a fair amount of control over the work that is done by the bureaucracy.
This course therefore focuses on considering the features that help bring about greater political control of bureaucrats and those that offer greater bureaucratic discretion (or autonomy).
The class should be useful for people in any subfield. I am officially a comparativist, but much of the literature from the class comes from the American politics tradition. However, there is a growing set of comparativists working in this area as well. People working in IR may have an interest insofar as much of a given country’s decision making is ultimately bound up in the decisions made by individuals working within groups under particular types of constraints and incentives. And much of the work in the organizational theory tradition is clearly a direct descendant of classical and modern political theory.
The organizational theory literature is vast, so much so that this course is able to touch only a limited number of topics within it. I strongly encourage seminar participants to consider other organizational theory lines that are not covered in the course in their final seminar papers.