Deregulating the Public Service: Can Government Be Improved?

With the publication of Reinventing Government by Osborne and Gaebler (1992), a national debate began in earnest which captured the emerging public negativism towards government and bureaucracy in particular. This debate focusses on ways to make government more responsive, effective, and accountable. Each of the authors in this work addresses the hypothesis that in order for the notions of bureaucratic reform to take seed, bureaucrats need to be freed of their regulatory straight jackets. In sum, the argument seems relatively simple. Reduce the myriad of regulations that govern bureaucrats and restrict them from innovation and government will work better. This is a simplified version, to be sure, but despite the quality of some of the essays in this volume (particularly the contributions of Wilson, Kettl, Nathan and Dubnik) the reader is left with little better definition of the hypothesis and precious little empirical support for its advancement.

The authors cover a good deal of ground in their efforts, from the federal government, to state and local governments, to theories of federalism and public choice. They cover police, personnel functions at all levels, federal procurement and mass transit. Their menu is large and they detail what is wrong in each of these areas that is related to over-regulation of bureaucrats. In doing so, however, they cover much of the same ground. This reduces the feeling that the essays are integrated or that they read as one work. In fact they do not. Having said this, they are all well written. The Wilson and Dubnik essays alone are worth the cost of the volume. The latter is a thoughtful analysis of competing paradigms of reform.

The problems with this volume are relatively consistent. Each article is decidedly vague on just what deregulation is and how is would be implemented. The authors generally admit this, but admission does not obviate the need to demonstrate some relation between the hypothesis and the problems addressed. Even if one accepts the proposition that "over-regulation" is the cause of bureaucratic malaise, it is necessarily unclear how "deregulation" will address the problem since both terms are rife with ambiguity.

Another concern is the rather direct process oriented tone and neo-institutional focus of the theory. Each inherently disregards the individual behavioral dimension and its relationship to the role of bureaucratic regulation. Only brief mention is made of potential unanticipated and unwanted consequences of such a deregulation. Among these are the pernicious degree of racism and sexism in the United States. Are we to believe that these traits will somehow disappear in a happily deregulated environment? The authors do set out, repeatedly, the traditional arguments for bureaucratic regulation. But they do not address the possibility that once freed from the "burdens" of regulations, government agencies would lower the glass ceiling and relegate notions such as affirmative action to history. The values advanced by the deregulation perspective are less likely to find broad political support if they cannot reconcile these sorts of problems. As Dubnik notes, "Launching a movement and succeeding..are not the same" (p.259).

In fairness, the editor (DiIulio) notes that no effort was made to answer many of the questions posed by this review. As a whole, this set of stimulating essays addresses, both in operational and theoretical terms, the central dimensions of the debate Reinventing seems to have generated, and it does this very well. Every public administrationist should read this volume regardless of your perspective.

Gregory D. Russell
California State University, Chico

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