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The Future of Governing: Four Emerging Models. By B. Guy Peters. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. 180p. $35.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.
Government seems to be in trouble throughout the industrial democracies. Citizens tell pollsters (and affirm at the polls) that they do not trust their government and do not believe it works very well. While depictions of a postwar public-sector golden age and a subsequent fall from grace are often overblown, governments in the United States and Canada, Western Europe, and Japan have dropped in perceived performance and public esteem in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to electoral turmoil, austerity campaigns, and a ferment of reform efforts in the 1980s and 1990s. Now what? B. Guy Peters takes up no less sweeping a question in The Future of Governing. What should government do in an age when means dwindle but missions do not? How can politicians and bureaucrats deliver on citizens' expectations despite weakening claims on authority, resources, and popular legitimacy? Why did systems of government that seem to have functioned tolerably well for the industrial democracies in much of the postwar era stumble so badly (and so close to simultaneously)? And how can the surging wave of theoretical work on public-sector reform be harnessed to the service of better practice? Peters has an eagle eye for the right questions.
The Future of Governing is as ambitious as its title suggests. Not only the questions engaged but also the intellectual terrain surveyed are of intimidating scope. This short book features 24 small-print pages of bibliographic references, including works in five languages and covering several disciplines (economics,...