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The question of bureaucratic effectiveness has been an issue of great concern and disagreement in the field of American politics and public administration. Various schools of thought and competing hypotheses vie for acceptance, while case studies are the primary method of empirical investigation. In this article, I use the case survey method to aggregate the collective judgements of previous case-study researchers regarding bureaucratic effectiveness and other key characteristics of U.S. cabinet agencies. I then conduct a preliminary test of competing theories using Maximum Likelihood Estimation. The processes accounted for by the Political Theory of the Firm prove most likely to be the correct model of bureaucratic effectiveness. The collection of more data will permit greater sophistication in the analysis and will give us more precise and reliable insights into the factors that systematically produce sound or poor performance in the agencies of America's federal government.
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A 1993 study studied this question.
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