Bureaucracy and Service Delivery
This essay reviews the literature on the politics of bureaucracy in the developing world, with a focus on service delivery and bureaucratic performance. This survey classic topics and themes such as the developmental state, principal agent relations, and the ancient Greece hypothesis, and link them to new research findings in political science, sociology, and economics. This review identify the concept of embeddedness as an important yet still under explored framework that cuts across disciplines and which may be used to understand bureaucratic performance and service delivery. Looking forward, the out line a framework for conceptualizing bureaucratic action by exploiting variation across time, space, task, and client, and identify promising areas for further research on the bureaucrat citizen encounter in developing countries.