Understanding Big Government: The Programme Approach (Sponsored by ECPR) Book

Everybody talks about big government, but is it clear what people have in mind? Richard Rose's incisively written new book provides the ideas and information needed to understand how and why government grows.The programme approach examines government not only in terms of what it is, a set of organizations, but also in terms of what it does. Government mobilizes the resources of law, taxation and public employment in order to produce varied programmes concerned with education, health, pensions, law and order, and national defence. The programme approach puts the purposes of government first.To understand whether government is growing bigger still, the book systematically examines changes in the scale of laws, taxes and public employment, and in public sector organizations. In turn, these are related to changing claims of programmes. Some programmes of government, such as defence, are contracting, while others, such as health care and pensions, are growing rapidly.Given that government can change its shape by changing the size of its programmes, the causes of big government are multiple. Richard Rose draws upon political science, public administration, economics, sociology, and law to demonstrate the principal causes of government's growth. The causes are not so much nation-specific as programme-specific.The growth of government has costs as well as benefits. This volume shows that big government is not less effective, nor full of contradictions or lacking in popular consent. But big government does make big demands for taxation, and in the 1980s such claims cannot readily be met by economic growth.The evidence supporting these conclusions is drawn from a masterful survey of the dynamics of governments in Western nations in the past-quarter century. Attention is given to developments in Scandinavia and Continental Europe, as well as Britain and America. The book's 35 tables provide a vast array of information about the resources and programmes of government.This text is a thoughtful and imaginative examination of the future implications as well as past trends in the career of big government.Read More