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Bureaucracy provides access to two important and influential books on bureaucracy by Gordon Tullock: The Politics of Bureaucracy (1965) and Economic Hierarchies, Organization and the Structure of Production (1992).

When The Politics of Bureaucracy was published in 1965, bureaucracy was viewed by many people as benign—serving the public good with objectivity and omniscience.

In Economic Hierarchies, Organization and the Structure of Production, Tullock looks at bureaucracy in a different but related way, basing his new book on developments in the theory of the firm that had occurred during the intervening period. By comparing the politics of bureaucracy with the economics of industrial organization, Tullock demonstrates that corporations perform with greater economic efficiency than do government bureaus.

“The perfectly good word “politics” has an extremely broad range of meaning. We speak of “national politics”, “bureaucratic politics”, “army politics”, and “corporation politics”; and we know that the word “politician” refers to an individual with particular characteristics in any of these organizational settings. Any general theory about politics should have some relevance for each of these organizational structures.”

Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock (1922) is University Professor of Law and Economics and Distinguished Research Fellow in the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy at George Mason University. He holds a joint teaching position in the Department of Economics and the School of Law. Professor Tullock received a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1947. Tullock is one of the fathers of public choice theory.