Democracy and Administration: Woodrow Wilson’s Ideas and the Challenges of Public Management

Though his term in the White House ended nearly a century ago, Woodrow Wilson anticipated the need for new ideas to address the effects of modern economic and social forces on the United States, including increased involvement in international affairs. Democracy and Administration synthesizes the former world leader’s thought on government administration, laying out Wilson’s concepts of how best to manage government bureaucracies and balance policy leadership with popular rule. Linking the full gamut of Wilson’s ideas and actions covering nearly four decades, Brian J. Cook finds success, folly, and fresh thinking with relevance in the twenty-first century. Building on his interpretive synthesis, Cook links Wilson’s tenets to current efforts to improve public management, showing how some of his most prominent ideas and initiatives presaged major developments in theory and practice. Democracy and Administration calls on scholars and practitioners to take Wilson’s institutional design and regime-level orientation into account as part of the ambitious enterprise to develop a new science of democratic governance.