Shared Readings

Core readings used across course versions

This page contains readings shared across all versions of the course. Individual course pages may have additional or modified readings.

Part One: Politics, Public Policy, and Democracy

Policy-centric Politics

  • Brady, David. 2023. “Poverty, Not the Poor.” Science Advances 9 (34).
  • Schattschneider, E. E. 1957. “Intensity, Visibility, Direction, and Scope.” American Political Science Review 51(4): 933-942.
  • Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. 2014. “After the ‘Master Theory’: Downs, Schattschneider, and the Rebirth of Policy-Focused Analysis.” Perspectives on Politics 12 (3): 643-62.
  • Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander, Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen. 2022. “The American Political Economy: A Framework and an Agenda for Research.” In: The American Political Economy. Cambridge University Press.

Additional resources

  • Paul Pierson and Kathleen Thelen. Rethinking American Political Economy. Public lecture hosted by the LSE US Centre (2021). YouTube | Podcast

Politics of Policy Implementation

  • Mangla, Akshay, and Jae Yeon Kim, “Reconstructing Implementation as Politics,” Working Paper.
  • Wildavsky, Aaron. 1973. “If Planning Is Everything, Maybe It’s Nothing.” Policy Sciences 4 (2): 127-153.
  • Lipsky, Michael. 1971. “Street-Level Bureaucracy and the Analysis of Urban Reform.” Urban Affairs Quarterly 6 (4): 391-409.
  • Simon, Herbert A. 1990. “Invariants of Human Behavior.” Annual Review of Psychology 41(1): 1-20.

Additional resources

  • Ezra Klein’s interview with Jennifer Pahlka. “The Book I Wish Every Policymaker Would Read.” The Ezra Klein Show, June 6, 2023. YouTube | Podcast

Political Legitimacy and Policy Delivery

  • Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.” American Political Science Review 53 (1): 69-105.
  • Levi, Margaret. 2022. “Trustworthy Government: The Obligations of Government and the Responsibilities of the Governed.” Daedalus 151 (Fall): 215-233.
  • Lerman, Amy E. 2020. “The Public Reputation as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” In: Good Enough for Government Work. University of Chicago Press.
  • Fukuyama, Francis, Christopher Dann, and Beatriz Magaloni. 2025. “Delivering for Democracy: Why Results Matter.” Journal of Democracy 36 (2): 5-19.

Additional resources

  • Margaret Levi. Trustworthy Government and Legitimating Beliefs. Public lecture hosted by the TiGRE Webinar series (2020). YouTube

Part Two: What Is the State, How It Works, and Why It Matters

State Capacity

  • Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2024. “Tilly Goes to Church: The Religious and Medieval Roots of European State Fragmentation.” American Political Science Review 118 (1): 88-107.
  • Kapur, Devesh. 2020. “Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34(1): 31-54.
  • Lee, Melissa M., and Nan Zhang. 2017. “Legibility and the Informational Foundations of State Capacity.” The Journal of Politics 79 (1): 118-132.
  • Zhang, Simone, and Rebecca A. Johnson. 2023. “Hierarchies in the Decentralized Welfare State.” American Sociological Review 88 (1): 114-153.

Additional resources

  • Yascha Mounk’s interview with James Scott. “The Perils of State Power.” Persuasion, September 3, 2024. Podcast

Institutional Variations

  • Tsebelis, George. 2000. “Veto Players and Institutional Analysis.” Governance 13 (4): 441-474.
  • Lacey, Nicola, and David Soskice. 2015. “Crime, Punishment, and Segregation in the United States.” Punishment & Society 17 (4): 454-481.
  • Anzia, Sarah F. 2022. “Interest Groups and Public Policy in US Local Government.” In Local Interests. University of Chicago Press.
  • Grumbach, Jacob, and Jamila Michener. 2022. “American Federalism, Political Inequality, and Democratic Erosion.” The ANNALS 699 (1): 143-155.

Additional resources

  • Jamila Michener. Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid Federalism and Unequal Politics. Book talk hosted by Cornell’s Mann Library (2019). YouTube

Bureaucratic Performance

  • Ang, Yuen Yuen. 2017. “Beyond Weber: Conceptualizing an Alternative Ideal Type of Bureaucracy in Developing Contexts.” Regulation & Governance 11 (3): 282-298.
  • Williams, Martin J. 2021. “Beyond State Capacity: Bureaucratic Performance, Policy Implementation and Reform.” Journal of Institutional Economics 17(2): 339-57.
  • Auerbach, Adam Michael, Shikhar Singh, and Tariq Thachil. 2025. “Who Knows How To Govern?” American Political Science Review 119 (2): 708-726.
  • Carpenter, Daniel P. 2000. “State Building Through Reputation Building.” Studies in American Political Development 14 (2): 121-155.

Additional resources

  • Guo Xu. Bureaucracy. Public lecture hosted by VoxDev (2023). YouTube

Administrative Burden

  • Moynihan, Donald, Pamela Herd, and Hope Harvey. 2015. “Administrative Burden: Learning, Psychological, and Compliance Costs in Citizen-State Interactions.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 25 (1): 43-69.
  • Mettler, Suzanne. 2010. “Reconstituting the Submerged State.” Perspectives on Politics 8(3): 803-824.
  • Soss, Joe, and Vesla Weaver. 2017. “Police Are Our Government.” Annual Review of Political Science 20: 565-591.
  • Michener, Jamila, Mallory SoRelle, and Chloe Thurston. 2022. “From the Margins To the Center.” Perspectives on Politics 20 (1): 154-169.

Additional resources

  • Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan. Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means. Public lecture hosted by the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford (2019). YouTube

Part Three: State, Business, and Society

The Contracting State

  • Kettl, Donald F. 1988. “Performance and Accountability: The Challenge of Government by Proxy.” The American Review of Public Administration 18 (1): 9-28.
  • Salamon, Lester M. 1987. “Of Market Failure, Voluntary Failure, and Third-Party Government.” Journal of Voluntary Action Research 16(1-2): 29-49.
  • Dooling, Bridget C. E., and Rachel A. Potter. 2022. “Rulemaking by Contract.” Administrative Law Review 74: 703.
  • James, Oliver, Sebastian Jilke, Carolyn Petersen, and Steven Van de Walle. 2016. “Citizens’ Blame of Politicians for Public Service Failure.” Public Administration Review 76 (1): 83-93.

Additional resources

  • Paul Light. The Government-Industrial Complex. Public lecture hosted by USC Price (2019). YouTube

State and Social Embeddedness

  • Collier, Ruth Berins, and David Collier. 1979. “Inducements Versus Constraints: Disaggregating Corporatism.” American Political Science Review 73 (4): 967-986.
  • Crawford, Sue E., and Elinor Ostrom. 1995. “A Grammar of Institutions.” American Political Science Review 89 (3): 582-600.
  • Mangla, Akshay. 2022. “Bureaucratic Norms: A Theory of Implementation.” In: Making Bureaucracy Work. Cambridge University Press.
  • Xu, Alice. 2024. “Segregation and the Spatial Externalities of Inequality.” American Political Science Review 118 (3): 1431-1448.

Additional resources

  • Akshay Mangla. Making Bureaucracy Work. Public lecture hosted by Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship (2023). YouTube

Part Four: Political Strategies

Credit-Taking and Blame-Shifting

  • Holland, Alisha C. 2016. “Forbearance.” American Political Science Review 110(2): 232-246.
  • Dasgupta, Aditya, and Devesh Kapur. 2020. “The Political Economy of Bureaucratic Overload.” American Political Science Review 114 (4): 1316-1334.
  • Toral, Guillermo. 2024. “Turnover: How Lame-duck Governments Disrupt the Bureaucracy.” The Journal of Politics 86 (4): 1348-1367.
  • Silva, Fernando, Irene Bloemraad, and Kim Voss. 2025. “Frame Backfire.” American Sociological Review 90 (3): 349-386.

Additional resources

  • Alisha Holland. Creative Construction: The Rise and Stall of Mass Infrastructure in Latin America. Public lecture hosted by the Hinkley Institute of Politics (2021). YouTube

Civil Society and Collective Action

  • Cohen, Joshua, and Archon Fung. 2004. “Radical Democracy.” Swiss Journal of Political Science 10 (4): 23-34.
  • de Vries, Milan, Jae Yeon Kim, and Hahrie Han. 2024. “The Unequal Landscape of Civic Opportunity in America.” Nature Human Behaviour 8 (2): 256-263.
  • Parthasarathy, Ramya, Vijayendra Rao, and Nethra Palaniswamy. 2019. “Deliberative Democracy in an Unequal World.” American Political Science Review 113 (3): 623-640.
  • Carpenter, Daniel. 2025. “Petitioning as Governance.” Journal of the Early Republic 45(3): 417-428.

Additional resources

  • Hahrie Han. Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church. Public lecture hosted by Amos Fortune Forum (2025). YouTube

Part Five: Current Debates and Research Frontiers

Challenges to the Administrative State

  • Coglianese, Cary. 2022. “Administrative Law: Governing Economic and Social Governance.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia.
  • Bagley, Nicholas. 2019. “The Procedure Fetish.” Michigan Law Review 118(3): 345-401.
  • Howell, William G., and Terry M. Moe. 2023. “The Strongman Presidency and the Two Logics of Presidential Power.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 53 (2): 145-168.
  • Carpenter, Daniel, Angelo Dagonel, Devin Judge-Lord, Christopher Kenny, Brian Libgober, Steven Rashin, Jacob Waggoner, and Susan Webb Yackee. 2022. “Inequality in Administrative Democracy.” SSRN.

Additional resources

  • Richard Hanania’s interview with Nicholas Bagley. “Administrative Procedure and the Common Good.” Center for Science in the Public Interest, February 27, 2023. YouTube

AI, Politics, and Society

  • Engstrom, David Freeman, and Daniel E. Ho. 2020. “Algorithmic Accountability in the Administrative State.” Yale Journal on Regulation 37: 800-854.
  • Alon-Barkat, Saar, Madalina Busuioc, Kayla Schwoerer, and Kristina S. Weißmüller. 2025. “Algorithmic Discrimination in Public Service Provision.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 35 (4): 469-488.
  • Raviv, Shir. Forthcoming. “When Do Citizens Resist the Use of AI Algorithms in Public Policy?” Journal of Politics.
  • Narayanan, Arvind, and Sayash Kapoor. 2025. “AI as Normal Technology.” Knight First Amendment Institute.

Additional resources

  • Daron Acemoglu. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. Public lecture hosted by the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, University of Chicago. YouTube

Research Methods

  • Burawoy, Michael. 1998. “The Extended Case Method.” Sociological Theory 16 (1): 4-33.
  • Rao, Vijayendra. 2022. “Can Economics Become More Reflexive?” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9918.
  • Bergman, Peter, Raj Chetty, Stefanie DeLuca, Nathaniel Hendren, Lawrence F. Katz, and Christopher Palmer. 2024. “Creating Moves to Opportunity.” American Economic Review 114 (5): 1281-1337.
  • Kim, Jae Yeon, Pamela Herd, Sebastian Jilke, Donald Moynihan, and Kerry Rodden. 2025. “Administrative Checkpoints, Burdens, and Human-Centered Design.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Additional resources

  • Vijayendra Rao. Policy for the People. Public lecture hosted by the Development Research Group, World Bank (2025). YouTube