ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a true voyage, for those who wrote it and for those who shall read it. It started as an idea that emerged during a discussion between the two authors, who accidentally met in the exhibit hall during the annual conference of the American Society of Public Administration in Baltimore, mid-March 2011. We later realized that many accidental events shape our world in a peculiar way. Prominent unusual events impact our lives through governmental decisions and non-decisions, actions and reactions, reforms and regressive-reforms in a culturally diverted global environment. The voyage of this book started in that meeting.

We talked about the state of comparative research and at some point observed that an update of Ferrel Heady's book would be in order, but that it had to be a new book. Heady's first edition had been published in 1966 and contained 115 pages. By the time its sixth iteration came on the market (2001), it counted 484 pages. Heady's study was unusual in that it combined attention to political with that of bureaucratic institutions and organizations. It was even more unusual in that it was truly global in perspective, that is, inclusive of all world regions. It became clear to us that merely updating Heady's book would not be sufficient. Instead, we felt that content on political and bureaucratic institutions had to be matched with content on management and policy areas. Heady's study is mainly descriptive. His study is also comparative, and given that it includes all world regions, it is global. However, we now live in a time when globalization affects domestic politics, policies, and bureaucracies in a manner very different from the time when Heady wrote his first edition. The traditional empirical research using a comparative perspective focuses on the political system, or some policy area, or bureaucracy, of a number of generally “related” countries. We wanted to address politics, bureaucracy, and policy in one descriptive volume that treats the reader to insights into converging trends in government and governance, and into divergence of policy making and implementation. Globally, governments face comparable challenges; domestically, they solve or resolve them in the context of a political-administrative tradition and culture that changes, but perhaps not as rapidly as their natural and social environments do (just think of natural disasters such as major hurricanes and tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions; and of manmade disasters such as 9/11). The political-administrative system of a country evolves and adapts to changing environments, but how it appears in the present is a product of the past. While Heady did address historical development, one important feature of this volume is that it discusses the emergence and development of governments throughout the world from the earliest times up to the present.

As the reader can see, we have built this book upon a substantial amount of literature. In other words, without all that research we would not have been able to write this book. And the research we have accessed is not limited to public administration and political science, for we draw upon publications from law, history, evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, economics, and so forth. Thus, another feature of this book is its explicit interdisciplinarity. How could it be otherwise? Government is a social phenomenon existing since human beings adopted sedentary lifestyles, but in its current role and position in society it is unique to the modern age (that is, since the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries). In fact, it is central to the survival of modern society, and thus it is that it has drawn attention from scholars across the social sciences.

In our approach to understanding the role and position of government in society in the world today, we are generalists. When writing the chapters of this book, we have not sought the input of specialists, but instead relied on the knowledge we acquired in the course of our own studies that started as students and have continued ever since; and on the discussions we have had over the years with colleagues about the challenges and opportunities of comparative research. Raadschelders presented an expanded version of Chapters 2 and 3 at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis of Indiana University (November 2011), and he is grateful for the commentary Elinor Ostrom and others present gave. We are also very much in debt to Ms. Mirit Kisner, a PhD candidate at the University of Haifa, who helped us by collecting, analyzing, and producing valuable material for Chapters 9 to 12. She deserves our recognition as a colleague with high professional standards and a commitment to comparative studies. And then, obviously, we are very appreciative of the enthusiastic support of Alison Hankey, executive editor of business management, who shepherded this book through the publishing process at Jossey-Bass. We would also like to thank Deborah Schindlar, senior production editor, and Rob Brandt, editorial projects manager, for both have been very helpful.

This work could not have been carried out without the help of many who supported this project since its birth in 2011. We are especially grateful to those young students and early-stage scholars who worked with us during these years and continue to support our pursuit for better comprehensive understanding of comparative research in public administration. They share with us the sense of contributing not only to science and knowledge but also to society and to citizens and governments across the globe, as our study demonstrates. We are thus thankful to all of our students who supported the study throughout the years. Our special thanks go to our research assistants—Ms. Rotem Miller-Mor, Mr. Noam Cohen, Mr. Amir Hefetz, and to three students who have progressed since then and whom we are proud to call our colleagues: Dr. Galit Meisler, Dr. Haim Cohen, and Dr. Nissim Cohen.

The book was written over a period in which every one of us had the chance to enjoy the collaboration of colleagues at several institutions and universities across the globe. We especially thank Prof. Geert Bouckaert and Prof. Annie Hondeghem at the Institute for Public Management, Leuven University, where some of the ideas for this book matured into a cohesive framework during the summer of 2013. We would also like to thank other colleagues whose observations and suggestions helped us construct the framework of this book. Among them are Prof. Jan-Erik Lane, Prof. Mildred Warner, Prof Gerald Caiden, and Prof. Naomi Caiden. Special thanks go also to our dear late friend who passed away just last year, Prof. Arie Halachmi at Tennessee State University, with whom we shared many of our ideas for comparative analysis over the years. We are grateful to the Israel Science Foundation and the Israeli National Insurance Institute as well as the research authorities at the University of Haifa for providing financial support for the project.

We wish to thank our colleagues at the Division for Public Administration & Policy both at the University of Haifa and at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, who were a source of inspiration and fresh critical thinking about this project and its implications. We hope to continue our studies in this area and by so doing improve the comparative knowledge and capacities for future studies in the public sector. Finally, we dedicate this book to our loved ones, for they shared the voyage with us, over time, space, and mind.

Jos C.N. Raadschelders, Eran Vigoda-Gadot
Columbus, Ohio, USA and Haifa, Israel