ABSTRACT
Although public bureaucracy has emerged as a significant political phenomenon in recent decades, Americans have neglected to integrate this development into their general understandings of the political process. Various national polls confirm that Americans contact with bureaucracy is quite extensive and indicate that they are generally satisfied with their bureaucratic encounters. Like the public at large and the politicians, scholars also have failed to take public bureaucracy seriously. A more comprehensive explanation of why scholars have failed to take bureaucracy seriously may be found by tracing the histories of the relevant academic disciplines. The sketch of the history of public bureaucracy within political science will reveal that for nearly the first half of the twentieth century, public bureaucracy was important to the discipline, but soon after midcentury such studies had very nearly died out within organized political science. For the past decade or so, however, interest in public bureaucracy has been resurrected in political science.
