Cases in Public Policy and Administration

Writing the perfect complement to their bestseller, Introducing Public Administration, Shafritz and Borick highlight the great drama inherent in public policy -- and the ingenuity of its makers and administrators -- in this new casebook that brings thrilling, true life adventures in public administration to life in an engaging, witty style.

Drawing on a unique assortment of literary, historic, and modern examples, Cases in Public Policy and Administration exposes students to public administration in practice by telling the tales of:

• How Thurgood Marshall led the legal fight for civil rights and made it possible for Barack Obama to become president
• How the ideas of an academic economist and a famous novelist led to the recession that started in 2008
• How Al Gore really deserves just a little bit of credit for inventing the Internet
• How the decision was made by President Harry Truman to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan in order to end World War II
• How the current American welfare state was inspired by a German chancellor
• How a Nazi war criminal inadvertently provided the world with a lesson in bureaucratic ethics
• How Napoleon Bonaparte encouraged the job of chief of staff to escape from the military and live in contemporary civilian offices
• How an obscure state department bureaucrat wrote the policy of containment that allowed the United States to win the Cold War with the Soviet Union
• How Dwight D. Eisenhower was started on the road to the presidency by a mentor he found in the Panamanian rain forest
• How Florence Nightingale gathered statistics during the Crimean War that helped lead to contemporary program evaluation.