Results from our survey on important books of the last 30 years
Governance will begin its 30th year of publication in 2017. To mark our anniversary, in January 2016 we asked readers of our newsletter to nominate books published in 1988 or afterward that have made an important contribution on subjects covered by the journal. Here are the results. Take these results with a large grain of salt. Only 74 of our 5000 newsletter readers responded to the survey, and their 169 suggestions actually included more than 100 different books. Still, you might find the results interesting. We’ve included every title that was mentioned more than once. Comments welcomed — see below.
Mentioned 6 times
Hall and Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism
Pollitt and Bouckaert, Public Management Reform
Wilson, Bureaucracy
Mentioned 5 times
Ostrom, Governing the Commons
Mentioned 4 times
Hood, The Art of the State
Scott, Seeing Like a State
Mentioned 3 times
Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail
Baumgartner and Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics
Blyth, Great Transformations
Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay
Mentioned 2 times
Braithwaite, Regulatory Capitalism
Evans, Embedded Autonomy
Finer, The History of Government From the Earliest Times
Horn, The Political Economy of Public Administration
Kornai, The Socialist System
Moore, Creating Public Value
North, Wallis and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders
Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State
Putnam, Making Democracy Work
Stone, Policy Paradox
Thelen, How Institutions Evolve