In Tocqueville's view of the antebellum United States, the connection between the sovereign authority of the people and the administration of the laws that shape their behavior was a defining feature of its democracy. As we consider the political economy of public sector governance, the connection between the people and public managers will always be at the center of our story. In the narrative of American public management that developed with its practice beginning in the nineteenth century, the need for administrators to exercise rational, balanced judgment that is accountable to the public through its elected representatives was seen as a requirement for the people to govern themselves (Bertelli and Lynn, 2006). Thus the lessons of the analytical models that we review in this and subsequent chapters will reveal themselves as corresponding to the broadest and most trenchant themes of public management: what it is, what its practitioners do, what they should do, and what a democratic public expects of them when they do it.