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The Political Economy of Public Universities in the United States: A Review Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2021

Robert C. Lowry
Robert C. Lowry*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Dallas
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Abstract

Scholars of state politics and policy have devoted little attention to the public universities where so many of them work. Public higher education is organized at the state level, and its funding and governance have been debated at length in many states in recent years. Moreover, these universities provide opportunities for contributions to a variety of theoretically-grounded research, including the decision to make or buy public services, principal-agent issues and institutional arrangements for governance, the politics of institutional reform, the determinants of government appropriations and budgetary trade-offs, and internal decisionmaking in state-owned enterprises, public bureaucracies, and nonprofit organizations. Research on these issues could not only generate insights relevant to many types of institutions and public services but also contribute to ongoing policy debates over relations between state governments and higher education.

Type
Review Essay
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Fall 2007 , pp. 303 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association, 2007

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