The motivation for writing this book came from our dissatisfaction with existing economic theories of bureaucracy. In his 1974 monograph The Economic Theory of Representative Government, Breton adopted Niskanen's general approach to bureaucracy. Therefore, he had nowhere to turn for a hypothesis about the relationship between public bureaucrats and politicians. To solve this problem, he assumed that whenever there was a conflict between these two groups, the one with greater power would win. Without a theory of accumulation of power by bureaucrats and politicians, that assumption was, of course, unsatisfactory.

In 1975, Breton and Wintrobe published a note on Niskanen's theory seeking to provide the beginnings of a model on the relationship of bureaucrats and politicians. In that paper, it was suggested that bureaucrats must be viewed as subordinates even if they are also someone's superiors. It was argued that the power of bureaucrats lies not in their formal position but in their control of information, that is, in their ability to distort and conceal it. Further, to the extent that governing politicians can police or counteract the distortions of bureaucrats through the use of redundancy, external data checks, and direct monitoring, the power of bureaucrats would be checked, and they would revert to their formal status as subordinates.

In 1976 Wintrobe completed his doctoral dissertation on bureaucracy. Building on an idea of Tullock, he sought to break with the tradition of modeling bureaucracies - public or private - either as pure systems of authority or as pure voluntary associations such as teams.