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Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 Stephen Skowronek Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. x, 389

described, and the authors quote approvingly Jackson and Atkinson'sjudgment that "in Canada we have created the structures of rational policymaking but incrementalism predominates within them." This leads smoothly into the discussion of public budgeting, being the story of incrementalism to the present PEMS, via the tortured path of PPBS. The search for mechanisms of control (top-down direction) and accountability (through review) provides a unifying focus for this survey of Canadian experience. Interposed between the discussion on budgeting and an examination of administrative accountability are chapters on the merit principle and the significance of federalism, respectively. The subject ordering ought to be otherwise, with the review of accountability following hard on the heels of the chapter on the budgetary process. Indeed, a good argument could be made for splitting in two the chapter on public policy-making, with the theory section expanded and left to stand on its own, and the Canadian practice section modified to incorporate the analysis of federalism and its consequences for policy determination and implementation. And while on the subject of federalism, the development of yet another series of pigeonholes for the historical analysis of federal-provincial relations is somewhat gratuitous. On the other side of the ledger, the chapter on the merit principle, written by Robert Best, warrants special mention. This extended discussion of the Canadian experience, with less detailed forays into developments in Great Britain and the United States, represents a thorough and up to date review of a protean principle. Best does a commendable job in describing the changes which have occurred in the balance struck between efficiency (understood as cost-benefit effectiveness) and representation. The burden of the analysis is that Canada has come full circle: from the pre-CSC situation of widespread patronage appointment (ascriptive criteria), through a merit-based regime which attached particular importance to educational attainment (and which, because it was based upon the educational system of English Canada, placed francophones at a disadvantage), to the present state of affairs captured in the d'Avignon Report's suggestion that the merit principle "can and should be temporarily suspended by parallel provision for special treatment of members of designated groups in support of eventual real equality of opportunity [ascriptive criteria]." The inclusion of a select bibliography at the end of each chapter adds to the value of this book as a course text. Indeed, Thomas and Adie's volume easily surpasses the few previous attempts to put together a textbook on Canadian public administration and doubtless will be widely adopted.