Governing By Committee: Collegial Leadership in Advanced Societies

Governing by Committee is the first book-length study to examine decision-making among political executives. It examines sixteen advanced Western and Communist states and shows that collegial and semi-collegial patterns are far more common than is generally assumed.

Contrary to the assertions of Max Weber, Baylis contends that modern bureaucracy, with its growing role in policy-making and its intimate association with neocorporatist forms of interest group representation, offers a particularly congenial setting for collegial leadership.

A timely study, Governing by Committee opens a new dimension in the comparative study of political executives. But it also complements and contributes to the existing literature on political leadership, decision-making, consociationalism, and neocorporatism. It belongs as well to the still relatively small number of works comparing the politics of advanced Western and Communist states.