PUBLIC-POLICY, OVERHEAD DEMOCRACY, AND THE PROFESSIONAL STATE REVISITED

This article chronicles and critiques three primary perpectives reflec ted in the normative, empirical, and formal theoretical literature on overhead democracy and the professional state. After demonstrating how disparate the thinking is on the nature, causes, consequences, and di lemmas associated with the professional state, the article offers reas ons for this electicism. Cited are conceptual, contextual, rhetorical, and normative shortcomings of this otherwise informative literature. In the process, the article offers several research strategies for dev eloping midrange and contingency-based descriptive, instrumental, assu mptive, and normative theories of the political-professional nexus in the United States.