The politics and administration of privatization: Contracting out for corrections management in the United States

Shrinking budgets and the emergence of "new public management" and other market-based reforms have put increasing pressure on many governments and government agencies to use contracting as a means of service delivery. This essay suggests that contracting should be viewed as a multistage affair, in which both political and administrative actors make key decisions at different stages of the process. It also hypothesizes that these actors weigh the political and instrumental motivations for contracting differently and, therefore, that the relative importance of these factors varies depending on the stage of the contracting process. An empirical analysis of corrections management contracts in the American states provides significant evidence for these assertions.