This paper surveys literature from several disciplines on how and why governments grow. The empirical question as to whether, or to what degree, government has grown is critically entwined with the nature of the ‘dependent variable’ chosen (federal government expenditures as a proportion of GNP, total real public expenditures, number of government employees as a percentage of the workforce, etc.). Specific approaches to the study of government growth considered include those associated with: Wagner's ‘Law’, the ‘Displacement Effect Hypothesis’, formal models of political and economic behavior, behavioral views of organizational decision making, the ineffectiveness of the public sector in coping with economic decline, and Marxist views.

A model of the territorial distribution of public employment within a country is presented, and tested with evidence from the United Kingdom in 1977. Three influences are suggested to account for the pattern of territorial variation: proportionality (an even distribution after standardisation for area and client group characteristics); the structure of the public sector (the presence of industries and services that must be concentrated in some places) and political discretion. These are then related to different activities of government. The first two influences are shown to account for much, though not all, of the territorial variation between United Kingdom nations and regions in 1977, substantial though this was, with Northern Ireland having nearly twice the level of public employment of the West Midlands. Location patterns tend to be byproducts of decisions taken on functional grounds, with structural constraints and service entitlements having a much greater impact than political choice.

Innovation is only one of a range of public policy responses to social and technological novelty and is not necessarily the most appropriate response. While a number of case studies have provided information about determinants of innovation and have traced processes leading to the adoption of innovation, there has been little attention given to the processes that lead to the rejection, deferral or avoidance of available innovations. This paper examines the technical and political controversy surrounding a proposed resource recovery steam plant in metropolitan Syracuse, New York. Although a report on solid waste management had been prepared in 1969 and a dozen consulting studies authorized over the next decade, by 1981 no decision had been reached. In analyzing twelve years of ‘nondecision’, this study seeks to examine some of the difficulties of using technical information in complex policy problems. The case highlights a number of issues pertaining to the use of information in technology policy including: (1) the role of scientific and technical information in policymaking; (2) the interplay between technical information and political values, and (3) the reciprocal effects of information resources and decision processes.