How can public-sector regimes, agencies, programs, and activities be organized and managed to achieve public purposes? This question, of fundamental importance in the fields of politics, policy implementation, public administration, and public management, motivates the systematic study of governance. In this article, we present a logic of governance, based in political economy literatures, that might be used as a first step toward framing theory-based governance research. We also describe a methodological approach that is more likely to appropriately identify and explain relationships in governance regimes that involve activities and interactions that span more than one level of an organization or systemic structure. In addition, we explore the potential of various sources of data for governance research, recognizing that governance researchers will inevitably have to make simplifying assumptions or measure crudely things that we know are much more complex. We argue that when appropriately framed and interpreted through a logic of governance that acknowledges limitations attributable to the models, methods, and data employed, governance research is more likely to produce enduring knowledge about how, why, and with what consequences public-sector activity is structured and managed.
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