When the State Meets the Street

This book probes the complex moral lives of street-level bureaucrats: the frontline social and welfare workers, police officers, and educators who represent government’s human face to ordinary citizens.

Combining insights from political theory with ethnographic fieldwork, Bernardo Zacka shows how these workers wield significant discretion and make decisions that profoundly affect people’s lives.

The book reveals bureaucratic life as more fluid and ethically fraught than most citizens realize, inviting a bottom-up approach to political theory that considers how the state interacts with citizens when implementing policies.