Daniel Carpenter describes how the FDA cultivated a reputation for competence and vigilance throughout the last century, and how this organizational image has enabled the agency to regulate an industry as powerful as American pharmaceuticals while resisting efforts to curb its own authority. Carpenter explains how the FDA's reputation and power have played out among committees in Congress, and with drug companies, advocacy groups, the media, research hospitals and universities, and governments in Europe and India. He shows how FDA regulatory power has influenced the way that business, medicine, and science are conducted in the United States and worldwide. Along the way, Carpenter offers new insights into the therapeutic revolution of the 1940s and 1950s; the 1980s AIDS crisis; the advent of oral contraceptives and cancer chemotherapy; the rise of antiregulatory conservatism; and the FDA's waning influence in drug regulation today.

Reputation and Power demonstrates how reputation shapes the power and behavior of government agencies, and sheds new light on how that power is used and contested.

Daniel P. Carpenter is the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928 (Princeton).

Endorsements:

"Reputation and Power is by far the most thorough and penetrating study of the most powerful and important regulatory agency in the world--the U.S. Food and Drug Administration--and one of the best studies of any American regulatory agency. The book is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in American politics, public policy, administrative institutions, or health and medicine. This is an extraordinary work."--Paul Quirk, University of British Columbia