During the latter half of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, citizens ceded control of public sector policy making and implementation to bureaucraticprofessionalism. This made sense as part of building an administrative state to meet the demands of a growing nation, wars, depression and so on. But now people mistrust the public sphere, regarding politicians as corrupt, bureaucrats as self-serving and inefficient, and governing as "a matter of invisible negotiations conducted in government offices by public officials and private interests" (King and Stivers 1998b, 15)