In the two decades following the publication of The Administrative State (Waldo an embryonic ), theory of bureaucratic politics began to emerge from a series of studies examining decision making in the executive branch.
The significant claim generated by these studies was that government decisions were products of bargaining and negotiation among interested political actor These studies were discursive rather than explicitly theoretical,
but the parallels them and the contemporary work on game theory a highly formalized and mathematical approach to explaining behavior are unmistakable.