Are public sector institutions being exposed to ever-greater oversight, audit and inspection in the name of efficiency, accountability and risk management? Controlling Modern Government explores the long-term development of controls over government across five major state traditions in developed democracies - US, Japan, variants of continental-European models, a Scandinavian case and variants of the Westminster model. A central aspect of the study is an eight country comparison of variety in the use of controls based in oversight, competition, mutuality and contrived randomness in the selected domains of the high bureaucracy at the core of the state, the higher education sector and the prison sector. Countries covered include Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK and the USA.