Theories of

Bureaucratic Politics
 INTRODUCTION: WHAT ARE THEORIES
OF BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS?
O Theories of bureaucratic politics seek
to explain the policymaking role of
administration and bureaucracy. Such
frameworks typically reject the politics-
administration dichotomy underpinning
theories of bureaucratic control,
viewing this division as an analytical
convenience that imposes too steep a
cost on theoretical development.
O Since bureaucracies and bureaucrats routinely engage in
political behavior, the need to account theoretically for the
bureaucracy’s political role is justified. Politics is
generically defined as the authoritative allocation of
values, or the process of deciding “who gets what, when
and how”
O Accordingly, theories of bureaucratic politics seek to
breach the orthodox divide between administration and
politics and attempt to drag the former into a systematic
accounting with the latter.
O If bureaucracies were helping to determine the will of the
state, they were inescapably political institutions, and
Gaus argued that administrative theory ignored this fact at
its peril. Most famously, in the final sentence of an essay in
Public Administration Review , he threw down an implied
gauntlet to those who would fashion a theory of
administration: “A theory of public administration means in
our time a theory of politics also”
O The goal is not to locate the dividing line between politics and
administration because no such line exists, nor is it to ascertain how
bureaucracies can be made accountable to their democratic masters,
although this is a question of some importance to theories of
bureaucratic politics. Questions of political power are the central focus:
O To what extent do administrative processes, as opposed to
democratic processes, determine public policy?
O Who controls or influences the exercise of bureaucratic power?
O What is the role of bureaucracy in representing and advancing the
goals of particular clientele groups or organized interests?
O To what extent do elective institutions and elected officials seek to
shape and control administration as a means to advance their own
political interests?
O What is the source of bureaucratic power?
O How does the important political role of nonelected institutions
based in hierarchy and authority square with the fundamental
values of democracy?
 ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY AS
POLITICAL THEORY
O Waldo did not construct a theory of bureaucratic politics
in this book, but here and in later writings he made two
critical contributions that have supported all
subsequent efforts to do so.
O First, he undertook a devastating critique of the extant
research literature. He argued that public administration
scholarship revolved around a core set of beliefs that
cumulatively served to constrain theoretical
development. Key among these were the beliefs that
efficiency and democracy were compatible and that the
work of government could be cleanly divided into
separate realms of decision and execution
O Second, and probably more important, Waldo argued that
administrative scholarship was itself driven by a particular
philosophy of politics. A good portion of The Administrative State
is devoted to examining the scholarly public administration
literature through the lens of five key issues in political
philosophy: (1) the nature of the Good Life, or a vision of what
the “good society” should look like; (2) the criteria of action, or
the procedures for determining how collective decisions should
be made; (3) the question of who should rule; (4) the question of
how the powers of the state should be divided and apportioned;
and (5) the question of centralization versus decentralization, or
the relative merits of a unitary state versus a federal system.
O If administration scholarship advanced such a distinct and
definable political philosophy (some might say ideology), it raised
an immediate and formidable intellectual obstacle to attempts
at conceptually dividing politics and administration: How could
students of administration claim that politics was largely
external to their interests when their intellectual history revealed
such a systematic value based philosophy of government?
O Waldo argued that administrative scholarship’s failure to
incorporate politics explicitly into its theoretical
development was a product of its early cultural and
intellectual environment
O Yet, as administration scholars accepted efficiency as their
central principle, they also accepted democracy—a
notoriously inefficient basis of organization—as the central
principle of the American political system. This presented a
problem in developing administrative theory. The formative
era of administrative scholarship, with its focus on the
scientific method, its guiding principle of efficiency, and its
position in the shadow of business, meant that it
developed in a decidedly undemocratic context.
O By separating the work of government into two distinct
operations and limiting their attention to the
“nonpolitical” element, administration scholars were free
to push for centralized power in the executive
O branch, to prescribe hierarchical and authoritarian
bureaucracies as the basis for organizing public
agencies, and to call for passing greater
responsibilities to the technocrat
O Waldo argued that at the heart of the problem with
administrative theory is a version of the problem
James Madison struggled with in Federalist
O How do we construct a theory that accommodates the
hierarchical and authoritarian nature of the
bureaucracy, the foundation of the modern
administrative state and a seemingly necessary
component of contemporary government, with the
seemingly contradictory egalitarian, inefficient ideals
of democracy?
 ALLISON’S PARADIGM OF
BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS
O In the two decades following the publication of The
Administrative State (Waldo 1948), 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
O 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.
 POLITICS, POWER, AND
ORGANIZATION
O In particular, Allison’s framework left important
organizational issue underdeveloped, and, like the
majority of the studies the framework sought to
synthesize, it was almost exclusively focused on the
executive branch.
O There are two key organizational dimensions to
bureaucratic politics theory. The first deals with
behavior. The primary goal here is to explain why
bureaucrats and bureaucracies do what they do
O The second deals with institutional structure and the distribution of power.
The primary goal here is to understand how a bureaucracy’s formal lines of
authority, its relationship to other institutions, and the programs and
policies placed within its jurisdiction all combine to determine the relative
political influence of a broad range of political actors.
O One of the key contributions of organizational behavior scholarship to
bureaucratic politics theory is James Q. Wilson’s classic, Bureaucracy:
What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (1989. Wilson posed a
similar question to Allison, though it was more focused toward
administrative matters. Instead of asking why governments do what they
do, Wilson asked why bureaucracies do what they do.
O As goals are vague (or even contradictory), bureaucracies cannot simply
deploy their expertise to determine the best way of achieving the ends of
policy. Something other than the product of the “politics” end of the
politics-administration dichotomy must drive the behavior of bureaucrats
and bureaucracies. What is it? What determines the behavior of the cop
on the beat, the teacher in the classroom, the private on the front lines?
Wilson proposed several potential answers: situational imperatives (the
day-to-day events operators must to respond to), peer expectations,
professional values, and ideology. He also argued that rules could also
substitute for goals.
O Wilson was not just interested in identifying the behavioral
motivations of operators; he also identified two other kinds
of bureaucrats: managers (people who coordinate the
work of operators to achieve organizational goals) and
executives (people responsible for maintaining their
organizations)
O Government organization, or, more accurately,
reorganization, is a subject near and dear to the discipline
of public administration and a perennial feature of
American politics.
O The bureaucracy is politically important not only to the
president and to Congress but also to a broad range of
organized interests. Seidman pointed out that the public
bureaucracy has a parallel private bureaucracy—
businesses that perform contract work for the
government—heavily invested in the status quo.
Contracting with a private firm to perform various public
functions has its advantages. Private companies
 NETWORKS AND
BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS
O This fact that bureaucratic politics extends beyond the
bureaucracy itself was highlighted by Laurence O’Toole
(1997b) in his admonition to take networks seriously For
public administration, networks can be thought of as a
set of organizations that are interdependent, that is, they
share goals, interests, resources, or values. for politics
and governance (O’Toole and Meier 1997a)
O The need to understand a networked bureaucracy is
obvious, but it is unclear if we have made much
theoretical headway since the mid-1990’s. Most
literature has focused on how to manage networked
systems, rather than on implications
O Given the explosive growth of networked
administration and its poorly understood implications
for public policy and effect on democratic values,
there can hardly be a better example of the practical
and critical need for theory development, not just in
the realm of bureaucratic politics, but also in the
general field of public administration.
O Power is really at stake in reorganization, and this is
the reason the president, Congress, and other
political actors take such an intense interest in
administration. Reorganization has become such a
perennial part of politics that it is increasingly
pursued for its own sake—a political objective with no
underlying administrative strategy whatsoever.
 REPRESENTATIVE
BUREAUCRACY
O The theory of representative bureaucracy is
perhaps the most explicit attempt to address
the central problem of democratic
administrative theory raised by Waldo
(1952,102): How can a theory that embraces
the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of
bureaucracy be reconciled with the seemingly
contradictory egalitarian and ultimately
inefficient values of democracy?
O This contradiction between bureaucracies making policy
and basic democratic values raises one of the most
important challenges for public administration theory:
“How does one square a permanent [and, we would add,
powerful] civil service—which neither the people by their
vote nor their representatives by their appointments can
readily replace—with the principle of government ‘by the
people’?” (Mosher 1982, 7). Any democratic theory of
administration, Waldo suggested, must be capable of
answering this question.
O The theory of representative bureaucracy focuses on
finding a way to legitimate the bureaucracy’s political
power in the context of democratic values. The central
tenet of the theory is that a bureaucracy reflecting the
diversity of the community it serves is more likely to
respond to the interests of all groups in making policy
decisions
O The notion of legitimating bureaucratic power by
treating bureaucracy as a representative institution
was formally introduced by J. Donald Kingsley in
Representative Bureaucracy
O Kenneth Meier puts it, “The theory of representative
bureaucracy begins by recognizing the realities of
politics. In a complex policy such as the United States,
not all aspects of policy decisions are resolved in the
‘political’ branches of government”
O Generally, it is assumed that bureaucrats are rational
actors in the sense that they pursue self-interested
goals when faced with discretionary choices.
Proponents of representative bureaucracy argue that
the goals driving behavior are supplied by the
individual values of the decision maker
O In the United States, Samuel Krislov (1974) argued
that a more appropriate basis of comparison is race,
ethnicity, and sex. These factors are assumed to be a
key source of socialization, and thus of values. A large
portion of empirical research on representative
bureaucracy in the United States is thus devoted to
examining the extent to which bureaucracy reflects
the basic demographic composition of society.
O The key to representative bureaucracy’s attempt to
build a bridge between orthodox public administration
theory and democratic theory thus still rests to no
small extent on the ability of future empirical studies
to support the theory’s central hypothesis that
passive representation will lead to active
representation
 CONCLUSION
O It is probably fair to say that public administration
scholarship has been more successful in
demonstrating the need for theories of bureaucratic
politics than in actually producing those
frameworks. It has been more than half a century
since scholars such as Waldo and Gaus exposed
the rickety foundations of the politics administration
dichotomy and made a convincing brief that
administrative theory had to share common ground
with political theory.
Thank You