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Bureaucracy refers to an organization or a set of organizations designed to carry out a specialized set of tasks, often on a massive scale. In political science, as well as the general public discourse, the term generally refers to the characteristics and workings of government organizations, although studies on bureaucracies have borrowed generously from research on economics and business organization.

Bureaucrats are people who work in bureaucracies. Tasks that are entrusted to bureaucrats range from simple administrative ones, such as typing or photocopying, to the implementation of complex policy goals, such as reducing air pollution or maintaining national defense. Thus, the subjects of studies of bureaucracy have ranged from street-level bureaucrats, such as doctors, teachers, soldiers, and social workers, to very powerful bureaucrats, such as army generals, monetary policy regulators, and attorneys general.

While executive and legislative bodies are responsible for making policy and judicial bodies are responsible for interpreting policy, bureaucracies are generally responsible for the implementation of policy. Studies of policy implementation examine how bureaucratic decision making is influenced by policy-making preferences, as well as political, economic, and social institutions. Within political science, such studies are typically part of the subfield discipline known as public administration, although the term public management has been used as well. However, some scholars have suggested that the term public management applies more specifically to studies of how to make public agencies more efficient and market oriented.

Although bureaucracies have been endemic throughout history, the origin of their analysis in the social sciences is generally traced back to the work of German social theorist Max Weber. Weber stated in 1946 that the use of bureaucratic organizations had grown over time because of their technical superiority over any other form of organization. According to Weber, several organizational features of bureaucracies ensured their technical superiority, most notably the consistent application of rules and the placement of appointed officials with expertise within a hierarchical structure. Most modern bureaucracies contain these features, but each feature receives different emphasis, according to each country and bureaucratic culture.

The Application Of Rules

Bureaucratic organizations apply rules and deliver services efficiently because they do so according to sets of rules and without regard to the varying concerns of individual people, argued Weber. When bureaucracies begin to treat each client according to criteria other than specific rules, such as the person’s socioeconomic status, resources are wasted on determining outcomes for each client. Additionally, erratic application of the rules also diminishes the credibility of the agency itself, as people will learn over time that particular clients are favored over others. In The Politics of Bureaucracy (1995), political science scholar B. Guy Peters argues that many non-Western societies have been unable to implement a consistent interpretation of rules within public bureaucracies because clients expect to barter, to some extent, over final decisions or to use their status in society as leverage.

However, while a consistent application of the rules is generally a desired result, this does not necessarily mean that bureaucrats always will know precisely how to behave and do their job. According to James Q. Wilson in Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (1989), most government agencies have goals that they want to accomplish, but the more vague these stated goals are and the less easily they are translated into tasks, the more the behavior of bureaucrats will come to depend on other factors. For example, the collective goals of a police department might be to “protect the public” and “uphold the law,” but people will have different interpretations as to how to achieve these rather broad goals. Additionally, these goals do not necessarily dictate how a police officer should deal with, for example, a belligerent panhandler on the street. Thus, the particular circumstances will be important as the officer attempts to bring the situation under control. Herbert Simon, in his 1947 book Administrative Behavior, argued that the uncertainty of such situations is precisely what causes bureaucrats to follow rules and routines. According to Simon, because policy outcomes arising out of bureaucratic action are often difficult to determine or observe, structured and organized behavior helps to reduce uncertainty and preserve stability within the organization.

Wilson also argues that when agency goals are unclear, behavior may come to depend on the professional training of the bureaucrats in question. In antitrust or competition law, economists tend to favor breaking up concentrations of market power when they are economically inefficient, whereas attorneys are more likely to favor such breakups when the law has been broken. Finally, when an agency has multiple constituencies with competing interests, bureaucrats may feel pulled in different directions. For example, an agency charged with regulating air pollution may have to weigh the benefits of clean air against the potential costs to business of pollution abatement. Dissatisfaction with agency actions may lead certain constituents to seek formal rule changes from the legislature overseeing the agency, in turn, sending conflicting signals to the bureaucrats themselves.

Several examples exist of administrative cultures that strongly emphasize an adherence to written laws and rules. Such systems have been characterized as following the Hegelian civil service, or Rechtsstaat model, a model that requires senior civil servants to be trained in law. Countries with such systems, such as France, Germany, and Italy, accord civil servants a high level of respect, and future civil servants are trained in administrative law in prestigious institutions, such as France’s École Nationale d’Administration. Government scholar Christopher Hood has referred to civil servants in such systems as trustees of the government, acting in an autonomous fashion (2002). However, in contrast to the Weberian ideal of impartial expertise, French civil servants can be highly political, and many French politicians are former civil servants. Similarly, in Germany and Italy a lack of impartiality among civil servants may clash with the need to follow rules closely.

The Rechtsstaat model of civil service has been contrasted with the public interest model found in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In these countries, there is not the same emphasis on administrative law as in Rechtsstaat countries, and consequently, there is less adherence to the notion of rigidly following rules. According to Hood, public employees act more as “battle troops” to carry out the political will of the political incumbent. Despite this characterization, the degree to which the civil service is politicized varies considerably across these countries. For example, British civil servants have traditionally been considered to be neutral, working for the incumbent government, whereas in the United States, political appointees come and go with each presidency, and often are added or subtracted from particular agencies as presidents see fit.

Specialization And Expertise

Weber observed that bureaucracies were made more efficient by the selection of people with technical expertise in the organization. This expertise enables bureaucrats to perform their tasks in a specialized fashion and to apply strict criteria to their decision-making processes. In addition to his observations, Weber also argued that bureaucratic organizations should recruit and select personnel based on merit and expertise in order to ensure an independent and consistent application of bureaucratic rules. Once granted some autonomy in action as well, bureaucrats could use their specialized knowledge, free from political interference. As Murray Horn argues in The Political Economy of Public Administration: Institutional Choice in the Public Sector (1995), legislatures often “tie their hands” by limiting their ability to interfere with the inner workings of bureaucracies, thus enhancing the credibility of both the politicians and the bureaucrats. Fabrizio Gilardi (2002) demonstrates that many western European nations created independent regulatory agencies with the purpose of overseeing newly privatized energy and telecommunication companies.

Weber’s argument that bureaucrats should be selected according to merit has been echoed by other scholars, but historically, patronage concerns have often trumped merit concerns. In the United States in the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson implemented what became known as the spoils system, whereby loyal party workers were given high-ranking government jobs on a rotating basis. The system was created to eliminate what Jackson saw as a pattern of wealthy elites receiving the majority of federal appointments. This system of spoils or patronage enabled average party workers to obtain government jobs. While Weber’s ideal bureaucrat held a fixed term so that employment could not be arbitrarily terminated by political executives, administration turnover in the spoils system meant wholesale personnel changes across bureaucratic agencies, as party workers were rewarded for their loyalty with government jobs. Office holders were generally accountable to the politicians they helped elect, but populists, progressives, and urban reformers viewed the spoils system as a corrupt method of giving plum jobs to unqualified representatives of special interests.

Along with this negative perception of the spoils system, several events in the late nineteenth century resulted in the slow conversion of the American federal bureaucracy to a merit-based system from a patronage system. First, Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883, which required that federal jobs gradually come to be filled according to merit and qualification. Second, in 1887, political science scholar and future president Woodrow Wilson claimed in “The Study of Administration,” that it should be the job of American administrators to neutrally and faithfully implement the policy directives of politicians. Wilson’s article supported the idea that bureaucrats could work free of political influence and that administration could be separated from politics. The U.S. Congress had Wilson’s ideas in mind when it passed the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and established the Interstate Commerce Commission with the purported aim of independently regulating the nation’s railroads. However, depleted resources, vague statutory goals, and competing constituent influence all indicated how difficult it could be to separate politics from administration in bureaucratic policy making.

Although the complete separation of policy implementation or administration from politics has been an elusive, if not an impossible, goal to achieve, policy makers and scholars agree that there are some areas of policy making, such as macroeconomic monetary policy, in which bureaucratic independence from politicians is a concern of paramount importance. Conventional wisdom suggests that if politicians had direct control over the money supply and interest rates, they would print more money to finance their projects and would lower interest rates to engineer economic booms. The main consequence of both activities would of course be soaring inflation, which would diminish the credibility of any political commitments toward stable monetary policy. The United States Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Bundesbank are just a few of the major, formally independent central banks.

Hierarchy

Finally, according to Weber, expert bureaucrats applying a rational-legal framework had to be placed in a hierarchical setting to function properly. In a hierarchical setting, bureaucrats would work in a disciplined fashion toward common objectives set forth by the head administrators. Any other setting might result in the failure of bureaucrats to work coherently toward the same goals.

Weber’s observations caused other scholars to seek to explain why, over the course of history, hierarchies had emerged as the most common type of organizational structure. In his landmark 1937 article “The Nature of the Firm,” British economist Ronald Coase posited that, for private firms, hierarchy was efficient because it limited the transaction costs that business entrepreneurs would have to incur otherwise. In the absence of a hierarchy, the business entrepreneur must negotiate contracts with others to purchase input products and labor. If extensive bargaining must take place to negotiate each contract, time and resources are wasted in the process.

A hierarchical structure eliminates the need for costly bargaining by setting rules and, in the words of political scientist Terry Moe in his 1984 article “The New Economics of Organization,” “substitutes authority relations for market relations.

Although hierarchies serve to promote efficiency by reducing transaction costs, they also introduce into public and private organizations a new range of organizational dilemmas, known broadly as principal-agent problems. Moe states that

the principal-agent model is an analytic expression of the agency relationship, in which one party, the principal, considers entering into a contractual agreement with another, the agent, in the expectation that the agent will subsequently choose actions that produce outcomes desired by the principal (756).

However, agents have an incentive to misrepresent their true skills, and the manager may find it difficult to select the best candidate. This is a problem of asymmetric information, known as adverse selection. Second, the degree to which a principal can monitor the work behavior of the hired agent varies considerably across jobs. For example, a police captain cannot monitor what uniformed officers actually do on the streets at all times, if at all. The less observable the agent’s behavior, the more that agent can shirk the obligation to the principal. Additionally, when the principal hires an agent with specialized expertise to perform a complex task, the agent can exploit that information advantage to either shirk or perform the task in any preferred manner. This problem, known as moral hazard, is also a problem of asymmetric information.

The principal-agent framework has been employed broadly throughout political science and public administration research, particularly to depict the relationships between politicians and bureaucrats. William Niskanen, applying economic principles of utility maximization to bureaucrats, argued in his 1971 work Bureaucracy and Representative Government that information asymmetries between bureaucrats and legislatures were particularly problematic because knowledgeable bureaucrats could request exorbitant budgets from legislators, who, due to their lack of expertise, do not know the true cost of performing the bureaucratic tasks. Niskanen’s work, although highly influential, was criticized by many scholars as overly broad and flawed. Patrick Dunleavy followed Niskanen by maintaining in Democracy, Bureaucracy, and Public Choice (1991) that, rather than pursuing budget maximization, decision makers in bureaucracies follow a bureau-shaping strategy, most notably by separating the service delivery functions of the agency—or line agency functions—from the policy-making aspects of the agency. As a result, over time the agency’s core functions are more narrowly defined, and it actually faces fewer subsequent budget constraints. In turn, Dunleavy’s research was criticized by David Marsh, Martin Smith, and David Richards in their 2000 article, “Bureaucrats, Politicians, and Reform in Whitehall: Analyzing the Bureau-shaping Model.” Marsh, Smith, and Richards found that the bureau-shaping model did not explain the creation of many, highly specialized government agencies in the United Kingdom, known as the next-step agencies. The authors argue that this effective hiving off of duties into other newly created agencies did not originate among bureaucrats, but was imposed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet.

The research of Marsh, Smith, and Richards raises the question of how and why politicians attempt to control bureaucrats, a particularly salient question in a separation-of-powers system, such as the United States, where Congress, the president, and the courts vie for control over the direction of bureaucratic policy making. In The Administrative Presidency (1983) Richard Nathan emphasized how the president can influence bureaucratic outputs through the powers of appointment and reorganization; studies done by B. Dan Wood and Richard Waterman empirically demonstrate this (1994).Additionally, in a 2005 study, David Lewis found that presidents also manipulate the number of appointees and civil servants, particularly in agencies that clash with the president.

Much research also has been devoted to illustrating the U.S. Congress’s alleged ability to steer bureaucratic behavior. Congress is responsible for crafting the legislation from which agencies are born and, as a result, it has significant authority over how agencies are designed. Matthew McCubbins, Roger Noll, and Barry Weingast (aka McNollgast) have stressed the importance of this function, arguing in a 1987 article that Congress embeds particular administrative procedures into agency design in order to ensure that bureaucratic behavior does not deviate too far from congressional intent. Since their influential work was written, several scholars (e.g., David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran, 1996; Evan Ringquist, Jeff Worsham, and Marc Allen Eisner, 2003) have attempted to refine the work of McNollgast by showing that agency authority delegated by Congress also depends on the salience and complexity of the issue, the presence of divided government within Congress, and the ability of affected constituents to organize.

However, many scholars have focused also on the ability of American bureaucracies to be autonomous and to display greater independence of political control. In a 1976 study, Joel D. Aberbach and Bert A. Rockman found through surveys that Nixon administration bureaucrats were suspicious of his domestic policy agenda, particularly those bureaucrats that administered social regulatory programs. In Bureaucracy, Politics, and Public Policy (1984), Francis Rourke argues that bureaucrats can develop knowledge and expertise that can then be used independently of political principals. Additionally, agencies with large or important constituencies may have enough political cover to act contrary to the wishes of the president or Congress. In The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy (2001), Daniel Carpenter also emphasizes the ability of entrepreneurial agency heads to cultivate coalitions as the key to bureaucratic autonomy.

Bureaucratic Reforms

In the latter half of the twentieth century, public management reforms were driven by high levels of government debt, but also by the conservative ideals of leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Many countries in Europe and elsewhere implemented changes to the structure of civil servant contracts and to budgeting decisions. These changes also represented a desire to bring free-market principles into government—greater flexibility was sought in civil servant contracts to reward and punish bureaucrats according to their performance. Thus, for example, countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom introduced programs whereby bureaucrats were hired according to performance related contracts for a variable number of years, as opposed to being appointed for life. Moreover, budgeting procedures also were transformed in order to stimulate agency performance and enhance efficiency. Budgets are increasingly drawn up according to evaluations of agency performance, and many countries have instituted auditing procedures as well to monitor how money is spent once it is allocated. Finally, many countries passed legislation, such as the Government Performance and Results Act in the United States in 1993, to allow formal evaluation of bureaucratic behavior through the use of performance indicators and measurement.

In western Europe, the regulation of business gradually shifted away from direct control of nationalized industries by the executive to the creation of independent regulatory agencies. The shift to autonomous agencies represented a decision by governments to interfere less in markets while delegating important regulatory decisions to bureaucrats with specialized expertise. In his 1996 book Regulating Europe, Giandomenico Majone documented the proliferation of independent regulatory agencies as the European Union’s emergence as a regulatory state. The creation of such agencies also represented a shift toward more market-oriented economies, as state-owned enterprises were jettisoned in favor of an arrangement whereby the new agencies oversee private utilities and energy companies. Similar changes occurred in the United States in the late 1970s, despite the long-standing prevalence there of independent regulatory agencies. Widespread deregulation in transportation and utilities sectors of business resulted in the dismantling of regulations that were considered favorable for existing large businesses, but destructive to competition and consumers.

While these elements of the new public management have been widespread throughout the industrialized world, they have been implemented to varying degrees across countries. What accounts for this variation? In Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (2004), Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert posit that in majoritarian and centralized (unitary) governments, public sector reforms tend to be implemented most rapidly and most broadly, while in consensual and decentralized (federal) governments, such reforms move more slowly and with more limited scope. First, because everyone’s interests are represented in a consensual government, it is easier for those opposed to reforms to block their passage. Second, because power is dispersed from the federal government to regional governments in a federal system, it is more difficult for the executive in a federal system to impose nationwide reforms. Thus, majoritarian, centralized governments like New Zealand and the United Kingdom could implement far-reaching reforms. An oft-mentioned instance of such change occurred in the United Kingdom in 1986 when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher responded to policy disagreements with the Greater London Council by simply abolishing it, along with several other county councils. On the other hand, more consensual and federal systems, such as Belgium and Germany, did not experience the same level of change. Additionally, countries like Belgium, France, and Italy are characterized as having risk-averse bureaucratic cultures in which attempts to introduce performance-related civil servant contracts are fiercely resisted by bureaucrats.

Public sector reforms such as privatization, contracting out, pay for performance, and performance measurement have helped some governments realize significant savings and improve government performance, but public management scholars also emphasize that these reforms can be difficult to implement and may yield mixed results. For example, it may be difficult to develop indicators that reliably assess public sector performance, which also makes it difficult to link salary and budgets to performance. To the extent that reliable indicators can be developed, close linkage with budget or salary may give bureaucrats incentives to manipulate their numbers or ignore other important indicators. Finally, as numerous public administration scholars have noted, the procedures of implementing public policy are often concerned with values other than efficiency, such as equity or fairness.

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