Bureaucracy and Democracy: The Case for More Bureaucracy and Less Democracy

It hasn't been my aim to tell people what to think...I have tried, rather, to tell them how to think -- specifically, of course, about public administration. The United States is facing a serious problem with the interface between its bureaucracy and its electoral institutions.(1) Politicians often run for office by campaigning against the bureaucracy. The current antibureaucratic buzzword government, replaced the cost-benefit analysis of the Reagan/Bush administrative presidency (Durant, 1992), which replaced Carter's civil service reform and reorganization. Zero-base budgeting, management by objectives, program planning budgeting systems, civil service reform, and reinventing government are all efforts to convince us that bureaucracy is the problem with governance in the United States.(2) If we could just somehow get bureaucracy under control, we could balance the budget, eliminate poverty, reinvigorate the education system, and cure male pattern baldness. Missing in the political debates is any serious assessment of bureaucracy, its performance, its pathologies, or its promise.(3) In comparison to other industrialized democracies, however, the United States bureaucracy appears to be much smaller and leaner (Rose, 1985). It relies more on the private sector to deliver goods and services. It is composed of technocrats rather than administrative elites. And, I will argue that it is both reasonably effective and at the same time highly responsive to legitimate political demands. The problems in American government, in my view, are not problems of bureaucracy but problems of governance.(4) In contrast to what is adequate (some might even argue excellent) performance by the bureaucracy (Goodsell, 1983), the performance by our electoral institutions has been dismal. As an illustration, Congress and the president have been engaged in a futile 25-year battle to balance the budget. Tilting at economically forecasted windmills, different Congresses and different presidents have agreed to balance the budget (Gramm-Rudman); have acquiesced in deficits nearing three hundred billion dollars; have perpetrated the myth that one can balance the budget without either raising taxes or cutting spending;, have on numerous occasions shut down the federal government; but have accomplished little more than to make Alan Greenspan's job more difficult. As the electoral institutions have eliminated the feasibility of sensible fiscal policy, a bureaucracy (the Federal Reserve) has compensated. In the policy fields of health care, affirmative action, budget deficits, crime, drugs, and so on, electoral institutions have been unable either to provide a deliberative forum for resolving political conflicts, or to adopt good public policy.(5) The only political consensus appears to be that bureaucracy is bad and needs to be restricted. The irony of the situation is that as the electoral branches stalemate, they act against the bureaucracy -- the one part of government that has a capacity to govern. Public Administration's Sins Are Sins of Omission The governance problem can be blamed in part on the field of public administration. We have readily and enthusiastically helped to reorganize, reform, and reinvent bureaucracy. We have worked suboptimizing wonders on the bureaucracy but have long since passed the point of diminishing marginal returns. There are no more, if there were any, silver bullets that will slay the bureaucracy dragon and magically improve governance in the United States. Most of the dragons have starved to death: few of the bullets hit anything. Intellectually the field of public administration made two mistakes that contributed to our current governance problem. First, in rejecting the politics/administration dichotomy, public administration was unambitious in its territorial claims. As scholars, we were happy to argue that the administrative process was inherently political and, therefore, we confined our study to bureaucratic politics. …