Searching for a Role: The Civil Service in American Democracy

Political changes in the United States have produced several conflicting pressures on the public bureaucracy. On the one hand, the Reagan administration placed greater demands for political responsive ness on civil servants; those pressures continued to a lesser degree in the Bush administration. At the same time, there are increasing pressures on civil servants from clients and interest groups for attention to their needs and demands. All these groups also seek to hold civil servants accountable, although in different ways. The public is often caught in the middle, and individual organizations may experience internal tensions arising from these conflicting demands. The public bureaucracy itself is composed of well-educated and commit ted individuals who seek their own role in defining and implementing policy. These policy and managerial conflicts are not peculiar to the United States but are found in most modern democracies.