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

Bureaucracy and Democracy: The Case for More Bureaucracy and Less DemocracyAuthor(s): Kenneth J. MeierReviewed work(s):Source: Public Administration Review, Vol. 57, No. 3 (May - Jun., 1997), pp. 193-199Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Society for Public AdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/976648 .Accessed: 09/06/2012 10:56

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Bureaucracy and Democracy .

The Case for More Bureaucracyr and Less Democrc

Kenneth J. Mejer, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In 'Democracy and Bureaucracy "Meier argues that the bureau-

cracy problem in the United States is, in reality, a governance problem. Framed in this way, he argues the key problems are

failures of electoral institutions rather than failures of bureaucra-

cy. As a result, public administration needs to broaden its focus

and include the study of electoral institutions as well as the study

of bureaucracy. Effectivegovernance is possible only students of

public administration return to their reformist roots and address

both bureaucratic and electoral institutions. As a starting point in such a debate, Meierproposes a series of reformsfor U.S. politi-

cal institutions.

It hasn't been my aim to tellpeople what to think...I have tried,

rather, to tell them how to think-specifically, of course, about public

administration.

Dwight Waldo (Brown and Stillman, 1986, 164).

T the United States is facing a serious problem with the interface between its bureaucracy and its electoral institutions., Politicians

often run for office by campaigning against the bureaucracy. The current antibureaucratic buzzword "reinventing 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.

Public Administration Review * May/June 1997, Vol. 57, No. 3 193

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 Con- gresses and different presidents have agreed to balance the budget (Gramm-Rudman); have acquiesced in deficits nearing three hun- dred 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 mis- takes 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. With a few exceptions (e.g., Mazmanian and Sabatier, 1989; Linder and Peters, 1987), we have never recognized that the political branches of government had administrative components and that the real problem with the politics/administration dichotomy is that we only study part of the policy process. That we study both the political and the administrative within the bureaucracy is good, but it still yields an incomplete view of governance.

Public administration needs to overcome its bad choice on the politics/administration dichotomy and return to its pre-1950 reformist roots. The field of public administration, epitomized by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, was at one time part

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. of a larger reform tradition. That tradition of pragmatic liberalism with progressive ideas (Anderson, 1990) produced the merit system, the secret ballot, direct election of senators, and city manager government. It was concerned with governance, not with a narrow view of public administration.

To correct our first error, I suggest we redefine the field of public administration to encompass the design, evaluation, and implementation of institutions and public policy. Bureaucrats quite clearly participate in setting the policy agenda (Maynard-Moody, 1995) and in designing public programs in concert with the electoral branches of government (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993). These topics should be added to our long-term interests in policy evaluation and implementation.

The second error of ambition made by academic public administration occurred contemporaneously with its declaration of inde- pendence from political science.6 At the height of the behavioral revolution in political science, public administration rightly per- ceived that it was unwanted in political science (Waldo, 1987, 94; also Brown and Stillman, 1986). Many public administration scholars shifted their loyalties, others stayed within political science with the goal of recreating an empirical public administration within political science.7 Those who separated from political science left the broader reform tradition to political scientists, implic- itly assuming that as they shifted their focus to bureaucratic institutions of governance political scientists would continue to deal with the problems of democracy at the interface between bureaucracy and electoral institutions. Political scientists instead focused on individual behavior in the quest for the definitive study of presidential elections.8 Public administrators who remained in political science busily built a solid empirical study of bureaucracy, but they also neglected the political institutions side of governance. There are no great normative theories of bureaucracy in political science, by which I mean theories about what the role of bureaucracy should be in governance.9

Given these errors of ambition the best advice for contemporary public administration scholarship is the immortal statement of Senator Aiken of Vermont on the Vietnam War: "We should just declare victory and go home." Those scholars who left political science have created a variety of autonomous institutions that, quite frankly, dwarf those in political science. Public administration and public policy scholars who remained in political science have gained the respect of peers, built a body of scholarly literature, and gained access to whatever power political scientists possess. It is time to go home, home to the public administration of Luther Gulick, Lewis Browniow, Leonard White, Frank Goodnow, W.F. Willoughby,'0 Dwight Waldo, and Herbert Simon. Herbert Simon (1969) once noted that public administration is a science of the artificial, concerned not only with how things are but also with

194 Public Administration Review * May/June 1997, Vol. 57, No. 3

Bureaucracies perform best and can contribute

the most to the policy-makingprocess when 1) they are given clear goals by electoral institutions, 2) they are allocated

adequate resources, and 3) they are given the autonomy to

apply their expertise to the problem. how they might be. II Simon, as most in public administration, was not nearly ambitious enough. Public administration is the science of the artificial for both politics and administration.

OK, That's a Nice Idea, But What Does It Mean?

Within this view of public administration, I revisit the question of the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy in the contemporary United States.12 I will look at this problem from the perspective of institutions and institutional design. The look is quite frankly normative as well as empirical; it seeks to define what we should study and what we should proselytize.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracies are permanent, goal-oriented open systems, and all these characteristics are important for understanding the relationship between bureaucracy and electoral institutions. Bureau- cracies are structured around policy-oriented goals (see Simon, 1947; Barnard, 1938; Wilson, 1989).13 Because bureaucracies are built around goals, what others call a mission, they quite naturally resist tasks that do not fit within these goals. The Army Corps of Engineers strongly resisted taking control over coastal wetlands (an environmental task) until they were finally forced to do so by Congress. Similarly, the armed forces and the FBI were able to avoid being pulled into the war on drugs until the mid-1980s. Goals are crucial to bureaucracies. They define the bureaucracy's reason for existence; they serve as the basis for organizational socialization; and they can be used as part of the process to moti- vate employee performance.

Bureaucratic permanence (or more aptly its stability since bureaucracies can be, and at times are, eliminated-e.g, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Resolution Trust Corporation), the use of merit-oriented procedures, and the ability to exploit economies of scale mean that bureaucracies become storehouses of expertise. They can learn over time (Lebovic, 1995; Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith, 1993), specialize beyond the capabilities of the electoral branches of government, and hire or contract for needed expertise.

The open-systems element of bureaucracy has consequences for a bureaucracy existing in a democracy. The norms of democracy grant policy-making legitimacy to electoral institutions, not to bureaucracy.14 While bureaucracy can at times claim to represent the interests of individuals, bureaucracies are not inherently repre- sentative institutions and lack the imprimatur of elections. 15

As open systems, however, bureaucracies both shape their environment and respond to it. In general, bureaucracies are fairly responsive institutions as long as what the environment demands of them is consistent with their mission, their capabilities, and the norms of democratic policy making.16 The democratic norms of the policy process also define methods for influencing bureaucracy. The more the attempts to influence the bureaucracy are consistent with the norms of democracy, the less likely they are to generate resistance. That is, clear legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president is difficult to resist since both institutions are performing their defined constitutional role. Attempts to change policy by changing department heads have less legitimacy but are still acceptable if such changes are within the scope of the agency's mission. The Reagan administration's problems with the Environmen- tal Protection Agency are a classic example of an unsuccessful attempt to change the mission of an agency via the appointment process. Exparte contacts by a politician involving an ongoing case lack legitimacy even if they are consistent with the agency's mission.

Given the development of bureaucracies as goal-oriented open systems within a democracy, I would posit a normative institutional rule for bureaucracy. Bureaucracies perform best and can contribute the most to the policy-making process when 1) they are given clear goals by electoral institutions, 2) they are allocated adequate resources, and 3) they are given the autonomy17 to apply their expertise to the problem.18 This normative rule applies to all stages of the policy process. In the agenda setting or policy adoption phase of policy making, this demands a policy advocacy role. Bureaucracy contributes to the political debate to the extent it can provide informed commentary on policy problems and how they might be solved.

Electoral Institutions

Congress and the presidency are also open systems although it is unclear if they are goal-oriented or merely composed of goal-oriented individuals. Because they rely on elections, these institutions have less control over their institutional boundaries. Electoral institutions, as a result, are less likely to be as homogeneous as bureaucracies since they are less able to use the normal means that organizations use to recruit, socialize, and train their members.19 Whether members of electoral institutions have goals of reelection or of policy, there will be greater tension between the institution and its members than in a bureaucracy.

The key skill of the electoral institutions is serving as forums for deliberation. They aggregate the political interests in the nation and provide a forum for the conflict between these interests in which they can be focused and perhaps resolved, either through compromise or through majoritarian fiat. In the process of repre- senting interests, electoral institutions set public policy goals or, put in more organizational terms, resolve goal conflict among the demands from the organization's environment (that they do not always do so has long been known; see Seidman, 1970).20

While bureaucratic institutions can be designed to resolve political conflict-the National Labor Relations Board is a good example-bureaucracy has no inherent advantages in this role. If anything, the bureaucracy is far less suited to this role than are

Waldo Symposium: The Case for More Bureaucracy and Less Democracy 195

electoral institutions. This position reflects the consensus of both scholars who think that neutral competence is the end of bureaucracy (Goodnow, 1900) and those who advocate responsive competence (Wood and Waterman, 1994).

So What Is the Problem? The fundamental problem of governance that has generated the

continual state of crisis in political/bureaucratic relationships is that the electoral branches of government have failed as deliberative institutions; they have not resolved conflict in a reasoned manner. At times they do not resolve conflict and at other times they have done so in a manner that undercuts effective public policy 21

The policy failures of Congress and the president are legion. In an effort to deal with immediate problems of social security funding, Congress has created a system that essentially is an intergenera- tional transfer of wealth. This conflict between generations remains unaddressed, because good policy would make bad politics in the short run. In 1993, we witnessed a year-long effort to sort out the various interests in health care and to design a comprehen- sive system; that effort failed to resolve the goal conflicts and the existing system was allowed to continue its incremental course of action.

Failure to establish new policy is not the only area where political institutions have failed. At times policies have contradictory goals, and these are left to the bureaucracy to grapple with as best it can. Affirmative action is one such policy, and many others could be found in agricultural policy and social welfare policy.

The failure to resolve goal conflict with informed public policy is exacerbated by the development of the continual campaign for office. Presidential candidates now start their campaigns a mini- mum of two years before the election. Members of Congress campaign, raise money, and run for office on a continual basis. The greater emphasis on campaigns has attracted individuals with high levels of campaigning skills, not necessarily the skills that are valu- able in governance. The reductio ad absurdum of the campaign spe- cialization occurred in January 1996 when both Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton concluded that the perfect way to resolve the balanced budget dispute was to make the 1996 election a referendum on the issue.

Political problems are enhanced by what is a decline in commit- ment to the institutions of governance. Uslaner (1993) finds that current members of Congress are less likely to identify with Congress as an institution than past members were. This decline in identification results in less deference to institutional rules, more personal attacks on other members and the institution, more con- frontation and less cooperation, and more concern with district and thus electoral benefits than institutional and policy benefits. The decline in comity that Uslaner (1993) documents quite clearly hampers Congress' efforts to resolve policy conflict. Some members prefer to produce not policy but election issues.

The method of staffing the institutionalized presidency has similar consequences. As part of the administrative presidency, recent recruits to the executive office have had to meet the test of personal loyalty to the president. As a result, staff members are loyal not to the institution of presidency but to the person who is president (Hart, 1995, 145; Hinckley, 1985, 13 1-136). While such personal

Our basicproblem ofgovernance is that the long

running interplay between bureaucracy and expertise on

one hand, and responsiveness and democracy (read

electoral institutions) on the other hand, has swung too far

in the direction of democracy. loyalty is not necessarily bad, it can lead individuals to overlook the role the institution plays in governance and the limits on that institution. On frequent occasions such forms of personal loyalty produce an Oliver North.

Unwilling or unable to resolve political conflict, when political institutions opt for policy action it is in areas where goals are gen- erally not in conflict. In such areas as drug abuse and drunk driv- ing, for example, there is only one politically acceptable side to the debate. Such policies are popular because they are easy to under- stand and appear to be electorally rewarding. Since there is no goal conflict, facts are irrelevant to the debate and we have a type of process that I call "the politics of sin" (Meier, 1994).22 Politicians compete with each other to adopt more extreme policies; the normal tempering role of bureaucracy, the application of expertise to policy and policy proposals, is lacking. Little rational deliberation is done, and the policies that are normally adopted are destined to fail because either the policy problem is not understood or the policy itself is poorly designed.

Policy failure then leads to greater cynicism among the public. Cynicism in turn leads to a renewed quest for magic bullets-those policies that will somehow quickly and cheaply solve the problem. Solving crime by building more jails; improving education by rely- ing on vouchers; balancing the budget by eliminating waste, fraud, and corruption; and reinventing government by contracting out services are current magic bullets. The political attraction of Ross Perot seems to be his superior ability relative to other politicians to sell his magic potions. Given the flawed nature of such policies, we create nothing more than another cycle of failure and cynicism.

Less Democracy and More Bureaucracy Our basic problem of governance is that the long running

interplay between bureaucracy and expertise on one hand, and responsiveness and democracy (read electoral institutions) on the other hand, has swung too far in the direction of democracy. We now demand not just that bureaucracy be responsive to electoral institutions, but that it be hyperresponsive; that it respond to political demands whether or not those demands are consistent and whether or not they are expressed through politically legitimate channels. Bureaucracy is being asked to resolve political conflict, a function it performs poorly at best. The scapegoating and resource reductions have surely dissipated some of the bureaucratic capacity essential for effective governance. If we are also going to ask bureaucracy to solve political problems, then even greater capacity is necessary. The solution to the governance problem in the United States is to have more bureaucracy and less democracy.


The argument for less democracy is so un-American that nothing less than fundamental political change is required.23 I do not have the solution, but let me suggest some items as a first step in the debates. 1. Redesign our political system to resolve rather than exacerbate

conflict. The establishment of an elaborate set of checks and balances was a triumph of libertarian political thought perfectly appropriate in the eighteenth century. While these procedural checks should make majority tyranny less likely,24 they also pre- vent the resolution of political conflicts and the adoption of good public policy. I suggest we examine the more unified political structures and the corporatist processes of many Euro- pean countries. In such systems politicians, bureaucrats, and interested citizens all actively participate in the discussion, design, and implementation of public policy. We need structures that instill in politicians a responsibility for the performance of political institutions as a whole, something difficult to achieve without both strong political parties and unified government (Jacobson, 1992, 233, 237).

2. Lengthen the time frame for public policy making. Frequent elections-a reform of Jacksonian democracy-do create an incentive for elected officials to be responsive. They also create, however, a short-term focus and are not conducive to a good policy process. In an effort to change the time frame considera- tions of electoral institutions, we need to consider longer terms for our elected officials.

3. Restrict and perhaps even eliminate political appointees. Quite clearly, the responsiveness of bureaucracies to electoral institutions is not a function of the number of political appointees (e.g., England, Australia). A large number of political appointees sets a layer of incompetence between elected officials and the career bureaucracy. The Senior Executive Service should be restricted to career personnel, and political appointees should be limited to agency heads only.

4. Assess rationally the trend in contracting out governmental functions. Both markets and bureaucracies do some things well and some things poorly. Neither is a universal solution. Unin- formed reliance on the private sector will consistently let government capacity waste away (O'Toole, 1989) and frequently spawn an epidemic of corruption (Perry and Wise, 1990). We need to conserve, build, and restore our institutions of policy expertise (Terry, 1995).

5. Evaluate critically the agency's policies so as to contribute effec- tively to the policy debate. Bureaucracy's normative role in public policy suggests that bureaucracy serves best when it exploits its information and expertise advantages. If agencies fail to exploit these advantages, they may pander to politicians by offering them solutions that will not work. The role of the Drug Enforcement Administration as chief cheerleader in drug policy is a prime example. Some agencies should be abolished and rebuilt from scratch.

6. Bring the institutionalized presidency under the merit system. If organizations such as the Office of Management and Budget can faithfully serve presidents of different ideologies, then similar organizations can run the White House and other parts of

the institutionalized presidency. The politicization of the institutionalized presidency actually undercuts its effectiveness as a political institution (Burke, 1995, 398-400; Durant, 1992). The objective is to staff this institution with individuals who are loyal to the institution per se rather than just to the temporary occupant of the office.

7. Replace the current public philosophy of neoclassical economics and its sole value of efficiency. We need a public philosophy that unites rather than divides, that enhances rather than destroys public institutions, that values rather than denigrates public service. What that philosophy might be is unclear, but public administration needs to initiate and participate in that debate.25

8. Reorient our education programs from training entry-level civil servants to training policymakers. Harvard has the right idea, they just do it badly. If public administration is about governance, then public administration education must deal with both politics and administration. As David Rosenbloom per- ceptively concluded, "As heretical as it may sound to some, public administration theory must make greater use of political theory" (1983, 225).

Conclusion The bureaucracy problem confronting the United States is in

reality a governance problem (Frederickson, 1997, especially ch. 3). The bureaucracy, by most objective standards, is performing fairly well while the electoral institutions seem to be deteriorating. To solve this problem, public administration needs to revisit its past and reincorporate the study of electoral institutions into the field. This suggests a normative orientation, with public administration concerned with how governance should be structured and operated rather than just how the bureaucracy should implement public policy.26 If the argument is correct, that the primary problem facing the United States is governance, then public administration must redefine its focus because no other discipline, field, or profession is concerned with these problems.

This is an essay meant to provoke debate, not a detailed blueprint for how to reconcile bureaucracy and democracy in the United States. I have presented a wide range of ideas; many need more thought and development. Some may well turn out to be wrong. My objective is to refocus public administration on some important questions; I claim no monopoly on correct answers. This enterprise is fundamentally different from what we learned as graduate students in public administration. Many, myself included, may be inadequately trained to engage in the debate on governance. Dwight Waldo was trained as a political theorist who became interested in practical problems. That combination might well be the one that can best deal with contemporary problems of governance.

Kenneth J. Meier is a professor of public administration at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the editor of the Amer- ican Journal of Political Science.


Acknowledgements I thank John Bibby and Rik Uslaner for advice on electoral institutions and Michael J. Licari, George Krause, Bill West, Joe Soss, Larry O'Toole, Susan Burgess, and H. George Frederickson for comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. In this essay I will use the term electoral institutions rather than political institutions to refer to Congress and the presidency because I believe that bureaucracy is also a political institution. "Electoral institutions" is used merely as a convenient collective description of these institutions. Little will be said about the courts, since I do not feel they are a democratic institution (Meier, 1993a, 162-167; see also Brown and Stillman, 1986, 177).

2. All of the efficiency-based reforms noted above have their roots in neoclassical economics. While I can live with economics as an empirical science and I frequently do work that might well be considered economics, I find it a pernicious political philosophy because it seems inherently antigovern- ment. I attribute many of the problems discussed in this essay to the triumph of neoclassical economics as the public philosophy. See Lan and Rosenbloom (1992) and Meier (1993b) for discussion of the impact of this philosophy on public administration.

3. There have been academic debates on this topic, most recently the Blacks- burg Manifesto (see Wamsley et al., 1990; and the response by Kaufman, 313-315) and before that the New Public Administration (Frederickson, 1990). My argument is distinct from previous ones because I seek to reform both politics and administration.

4. I am using the term governance in the same sense that Aristotle used politics; it is the process of governing society in a generic sense. I do not use it to describe the process whereby bureaucracy is minimized and policy is privatized either through exchanges or contracts. The many nuances of the contemporary use of "governance" are cogently discussed in Frederick- son (1997). My prescriptions are 180 degrees away from those of most scholars using the term. Like Frederickson I seek to conserve institutions of governance not destroy them (see also Terry, 1990).

5. These conflicts are exacerbated by the system of checks and balances at the federal level; however, the problem appears at the state and local levels also.

6. Or was kicked out depending on one's point of view. 7. That movement has been a success. Within political science, public

administration is now viewed as a field that is quantitatively sophisticated and on a part with other subfields of political science (see the work of Wood, 1988; Wood and Waterman, 1994; Scholz and Wei, 1986; Krause, 1994; Moe, 1985). A subgroup within political science has also taken mathematical and formal approaches to the same end (see Bendor and Moe, 1985; Bendor, 1994; Epstein and O'Halloran, 1994). This success, however, has had at best modest impact on dissertations in the field.

8. In the second edition of The Administrative State, Waldo (1984, xlii) notes that no new studies of the separation of powers seem to have been written since the first edition. The early works on the separation of powers discussed in The Administrative State come closest to being normative theories of institutions and looking at the administrative side of political institutions.

9. A third error was made when public administration rightly rejected logical positivism. In the process it confused a tool of positivism, quantitative methods, with the philosophy itself. The philosophy was sterile, but the tool can be used to merge values with facts rather than separate them (see Meier and Keiser, 1996).

10. In chapter seven of The Administrative State, Waldo dealt harshly with the ideas of Goodnow and Willougby on the separation of powers. Although the ideas might have had problems, they were addressing the right questions.

11. I think of Simon as less positivist than Dwight Waldo does. While it is clear that Administrative Behavior takes a hard core positivist position, The

Sciences of the Artificial seems to reject this philosophy. I am aware that criticizing Herbert Simon in a note can be dangerous (Waldo, 1952; Simon, 1952).

12. By democracy I am referring to overhead democracy and control of the bureaucracy by electoral institutions. There are other forms of democracy, such as direct political participation in bureaucratic governance or hav- ing bureaucracy play an active role in the representation process (see Wamsley et al., 1990; Meier, 1993a, ch. 7).

13. I consider the notion that an organization's primary goal is to survive is trivially true. Organizations cannot attain their goals if they do not survive, but survival alone is fairly meaningless since it will deprive the organization of any methods of motivation other than monetary ones.

14. By making this statement, it should be clear that I am not advocating administrative supremacy as many accuse the Blacksburg Manifesto of doing. Electoral institutions in a democracy are the legitimate institutions for setting policy goals and resolving political disputes. These roles, however, are restrained by the Constitution. As a result I characterize electoral institutions' interventions in the administrative process as ranging from highly legitimate (legislation) to of questionable legitimacy (ex part contacts).

15. Whether bureaucracy should represent individuals is an interesting normative question that needs to be addressed in public administration.

16. At times electoral institutions ask bureaucracy to do a job but fail to provide it with the resources to do so. Immigration control is an obvious example, as is regulating consumer products. When and why this is done are interesting questions, but they need far more space than this essay per- mits.

17. Autonomy for an open system means that electoral institutions do not micromanage the bureaucracy. It does not mean that bureaucracy should be left unchecked.

18. I recognize that this rarely happens in practice. 19. The work on the institutionalization of Congress suggests that the institu-

tional coherence of Congress has varied over time. At times, the institution per se appears to be able to get individual members to submerge some of their goals for the greater institutional good. At other times, Congress appears to be little more than a collection of individuals (Uslaner, 1993).

20. Criticizing democratic institutions for not making good public policy is somewhat unfair since they are designed to be democratic rather than to produce good public policy. At the same time, the survivability of democracy rests, at least in part, on its ability to produce good public policies.

21. My feeling is that it is better to not resolve the conflict than to resolve it in an uninformed way. The latter results in the "politics of sin," while the former suggests that a resolution in the future is possible. This assumes, of course, that policy is not delegated to the bureaucracy without an effort to set goals and resolve conflict.

22. An alternative but similar view of such policies can be seen in the work of Schneider and Ingram (1993). They argue that social constructions create incentives for politicians to pursue policies focused on those designated as deviants.

23. In another context Rosenbloom (1983, 224) noted that we cannot synthe- size the different values of public administration (which he defined as management, politics, and law) because they reflect integral parts of our political culture. His warning is relevant here.

24. I am skeptical, given my work on "sin politics," that majority tyranny is not highly likely in a fragmented political system. While fragmentation is thought to constrain such policies, in actuality it may limit fast action only to those areas where knowledge exists by revelation-not by empirical analysis.


25. By calling for public administration to initiate this debate, I am not necessarily advocating that its voice be given more weight than that of others. Failure to initiate and participate in this debate, however, undercuts the legitimacy of bureaucratic institutions.

26. One potentially promising area is institutional rational choice, which

attempts to determine what the impact of various political and bureaucratic structures might be (Knott and Miller, 1987; Moe, 1989). While I do not always agree with the findings of this literature, it is asking the right questions.

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