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.

1. Theories of
Bureaucratic Politics
Submitted By :
3rd Group
M Edward Kairupan 125030100111119
Tomi

2. 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.

3. 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”

4. 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?

5. 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

6. 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: ( the nature of the Good Life, or a
)
vision of what the “good society” should look like; ( the
)
criteria of action, or the procedures for determining how
collective decisions should be made; ( the question of who
)
should rule; ( the question of how the powers of the state
)
should be divided and apportioned; and ( 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?

7. 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

8. 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?

9. ALLISON’S PARADIGM OF
BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS
O In the two decades following the publication of The
Administrative State (Waldo 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.

10. O The first serious comprehensive attempt to produce such a
framework was undertaken by Graham Allison in his book
Essence of Decision (and further refined by Allison
),
and Morton Halperin (Allison‟s immediate focus in
).
Essence of Decision was explaining why the governments of
the United States and the Soviet Union did what they did
during the Cuban missile crisis. With a nuclear exchange at
stake, these were policies of particular importance, but Allison
was aiming well beyond the confines of one case study.
Essentially, he posed a broad question that cut to the heart of
bureaucratic politics: Why do governments do what they do?
In other words, how is policy made, and who determines or
influences it? To provide general answers to these questions
O Allison articulated three theoretical models The first was the
rational actor model (what Allison termed “Model I,” or the
classical model). Model I proposes that government decisions
can be understood by viewing them as the product of a single
actor in strategic pursuit of his own self-interest

11. O The second model is the organizational process paradigm, or
Model II, which argues that numerous actors are involved in
decisionmaking, and decisionmaking processes are highly
structured through standard operating procedures (SOPs).
O Model III, or the bureaucratic politics paradigm, explains
government actions as the product of bargaining and
compromise among the various organizational elements of
the executive branch. Allison‟s model of bureaucratic politics
is constructed from four basic propositions.
O Model III, or the bureaucratic politics paradigm, explains
government actions as the product of bargaining and
compromise among the various organizational elements of
the executive branch. Allison‟s model of bureaucratic politics
is constructed from four basic propositions.
O Allison‟s model of bureaucratic politics has had a significant
impact on how bureaucracies are studied. It was not just a
series of propositions formulated to explain one study, but
rather a workable theory for understanding the policymaking
role of bureaucracy.

12. 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

13. 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 (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.

14. 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

15. NETWORKS AND
BUREAUCRATIC POLITICS
O This fact that bureaucratic politics extends beyond
the bureaucracy itself was highlighted by Laurence
O‟Toole ( in his admonition to take
b)
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
 )
O The need to understand a networked bureaucracy
is obvious, but it is unclear if we have made much
theoretical headway since the mid- Mosts.
literature has focused on how to manage
networked systems, rather than on implications

16. 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.
O Although Seidman‟s work and Wilson‟s work are
discursive rather than theoretical, more explicitly
theoretical efforts from organization literature seek to
explain at least some elements of the political behavior
bureaucracies indulge in. John Kingdon‟s
Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies

17. 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
( ,  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?

18. 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  ). 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

19. O The notion of legitimating bureaucratic power by
treating bureaucracy as a representative institution
was formally introduced by J. Donald Kingsley in
Repesentative Bureaucracy
O Kenneth Meier puts it, “The theory of
representative bureaucracy begins by recognizing
the realities of politics. In a complex polity 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 decisionmaker

20. O In the United States, Samuel Krislov (
)
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

21. 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.

22. O Allison‟s Model III and the theory of representative
bureaucracy represent two of the better known and
most widely employed bureaucratic politics frameworks.
Although it is hard to underestimate Allison‟s
contribution, it clearly falls short of a generally
applicable theoretical framework. Allison‟s Model III is
likely to continue to find gainful employment in
structuring administrative studies
O Long‟s point was that the ability of a public agency to
get things done was not dependent upon the
responsibilities and authority granted to it by statute
O Scholars such as Long, Gaus, and Waldo argue that,
like it or not, bureaucracy is a political institution and
that any useful theoretical framework has to recognize
and account for this simple fact of political life. Public
administration theory, in other words, must also be
political theory. Theories of bureaucratic politics are
designed with this objective in mind, and pursuit of this
goal remains a profitable activity for students of public
administration

23. Thank You