American Bureaucracy
 The Democratic Dilemma


                                                                                                                                             The Blind Leading the Blind (Bruegel)

  1. Introduction:
    1. What is a bureaucracy?
    2. Why study bureaucracies?
    3. How did federal bureaucracies come to play crucial roles in political life?
    4. What are the proper scope and limits of bureaucratic activity?
      1. Under what circumstances is bureaucratic regulation consistent with American political culture (i.e., America’s fundamental "world view" (paradigm) and fundamental American attitudes, values and beliefs)?
      2. Under what circumstances do bureaucracies serve legitimate governmental functions accurately (responsively), efficiently and fairly?
    5. What are the social, cultural and psychological impacts of bureaucracies?
  2. The Dilemmas of Bureaucracy
    1. American public is of two minds
      1. Scorn bureaucrats
        1. Over zealous guardians of status quo.
        2. Lazy/unimaginative
        3. Too liberal, large, powerful, unaccountable, intrusive.
        4. Lots of waste and fat in govt.
      2. Likes public services
        1. Social security
        2. Environmental regulation
        3. Food and drug testing
        4. Interstate highways
        5. Federal crime and anti-narcotic efforts
        6. National defense
      3. When asked, few members of the public are dissatisfied with their personal contacts with civil servants
    2. A ubiquitous feature of modern bureaucracy is delegation.
      1. Legislation typically delegates policy implementation to a bureaucracy.
      2. The specialized knowledge of an expert agency may be necessary to unravel the technical uncertainties surrounding the impact of alternative policy actions;
      3. However, the policy preferences of bureaucrats are often different from those of political leaders, and, if they have unique expertise, the former may use their superior knowledge to advantage themselves rather than to carry out the latter’s policy wishes.
  3. Definition:
    1. The Ideal Type
      1. An analytical construct that serving as a measuring rod to determine the extent to which concrete institutions are similar and how they differ from some defined measure
      2. Not meant to refer to the "best" or to some moral ideal.
        1. The ideal type involves determining the "logically consistent" features of a social institution.
        2. The ideal type never corresponds to concrete reality but is a description to which we can compare reality.
          1. "Ideal Capitalism," for example, is used extensively in social science literature. According to the ideal type, capitalism consists of four basic features:
            1. Private Ownership
            2. Pursuit of Profit
            3. Competition
            4. Laissez Faire
          2. In reality, all capitalist systems deviate from the theoretical construct we call "ideal capitalism." But the construct allows us to compare and contrast economic systems of various societies to this definition.
    2. Bureaucracy (Weber's ideal-type):
      1. Goal-oriented organizations designed according to rational principles in order to efficiently attain their goals.
        1. What is the bureaucracy supposed to do in a Democratic Political System?
          1. Immediate goals:
            1. Implement policy (Congress is very VAGUE!)
            2. Provide services to people (Street level bureaucracy)
          2. Fundamental purposes:
            1. Provide order to facilitate life, liberty, property ownership and use and the pursuit of happiness
      2. Offices are ranked in a hierarchical order, with information flowing up the chain of command, directives flowing down.
      3. Operations of the organizations are characterized by impersonal rules explicitly stating duties, responsibilities, standardized procedures and conduct of office holders.
      4. Offices are highly specialized
      5. Appointments to these offices are made according to specialized qualifications rather than ascribed criteria.
      6. All of these ideal characteristics have one goal, to promote the efficient attainment of the organization's goals.
  4. The Reality of Bureaucracy
    1. The Federal Bureaucracy
      1. Career government employees work in
        1. 14 cabinet departments
        2. Over 50 independent agencies
        3. The armed forces
        4. The Postal Service
        5. The extensive Veterans' Administration health system.
    2. Federal Employees: About 3 million civilians (2 million more in the military)
    3. State and Local bureaucrats--about 13 million
  5. The role of the government in a free market
    1. Establishes the rules/acts as umpire
    2. Respond to economic cycles
    3. Market failure
    4. Public goods and Public Services
      1. Monopolies
      2. Negative externalities
        1. Example: The EPA
        2. Response to market failure to control pollution
        3. Decisions that had to be made (applicable to all govt. intervention)
          1. Should the government intervene?
          2. At what level should the intervention take place?
          3. How much intervention should there be?
            1. "Zero-Risk"
            2. "Safe-Levels"
            3. Balancing
  6. The Bureaucracy in Action
    1. Agencies become governmental interest groups on their own behalf, working with lobbyists, Congressional staff, and pressure groups (Iron Triangles)
    2. Building alliances is part of the job of agency heads, who may choose to expend agency resources disproportionately on high-visibility services which create a favorable public image
    3. Agencies tend to resist outside change and are predisposed toward proposals which will increase agency size and scope.
  7. Bureaucratic Accuracy (Responsiveness), Accountability, and Reform
    1. Congress can compel agencies to interpret/apply law to its wishes
      1. Congress also enjoys the benefit of bureaucracy, which can be used to direct services and jobs to their constituents
      2. Moreover, Congress is often inclined to pass the buck of responsibility to agencies, giving them broad discretion for implementation, thereby freeing Congress to be able to criticize what they want later on
      3. Even "red tape" can help members of Congress since it channels constituents to seek help from and depend upon the help of Congressional offices
        1. Many of the 20,000 Congressional staffers play just this constituent service role
    2. Administrative Procedure Act of 1946
      1. Agencies publicize machinery/organization
      2. Allow hearings and witnesses on rule changes and adjudication.
    3. Courts may hear appeals on agency actions.
    4. GAO audits spending
    5. Informal checks on agencies
      1. Ethics
      2. Experts
      3. Attitudes of branches, parties, individuals.
    6. Political checks on bureaucracies.
      1. Presidents who hope to control the bureaucracy must make full use of their powers: appointment, reorganization, budgeting, and reassignment (made more possible by Carter's 1978 Senior Executive Service reform),
      2. Federal agency and bureau chiefs are responsible in principle to the president, but in reality the career bureaucracy can have a great inertia.
      3. The Office of Management (OMB), an executive branch agency, plays a key role, receiving agency budget requests and forming the annual budget of the president, usually the basis for Congressional action.
        1. In this way, the OMB can serve as a vehicle for forcing agencies to tow the presidential line if they want to get their budgets through the OMB
        2. Only rarely can an agency go over the head of the OMB to appeal directly to Congress for money.
        3. Overall, there is a consensus that all national bureaucracies have become more responsive to Congress and the public in recent decades and there is not much momentum behind reform ideas like term limits for bureaucrats or job rotation of career civil servants.
  8. Texas Bureaucracies
    1. Two basic reasons for the expanded scope of governments in the United States since World War II.
      1. It is only through the bureaucratic coordination of the action of large numbers of people that large-scale planning and coordination, both for the modern state and economy, become possible
      2. Developing complexity and sophistication of issues that must be addressed in providing legitimate governmental functions requires specialization and constant attention
    2. Additional reasons for the expanded scope of governments in Texas
      1. Governor has no formal Cabinet
      2. "Plural Executive" (Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Comptroller, Land Commissioner, Agriculture Commissioner, Railroad Commission, State Board of Education) disperses power
    3. Four measures Texas has taken to make its state bureaucracies accountable to the public. Do each of these measures make our bureaucracies more or less accurate, efficient and fair?
      1. State Ombudsman, an investigator handling citizens complaints against state agencies (1-800-252-9600)
      2. Sunset laws: State agencies must be reviewed every 12 years and recreated by the legislature or go out of business
      3. Performance reviews: Comptroller conducts reviews of state programs
      4. Revolving door restrictions: prohibit former board members and key employees of regulatory agencies from going to work for rregulated companies within a certain period after leaving state posts
    4. Three ways a state agency can increase its bureaucratic power in Texas.
      1. Preliminaries
        1. Legislature meets only 5 month every year, so decreased legislative oversight
        2. Governor has limited powers over executive branch
          1. Appointment (confirmed by Senate) and removal of members of 200 boards and commissions
          2. Cannot remove predecessor's appointees
          3. Most positions on boards and commissions are part-time and unpaid, rendering occupants dependent upon constituencies they are serving or regulating, veteran administrators, and career bureaucrats
          4. Budget authority
          5. Line Item Veto may be effective sometimes
      2. Interpret vague laws, often changing its purpose and expanding their power (subject of course to court interpretations and administrative rules)
      3. Constituencies may lobby to have new responsibilities assigned
      4. May bid on services performed by other agencies if they think they can do the work more efficiently
    5. Query: Do these methods make the agency more or less responsive to the needs of the state? Why?
  9. Bureaucracies and the Self
    1. Two aspects of self:
      1. The I as the active knower, the subject
      2. The Me, the passive contents, the object
    2. Three components of self:
      1. The physical self,
      2. The mental self,
      3. The spiritual self
    3. Self-esteem is a very useful variable in helping us to understand individual social behavior.
      1. Our self-esteem defines how we judge other people, how we communicate with them, whether we choose to lead or follow others, when we will help others, when we aggress against others, when we love others.
      2. Negative self-esteem creates a constellation of behaviors producing self-fulfilling prophecies
    4. Our conceptions of self are influenced by history and cultural context.
      1. We tend to evaluate ourselves in terms of the ideal self, the ought self, and the actual self as strongly influenced by our regional culture
        1. Individualistic cultures, describe themselves primarily in attributive terms.
        2. Traditional cultures describes themselves in status terms
      2. Context sometimes motivates us to get an accurate picture of the self (self-verification) and it sometimes motivates to get a positive picture of the self (self-enhancement).
      3. Self-schemas are "cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experience, that organize and guide the information processing of self related information contained in the individual's social experiences.
        1. Self-awareness is the process whereby we direct attention to the self as an object
        2. Self-consciousness is an individual difference variable which gauges our ability to become self-aware.