ABSTRACT
Bureaucracy is the public organisation that implements decisions made by politicians and otherwise acts on behalf of the citizens living in a jurisdiction. It has been a feature of most societies, even in pre-modern times. As shown in Chapter 2, it is not enough for political systems to pass legislation, for laws need to be implementated effectively, which requires well-run bureaucracies. Even the levying of taxes requires organisations to collect the income and to chase up the non-compliers. Over time, bureaucracies have expanded in size and have extended their reach as states have become more powerful. As a result, the bureaucracies have come into contact with greater numbers of people who are influenced by what they do. Moreover, as politicians have sought to regulate more aspects of the economy and society, they have come to rely much more on bureaucracies to realise these ambitions. Politicians often think they can improve the delivery of their policies
by reforming the bureaucracy and introducing new systems of public management. They have good reason to direct their attention to these tasks. Surely bureaucrats and the organisations they inhabit are there to ensure decisions taken by politicians are followed? An efficient and responsive administration should ensure better implementation of political decisions. Getting the delivery chain in working order would seem to be an essential prerequisite for an effective policy. A well-run bureaucracy may have positive side effects given the extensive interaction between the state and the citizens. A high-quality bureaucracy could foster virtuous circles of rising trust in government and better cooperation between citizens and the state, which could then feed into improved policy outcomes. The secret to the effective use of the bureaucracy tool is the management of
organisational capacity, which is how bureaucracies are structured and coordinated so as to work effectively. Bureaucracies can, if properly organised, drive public action through the coordination of procedures and commands to a pre-identified end. This result does not always happen, which means governments lose out on one of the key levers of public action, often in ways that limit the application of the other tools of government. In contrast with law/regulation and finance/taxation, bureaucracy is one
step removed from the policy outcome. It relies on a chain of command
within the state or public organisation and then the belief those commands influence the world outside the bureaucracy rather than the citizens and organisations obeying a law or being incentivised by a change in income. If there are many steps between the decisions of politicians in office and what happens on the ground, then achieving a desired change will be more difficult than more direct means of reaching citizens and organisations (though in practice all the tools rely on many steps being in place). In spite of the potential abstraction of this method, policy-makers feel they
have some control over it. It is within the domain of the state, which is what they are elected to steer. In general, politicians in office have extensive discretion about how the bureaucracy works and can carry out reform programmes and reorganisations without feeling they are treading on the toes of the organisations of civil society or intruding into the domains of private individuals, though this autonomy varies according to the country in question. Politicians often seek to change the terms and conditions of public employees, the structure of departments, the extent of hierarchy, the remuneration system, the extent of contracting out to the private sector and the external regulation of the bureaucracy, which may affect the extent to which it responds to commands, and the degree of innovation and creativity bureaucrats apply to their tasks. With this array of mechanisms and choices, it is hard to know what the exact levers within that work best even if the bureaucracy is energised and is given much greater capacity. Is it efficiency in the use of resources or the application of expert knowledge or the influence of the personal values and motivations of bureaucrats? Or is it the energy of entrepreneurial administrators or the bureaucracy acting in ways that connect well with citizens? In particular, does following hierarchy lead to better performance or is it about allowing the bureaucracy to innovate and to compete? As with many ideas for achieving better policy outcomes, once the causal connections come under more scrutiny, it is hard to know what it is about the bureaucracy that improves policy performance. The key problem with the use and reform of the bureaucracy is that
bureaucrats are largely in control. Politicians, in spite of their ownership of the bureaucracy, need to hand over many decisions to a group that has its own interests and values. Bureaucrats tend to prefer standard ways of doing business as an automatic reflex action. Bureaucratic organisations are very difficult to direct and steer because their cultures are strong. Bureaucrats tend to resist change. Moreover, they can limit the extent to which politicians are able to use and reform the bureaucracy by their control of information about how it works. This is a version of the principal-agent problem: the principal (the politician) in command cannot fully exercise their power over the agent (bureaucrat) because of the information asymmetry between the two (see Moe, 1984). Partly because politicians fear lack of control and want more out of
public services, public bureaucracies are often subject to continual reform. In recent years, these measures have been grouped under the term the new
public management. This doctrine – and the associated set of practices – seeks to promote more efficiency and a leaner, fitter bureaucracy. It aims to reduce hierarchy, disaggregate bureaucracies and promote more competition in the public sector by contracting out services to the private companies, allowing units within the bureaucracy to compete with each other and giving more choice to the citizen-consumer. The new public management aims to create incentives based on appeals to private interest, such as with performance measurement and performance-related pay. These may operate either in competition or alongside the more traditional forms of control through the hierarchy and appeals to the public service motivation of the bureaucrats. Public management reform is fraught with problems and it may not achieve
its objectives. Failure can occur because the changes need to be implemented and accepted by bureaucrats themselves, which runs the risk the problems the reforms are designed to remedy will be perpetuated because the very people who are the cause of the problem are charged with finding the solution. Bureaucrats do not see the problem of policy implementation from the perspective of the outsider or the commissioner of policy, but from the viewpoint of the technocrat interested in how the machinery works and how it affects their conditions of work (Gains and John, 2010). The result is a self-reinforcing cycle of attempts at reform that result in failure or only partial success. Strong organisational cultures shape how reform is implemented and there is a tendency for the bureaucracies to retain past practices and ways of doing things. Assessing whether the ambitions of the reformers have been realised is a later task of this chapter, in a section on the new public management. But first the chapter discusses how classic or unreformed bureaucracies are supposed to get the job done.
