ABSTRACT
The place of bureaucracy within a democratic political order is one of the most important issues in public administration. Most textbooks in the field contain at least one chapter that seeks to inform readers about the linkage between the administrative process and democratic governance, and most scholars who delve into normative assessment of public bureaucracy (and many do, either explicitly or implicitly) seek to connect it, in varying ways, to some conception of democracy. Yet discussion of the relationship between bureaucracy and democracy has been fraught with conceptual difficulty and has lacked consensus. As Dennis Thompson has observed, the tension seems to stem from their respective conceptual cores: “Many of the values we associate with democracy—equality, participation and individuality—stand sharply opposed to the hierarchy, specialization and impersonality we ascribe to bureaucracy” (Thompson, 1983: 235).
