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Public Organiz Rev (2010) 10:209222
DOI 10.1007/s11115-010-0133-4
B. Guy Peters
Published online: 5 August 2010# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract The public bureaucracy is becoming an increasingly important locus for democratic activity. This shift of democratic activity is in part a function of the declining relevance of traditional forms of democracy, and changes within the public bureaucracy itself. In particular, the emphasis on performance and the links with output legitimation have led to greater participation through the bureaucracy.
Keywords Bureaucracy. Democracy participation
Introduction
The terms bureaucracy and democracy are usually thought of, both in the academic and the popular literature, as antithetical approaches to providing governance for a society (see Etzioni-Halevey 1983). On the one hand public bureaucracies are typically conceptualized as necessary for the effective administration of public programs, but as being legalistic and largely indifferent to the wishes and demands of individual citizens.1 Bureaucracies also tend to be associated with hierarchical and even authoritarian forms of governing, even though at least part of the logic for institutionalizing the bureaucratic form of governing was to ensure equal treatment of citizens, and to provide clients with records and justifications for the decisions being made about them within the public sector.2
On the other hand, democratic institutions are assumed to be responsive to the wishes of the public, and to be attempting to map those public preferences into positive outcomes for their citizens. Richard Rose (1974) and others have pointed out that the linkage between voting and policy choices in conventional representative democracy is not as clear as most democrats might like to believe.
1These views are, of course, stereotypes and do not reflect the real nature of many or even most public bureaucracies (see Goodsell 2004; Du Gay 2000).
2Webers model of bureaucracy, for example, attempted to ensure equality of treatment as well as greater transparency in the public sector.
B. G. Peters (*)
Political Science Department, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Bureaucracy and Democracy
210 B.G. Peters
Further, the public may vote for inconsistent goals, or have unrealistic expectations that will require leaderselected and bureaucratic to make policy decisions on their own (Caplan 2007). Further, in coalition governments the linkage between votes and final policy decisions is at...