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Theories of Political control of bureaucracy

1. What is the theory of bureaucratic politics?
Answer: Control of bureaucracy theory is an approach to public administration theory
particularly associated with matters of compliance or responsiveness. Control of bureaucracy
theorists accept some form of the politics administration. Sometimes the dichotomy is
described and accepted explicitly; other times it is simply assumed. Indeed the logic of political
control of bureaucracy theory is difficult, if not impossible, without assuming significant
distinction between political and administrative phenomena in democratic government.
The bureaucratic politics approach argues that policy outcomes result from a game of
bargaining among a small, highly placed group of governmental actors. These actors come to
the game with varying preferences, abilities, and positions of power. Participants choose
strategies and policy goals based on different ideas of what outcomes will best serve their
organizational and personal interests. Bargaining then proceeds through a pluralist process of
give-and-take that reflects the prevailing rules of the game as well as power relations among
the participants. Because this process is neither dominated by one individual nor likely to
privilege expert or rational decisions, it may result in suboptimal outcomes that fail to fulfill the
objectives of any of the individual participants.
Most discussions of bureaucratic politics begin with Graham T. Allison’s 1969 article in The
American Political Science Review, “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” although
this work built on earlier writings by Charles Lindblom, Richard Neustadt, Samuel Huntington,
and others. Allison provides an analysis of the Cuban missile crisis that contrasts bureaucratic
politics bargaining with two other models of policy making. The first of these assumes that
policy decisions are made by a unitary, rational decision maker, represented by “the state” in
many formulations. Thus, bureaucratic politics is often offered as a counterpoint to realist or
rationalist conceptions of policy decision making. The second alternative approach describes
policies as guided by, even resulting from, previously established bureaucratic procedures,
which leaves little room for autonomous action by high-level decision makers. Compared with
these and other alternative conceptions of policy making, the bureaucratic politics model
represents a significant and distinctive strain of organization- and state-level theory
in international relations, organization theory, public policy, and American politics.
A main goal of Allison’s initial analysis was to show that the assumption, common among
practitioners of foreign policy, that governments act as rational, unitary actors is fundamentally
flawed. To understand the actions of a state indeed, of any large, complex organization one
must understand the rules governing its decision-making processes and the motivations of
actors participating therein. The result of such a process may well indicate a compromise point
without any clear internal strategic logic and may even reflect the unintended consequence of a
dynamic tug-of-war among actors. Thus, it may be very difficult to interpret the intentions that
underlie the seemingly strategic behavior of complex organizations, making interactions with
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these bodies less predictable and, in some spheres, such as international conflict, consequently
more dangerous.
Though the bureaucratic politics model has been used to describe decision making in many
different contexts, it is most commonly applied to national policy making in the United States
and particularly to U.S. foreign policy. This focus has meant that the theory remains
underdeveloped in many policy areas, and the traditional pluralistic view of bureaucratic
politics has been challenged by critics who claim alternative paths to policy making. With
regards to the implications of the bureaucratic politics model for government accountability: if
government decisions cannot be traced to individual policy makers but rather result from
an opaque process of give-and-take among both elected and unelected leaders, assigning
responsibility and therefore accountability for these activities becomes far more difficult
In conclusion, the Bureaucratic Politics Approach is a subjective approach and the personal
skills, views, judgments and beliefs of policymakers (and their clashes of personalities) do
matter, but what should be taken into consideration is that these personal characteristics are
made within a structure (bureaucracy).

2. What are the main tenets or assumption of the theory?

Perhaps the most-abiding concept from the bureaucratic politics model, and the shorthand
many have used to define it, is that actors will pursue policies that benefit the organizations
they represent rather than national or collective interests. This idea, that “where you stand
depends on where you sit,” is often called Miles’s law after the For these theorists, three key
questions guide one’s understanding of the policy-making game: (1) Who are the actors? (2)
What factors influence each actor’s position? and (3) How do actors’ positions come together
to generate governmental policies?
Firstly, in treating the President as one of the main chiefs, who was slightly more powerful than
the other bureaucratic chiefs, the Bureaucratic Politics Approach has underestimated the
power of the President. The President dominates policy through his authority to select and
control both officials and decision-making style. He has the power to sideline an entire
bureaucracy. Thus the ‘President’s style—his level of attention and involvement—is the most
critical factor in determining the decision-making structure’. To make matters more
complicated, if there is central authority from the top (the President), ‘then how much of a
difference do the mechanics [pulling, hauling, and bargaining] make? Robert J. Art is of the
opinion that bringing in presidential perspectives (authorities) can make one dubious of the
resultant aspects of the Bureaucratic Politics Approach.
Secondly, the Bureaucratic Politics Approach gives little influence to the role of low-level
officials and structures; both can influence policymaking through the control of information and
implementation, particularly those decisions in which presidential involvement and
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organizational involvement are low – that is, when the heads of democracies are less attentive,
low-level officials can play a crucial part.
Thirdly, Jerel A. Rosati implicitly criticizes\ the Bureaucratic Politics Approach for giving little
attention to the decision ‘context’, as context ‘not only determines, in part, who will participate
in a decision, and thus, whose images count, but also affects the selection and formulation of
images’. Rosati continues to claim that the views (belief system and images) of policymakers
have a direct impact on the resultants, since they influence the way the decision-making
process is set out. He proposes that both context and belief system should be made integral
parts of the Bureaucratic Politics Approach.
Fourthly, the Bureaucratic Politics Approach is also criticized for ignoring the impact of other
nations’ actions on the US in order to explain US reactions. Robert J. Art argued that ‘we need
the systematic perspective in order to avoid the opposite dangers that an uncritical acceptance
of the paradigm would bring—looking for things that are not there and seeing things that we
should overlook’.
Fifthly, the Bureaucratic Politics Approach overlooks the role the legislative branch and other
external institutions can play in decision-making. Allison failed to take into account the role of
Congress and numerous other actors in the original (1971) bureaucratic politics case study of
the Cuban missile crisis. Instead, as was widely argued, the Approach’s main focus was on the
premise of ‘where you stand depends on where you sit’. The criticism assumed that the
Bureaucratic Politics Approach treated the premise as ‘Miles’ law’ (must do). The premise was
criticized for its ‘narrow view of preference formation, as it implied that the players followed
those policies that benefited the bureaucracies they represented rather
than collective interests.
Finally, since the Bureaucratic Politics Approach has most often applied to studies of crisis
decision-making, its usefulness for explaining ordinary decision-making is argued to be
questionable. Like any other approach or theory, the Bureaucratic Politics Approach has not escaped
criticism. However, the Bureaucratic Politics Approach remains an important model of the subfield of
Foreign Policy Analysis. It has been widely used, including by the author of this essay, to understand and
explain foreign policy decisions.

Theories in Bureaucratic Politics

1. What is theory of bureaucratic Politics?
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.

Specifically, the price of making theory more tractable by separating administration from politics is held
to be a willful ignorance of the central role of bureaucracy within the polity’s power structure. Since
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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”. Numerous studies
confirm that bureaucracies and bureaucrats routinely allocate values and decide who gets what, that
bureaucracies logically engage in “politics of the first order”. Theories of bureaucratic politics therefore
begin by accepting what has long been empirically observed; that is, in practice, administration is not a
technical and value-neutral activity separable from politics. Administration is politics.

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. That traditional
theoretical frameworks account poorly for bureaucracy’s obvious and repeatedly observed political role
has long been recognized. Even scholars traditionally credited with describing and supporting the
politics-administration divide were well aware of the political role the bureaucracy plays, and the rigidity
of the division accepted as their legacy has been described as a caricature of their arguments. Other
prominent public administration scholars argued during the first half of the twentieth century that
administrative theory had to account for politics, both in recognition of bureaucracy’s real-world role
and as a necessary element to building better explanatory frameworks within the discipline.

To conclude, Theories of bureaucratic politics made critical contributions to the development of

public administration through analysis of its policymaking functions, including policy analysis,
decision-making, and multiple other functions of public agencies. The origin of bureaucratic
politics can be traced to the 1940s. At that time, the field of public administration was
dominated by the scientific management movement and advocates of the politics–
administration dichotomy. World War II became a transformative event for public
administration. Specifically, it was responsible for multiplying government functions, increasing
complexity of political and administrative.
2. What are the main tenets or assumptions of the theory
Bureaucratic politics: a set of theories originating in the fields of public administration, foreign
policy analysis, and domestic public policy that focus on the policymaking role of public
administrators and bureaucrats.
The bureaucratic politics approach seeks to understand public policy as the result of decision-
making processes, characterized by conflict, bargaining, and compromise, inside and between
government organizations. A core assumption is that government organizations pursue distinct
interests, including the preservation of their unique sphere of authority (“turf”) as well as the
pursuit of distinct views on policy problems and solutions. Hence, while appearing as unitary
actors with consistent preferences from the outside, the bureaucratic politics approach
suggests that decisions of national governments, supranational organizations, such as the
European Commission, and other bodies, such as regulatory and executive agencies, should be
better understood as the result of political processes involving multiple organizations and
organizational units. The bureaucratic politics perspective therefore partly overlaps with the
literature on coordination inside and between government organizations, which for instance
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highlights the importance of “organizational silos” as impediments to successful coordination.

The paper introduces classic contributions to this literature (as well as more recent theorizing),
focusing on the political nature of public organizations, including reputation management and
blame avoidance. The paper also elaborates on different types of decisions –
reforms/institutional choice vs. regular policy-making – and the relevance of the bureaucratic
politics approach for analyzing such decisions.
Bureaucratic politics theories or explanations of why particular public policy decisions got made
the way they did stress the motivation by the relevant officials in the
government bureaucracy to protect or promote their own agency's special interests (in
competition with other agencies) as a major motivating factor in shaping the timing and the
content of government decisions. Each bureau (or other governmental sub-division) continually
strives to maximize its budget and its authorized manpower, as well as to protect or extend its
operating autonomy and discretion in decision-making in the area of its assigned
responsibilities. Often this can be most readily accomplished by lobbying for an expansion of
the scope of the bureau's responsibilities that are prescribed by Congress or the legislature.
Because bureaucratic agencies are in competition with each other for budget shares and for
personnel allocations as well as for gaining responsibility for juicy new programs justifying
expansion, the policies and policy recommendations generated in the executive branch of the
government and passed on to both the chief executive and the legislative authorities are often
better understood as the by-product of bureaucratic turf-battles and expedient compromises
between bureaucratic chieftains than as the product of reasoned analysis of how most
effectively and efficiently to carry out the policy commitments of the elected chief executive or
to serve the public interest.

Public Institutional Theory

1. What is Public Institutional Theory
Institutional theory is a research tradition that traces its origins back to foundational articles that
discussed how organizational founding and change were driven less by functional considerations and
more by symbolic actions and external influences than the theory at the time assumed (Meyer and
Rowan, 1977). These articles drew on concepts of bounded rationality that are central to behavioral
theories and sketched a broad range of potential research questions, but much subsequent research
drew away from the firm focus on behavioral theories of organization by emphasizing environmental
influences such as the diffusion of new institutionalized practices among firms.

As institutional theory has grown, some branches have moved closer to behavioral theory. Direct
dialogue between the perspectives has been started by researchers who have noted that the
organizational change processes examined by behavioral theory are influenced by the institutional
context (Wezel and Saka-Helmhout, 2006). A growing subfield of institutional theory concerns
institutional logics, which are broadly (but not universally) shared assumptions and action patterns
(Thornton, 1995). At the organization level, institutional logics can be seen as sources of managerial
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decision-making rules, and hence institutional logics research is related to research on the BTOF and
evolutionary theory.

Institutional theory has also moved into examining the founding conditions for new firms (Tolbert et al.,
2011). This work questions the conventional assumption that entrepreneurs are rationally able to locate
opportunities, and it instead posits that key sources of organization founding activities are institutional
features of the social group to which entrepreneurs belong or the symbolic environment they face. Like
population ecology, this work moves the concerns for decision-making processes and bounded
rationality to the stage of organizational founding.

2. What are the main tenets or assumptions of the theory

Institutional theory examines the processes and mechanisms by which structures, schemas, rules, and
routines become established as authoritative guidelines for social behavior. It asks how such systems
come into existence, how they diffuse, and what role they play in supplying stability and meaning to
social behavior. It also considers how such arrangements deteriorate and collapse, and how their
remnants shape successor structures.

One of the dominant theoretical perspectives at the end of the nineteenth century, institutional theory
was eclipsed by other approaches during the first half of the twentieth century. In recent decades,
however, institutional theory has experienced a remarkable recovery, entering the new century as one
of the most vigorous and broad-based theoretical perspectives in the social sciences.

Institutional theory is not a single, unified system .