Bureaucracy and Democracy
B. Guy Peters Jon Pierre
University of Pittsburgh University of Gothenberg
Bureaucracy and democracy are often considered antithetical properties of political systems. There is a large scholarly and popular literature arguing that bureaucracies are major problems limiting the capacity of democratic political systems to effectively respond to their citizens. In this panel we will be pursuing the contrary argument that the public bureaucracy may be becoming the locus for democratic responsiveness in many political systems.
The importance for bureaucracy for democracy in contemporary political systems arises in part from the weaknesses of more conventional institutions of democracy. For example, participation in elections has been falling rapidly in most democratic systems, and membership in political parties in also declining. Parliaments have for some time been argued to be losing power to the executive, and within the executive the collegiality of cabinet is eroding in favor of greater powers for the prime minister. Thus, the usual instrumentalities of political democracy are, if not failing, certainly weakened.
There is a more positive case to be made for the linkage of bureaucracy and democracy. First, public bureaucracies are major actors in making and implementing policy and therefore accountability has always been a crucial form of democracy, but it becomes even more crucial when other aspects of democracy are weakened. Further, the majority of contacts between the State and society occur through the public bureaucracy, and these contacts are important for political inputs as well as simply for administration of programs. This importance is especially evident given the development of a range of networked forms of governing within particular policy areas. Programs such as "citizen engagement" and e-government often are largely directed at, and managed by, the public bureaucracy, and provide opportunities for citizens to have more immediate and personalized redress of grievances against government than would traditional forms of accountability. Further, deliberative democracy may be more possible vis-a-vis bureaucracies than with the manifestly political components of government, given that this form of decision-making would not be seen as challenging conventional forms of representation.
Although we have made a case for some democratic elements in contemporary public administration, we also need to think carefully about the type of democracy that these contacts between state and society would produce. It would be a localized and sectorially-defined form of democracy, and might be even more skewed toward the affluent, organized and articulate than are conventional forms of democracy.
This proposed panel would investigate these issues in a variety of political and cultural settings coming from Europe, North America and Asia. The panel should advance our understanding of the nature of contemporary public administration, as well as contemporary democracy.