Third World. Even egalitarian ideology is no match for the bureaucrat’s
drive for prestige and status.
Employment in the national government also offers the tempting possibil-
ity of secondment to an international bureaucracy of a UN agency such as the
FAO, UNDP or WHO, with the World Bank, the IMF or even a regional
organization such as the OAS or the ECLA. The universal values that are dis-
seminated through such movements and contacts further enhance the élite
status of bureaucrats in their own countries. This may lead to a bureaucracy
which performs a kind of hegemonic role disseminating an ideology and a
particular view of the state and its role in development. In the functionalist
literature this has been especially identified as aimed at national integration
through the enunciation of universalistic, Westernised and modern values.
Bureaucrats were identified as pulling countries along the path to progress.
They not only influence the policy choices of governments but also the way
people outside government perceive the role of the state in development.
A fourth factor was alluded to in the earlier discussion of the post-colonial
state. This is the relativepower of the bureaucracy as a political institution
vis-à-visothers (Wallis, 1989, pp. 24–30). This perception is common to
both Marxist and functionalist political science. The functionalist position
was first put most persuasively by Riggs (1963). A very similar line of argu-
ment appears in Alavi’s neo-Marxist analysis of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Both schools of thought emphasize that one colonial legacy was the retarded
development of political institutions that might have held the bureaucracy
accountable. Colonialism developed bureaucracies at the expense of other
institutions. It was more interested in the power of officials in relation to
society than in the power of representative assemblies, political parties, pres-
sure groups and other organizations representative of different sections of
society and expected to evolve into institutions capable of controlling the
bureaucratic apparatus of the state.
Colonialism left behind a well-organized bureaucracy which new govern-
ments had to staff with their own people, often in the context of a great short-
age of qualified indigenous manpower. Crash programmes of training were
launched to produce people capable of replacing the expatriates who were not
invited to stay on and assist the newly independent governments to function.
New states thus inherited bureaucracies that were prestigious, well organized
and with a strong sense of corporate identity, and other political institutions
lacking the same power and legitimacy. As party organizations became
stronger, this situation changed. As mass parties threw up leaders not depend-
ent upon the bureaucracy but on mass support at elections, and the longer that
parliamentary institutions had to establish themselves, the stronger techniques
Bureaucracy and Political Power 161