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3

Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics

Introduction: What Are Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics?

Th eories of bureaucratic politics seek to explain the policymaking role of ad-
ministration 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. Specifi cally, the price of making theory more tracta-
ble 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 bureaucracies and bureaucrats routinely engage in political behavior,
the need to account theoretically for the bureaucracy’s political role is justifi ed.
Politics is generically defi ned as the authoritative allocation of values, or the pro-
cess of deciding “who gets what, when and how” (Easton 1965; Lasswell 1936).
Numerous studies confi rm that bureaucracies and bureaucrats routinely allocate
values and decide who gets what, that bureaucracies logically engage in “politics
of the fi rst order” (Meier 1993, 7). Th eories of bureaucratic politics therefore be-
gin by accepting what has long been empirically observed; that is, in practice, ad-
ministration is not a technical and value-neutral activity separable from politics.
Administration is politics (Waldo 1948).
Accordingly, theories of bureaucratic politics seek to breach the orthodox di-
vide between administration and politics and attempt to drag the former into a
systematic accounting with the latter. Th at traditional theoretical frameworks ac-
count 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. Woodrow Wilson and Frank
Goodnow, who both wrote at a time when public bureaucracies were ripe with
patronage, incompetence, and even outright corruption, were well aware that