42 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
politics and administration represented a synthesis rather than two neatly separa-
ble portions of the public policy enterprise (Lynn 2001). Other prominent public
administration scholars argued during the fi rst half of the twentieth century that
administrative theory had to account for politics, both in recognition of bureau-
cracy’s real-world role and as a necessary element to building better explanatory
frameworks within the discipline.
Among the most prominent of these was John Gaus (1931). He observed that
federal agencies not only carried out clearly understood directives from Congress
but also independently shaped those directives and exercised discretionary poli-
cymaking authority while translating the vague intentions of statutes into specifi c
government actions. Bureaucracy obviously wields political power. Th is being
so, those who sought to understand public agencies could not simply carve off
administration from politics and leave the complexities of the latter to political
theorists. If bureaucracies were helping to determine the will of the state, they
were inescapably political institutions, and Gaus argued that administrative the-
ory ignored this fact at its peril. Most famously, in the fi nal sentence of an essay
in Public Administration Review, he threw down an implied gauntlet to those
who would fashion a theory of administration: “A theory of public administra-
tion means in our time a theory of politics also” (1950, 168). Gaus thus succinctly
summarized the purpose of theories of bureaucratic politics.
As the broader intellectual history of political theory makes clear, this is a dif-
fi cult objective, and for more than half a century students of public administra-
tion have had mixed success in meeting Gaus’s challenge. Th e issues raised here
are more complex than those at the heart of the theories of bureaucratic control.
Th e goal is not to locate the dividing line between politics and administration
because no such line exists, nor is it to ascertain how bureaucracies can be made
accountable to their democratic masters, although this is a question of some im-
portance to theories of bureaucratic politics. Questions of political power are the
central focus:
- To what extent do administrative processes, as opposed to democratic pro-
cesses, determine public policy? - Who controls or infl uences the exercise of bureaucratic power?
- What is the role of bureaucracy in representing and advancing the goals of
particular clientele groups or organized interests? - To what extent do elective institutions and elected offi cials seek to shape and
control administration as a means to advance their own political interests? - What is the source of bureaucratic power?
- How does the important political role of nonelected institutions based in
hierarchy and authority square with the fundamental values of democracy?
If anything has been learned by the eff orts expended on developing theories of
bureaucratic politics, it is that such questions have no easy answers.