Politics, Power, and Organization 51
how power is distributed among various actors within the political system and in
explaining how bureaucracies infl uence policymaking.
Th ere are two key organizational dimensions to bureaucratic politics theory.
Th e fi rst deals with behavior. Th e primary goal here is to explain why bureaucrats
and bureaucracies do what they do. Th e general presumption is that bureaucra-
cies pursue important public missions and make numerous policy decisions, yet
have only vague guidance from statutes. If legislatures, the institutions formally
responsible for the goals of public agencies, only partially account for what bu-
reaucracies do and why they do it, what explains the rest? Th e second deals with
institutional structure and the distribution of power. Th e primary goal here is
to understand how a bureaucracy’s formal lines of authority, its relationship to
other institutions, and the programs and policies placed within its jurisdiction all
combine to determine the relative political infl uence of a broad range of political
actors.
Explanations for the political behavior of bureaucracy and bureaucrats have
deep roots in the organization theory literature. For example, Robert K. Merton
(1957) argued that institutions structured as classic bureaucracies shape the per-
sonalities of the people who work for them. A bureaucratic environment, Merton
argued, pressures people to conform to expected patterns of behavior—to follow
rules, to be methodical and detailed. Given these pressures, bureaucracies will
oft en substitute rules for ends, and they will adhere to SOPs even when those pro-
cedures clearly interfere with the organization’s main mission. William Whyte
Jr. echoed a similar theme in his work Th e Organization Man (1956). Whyte’s
research detailed the willingness of managers in US corporations to adopt the
goals of the organizations they worked for as their own, to subsume their per-
sonalities into the larger organizational environment of their employment. Sim-
ilar arguments about the pathologies of bureaucratic behavior have resurfaced
more recently in such infl uential works as David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s
Reinventing Government (1992). Here the argument is that conscious eff ort is
needed to break away from the predilection to see rules as ends, and instead shift
to an outcomes-oriented entrepreneurial bureaucracy.
If organizational structure shapes the behavior of particular institutions and
the individuals within them, this has broad implications for those seeking to ex-
plain the policymaking role of bureaucracy. If bureaucrats make decisions that
authoritatively allocate values, and organizational environment helps determine
how those decisions are made, then organizational theory holds the potential to
explain a good deal of how and why bureaucracy fulfi lls its political role.
One of the key contributions of organizational behavior scholarship to bureau-
cratic politics theory is James Q. Wilson’s classic, Bureaucracy: What Government
Agencies Do and Why Th ey Do It (1989). Wilson posed a similar question to Alli-
son, though it was more focused toward administrative matters. Instead of asking
why governments do what they do, Wilson asked why bureaucracies do what they
do. Wilson argued that bureaucrats have discretion in their decisionmaking, and