52 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
that a complex set of factors determine how that discretion is exercised: “When
bureaucrats are free to choose a course of action their choices will refl ect the full
array of incentives operating on them: some will refl ect the need to manage a
workload; others will refl ect the expectations of workplace peers and professional
colleagues elsewhere; still others may refl ect their own convictions. And some will
refl ect the needs of clients” (1989, 88). Before Wilson’s contribution, numerous
scholars had argued that discretion in decisionmaking, in eff ect, made bureau-
crats into policymakers, and bureaucracies into political actors. Wilson’s work
provided a richly detailed study of how and why this discretion was exercised to
produce government action.
Wilson took a disparate set of examples to develop his argument (he started
with the German army of World War II, prison systems in Michigan and Texas,
and a public school in Atlanta). Some of the agencies were successful, some of
them were not, and the performance of some bureaucracies went from good
to bad, or vice versa. Wilson sought to explain what separated the successful
agencies from the not so successful, and to understand variation in bureau-
cratic performance. In pursuit of this objective, he covered so much intellectual
territory that it is diffi cult to provide a meaningful synopsis of the entire work.
Key elements in his analysis, however, should convey some sense of the main
arguments.
Wilson began with the presumption that the behavior of bureaucrats and
bureaucracies was purposive; that is, it was motivated by some goal or objec-
tive. He rejected the argument that the goals driving bureaucratic behavior were
wholly, or even largely, determined by legislatures. Wilson noted that bureau-
cratic missions encapsulated in law tend to be vague (the goal of the Department
of State, for example, is to “promote the long-range security and well-being of
the nation”). Fuzzy exhortations to “do the right thing” are politically appealing,
but they provide no hint of the specifi c actions a bureaucracy is expected to un-
dertake. In Wilson’s terms, these goals do not defi ne “operator tasks,” meaning
they do not tell the frontline workers of a bureaucracy what they should be do-
ing. Th ese workers, whom Wilson termed the “operators,” are those whose work
actually justifi es the existence of a given organization—for example, teachers in a
school, patrol offi cers in a law enforcement agency, or soldiers in an army (1989,
33–34).
Because goals are vague (or even contradictory), bureaucracies cannot sim-
ply deploy their expertise to determine the best way of achieving the ends of
policy. Something other than the product of the “politics” end of the politics-
administration dichotomy must drive the behavior of bureaucrats and bureau-
cracies. What is it? What determines the behavior of the cop on the beat, the
teacher in the classroom, the private on the front lines? Wilson proposed several
potential answers: situational imperatives (the day-to-day events operators must
respond to), peer expectations, professional values, and ideology. He also argued
that rules could substitute for goals. When goals are vague, following established