54 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
behave but also how power and infl uence are distributed among the various ac-
tors in the political system.
Government organization, or, more accurately, reorganization, is a subject
near and dear to the discipline of public administration and a perennial feature of
American politics. For virtually the length of the twentieth century, and continu-
ing into the twenty-fi rst, critics have argued that the central problem of govern-
ment is poor management. In other words, the basic problem with government
is administrative: It is ineff ectively organized and ineffi ciently run. Th e orthodox
response of public administration scholarship to this problem is to impose the
politics-administration dichotomy, and on the administrative side, to organize
government agencies by functional responsibility, put them into a logical hierar-
chy with one another, and clearly assign authority and responsibility within these
hierarchies. In various guises through various administrations, such eff orts were
repeatedly made long aft er Waldo, Gaus, and others had pointed out that the con-
ceptual foundation that supported such eff orts was untenable. All these eff orts at
reorganization largely failed to meet their objectives when they ran into political
diffi culties.
In recent decades, the orthodox solutions have increasingly been abandoned
for a “new” organizational paradigm that seeks to bring economy and effi ciency to
government by adopting market-oriented management practices. Th e “reinven-
tion” movement of the Clinton administration, for example, sought to eliminate
hierarchy, to put “customers” fi rst, and to prize performance over accountabil-
ity. Yet the reinvention movement also ran into political obstacles. Regardless of
whether it is an orthodox call for centralization and reliance on the competence
of the technocrat or a less traditional appeal for decentralization and reliance on
market-based processes, the purported objective is the same: to improve the ef-
fectiveness and effi ciency of government through reorganization.
Students of the organizational connections to bureaucratic politics argue that
the reason government reorganization is never far from the public agenda, and
the reason it never achieves its supposed goals, is because the organization of
the government’s administrative arm has little to do with economy or effi ciency.
Organization of the government’s administrative arm is about power and politics.
One of the most astute proponents of this argument is Harold Seidman, whose
Politics, Position, and Power: Th e Dynamics of Federal Organization was immedi-
ately recognized as a landmark in the study of bureaucratic politics when it was
fi rst published in 1970 (it has since gone through several editions). Seidman’s
central argument was this: Th e institutional location and environment of a policy
or program and the organizational structure, process, and procedures that govern
it help determine the distribution of power and infl uence within the polity. Th is
includes the distribution of power among executive branch bureaucracies, but
also encompasses the balance of power among the three branches of the federal
government, between the federal government and state and local governments,
and between the government and organized interest groups. As Allison, Richard