Representative Bureaucracy 59
business vastly outnumber employees in the federal civil service, and reinvention
shrank these numbers not at all. If anything, the cuts in the federal payroll made it
much more diffi cult to hold third-party contractors accountable (Seidman 1998,
112–113).
Neither Wilson’s nor Seidman’s arguments constitute fully developed theo-
retical frameworks, and Wilson (1989, xi) explicitly raised doubts about whether
a comprehensive theory of organizational behavior was even possible. Yet Wil-
son and Seidman both provide a series of empirically testable propositions that
are characteristic of theoretical frameworks. From Wilson comes a rich set of
hypotheses, which can be confi rmed by observing bureaucratic behavior, about
everything from professional norms to the substitution of rules for goals. Seid-
man’s work points analysts toward the high political stakes surrounding organi-
zation and administration, and, in doing so, makes sense of the “eccentricities”
that defi ed the expectations of traditional theoretical frameworks. Combined,
both make it easier to understand why bureaucracies are the way they are, and
why they do the things they do.
Although Seidman’s work and Wilson’s work are discursive rather than the-
oretical, more explicitly theoretical eff orts from organization literature seek to
explain at least some elements of the political behavior bureaucracies indulge in.
John Kingdon’s Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (1995), for example, at-
tempts to explain why government addresses some problems while ignoring oth-
ers. Kingdon’s analysis shows that government agencies have an important role
in shaping the public agenda, not so much in determining agenda priorities but
in acting as key members of “policy communities.” Th ese communities consist of
actors who, through their specialized interests in particular policies and the den-
sity of their interconnections and common interests, can decide the fate of policy
proposals. A fragmented community (for example, one in which agencies have
confl icting goals on a particular issue) dissipates support for a policy proposal
and severely limits its potential for success (Kingdon, 1995, 116–144). Although
organizational context is shown here to play an important role in shaping the po-
litical role of bureaucracy, that role is not the primary focus of the theory.
Th e bottom line is that organization theory has provided an important lens for
such works as Wilson’s and Seidman’s, signaled the importance of the growing
phenomenon of networked administration, and in doing so has given ample jus-
tifi cation for pursuing comprehensive explanations of the political role of bureau-
cracy. As yet, however, organization theory has not provided that comprehensive
explanation.
Representative Bureaucracy
Th e theory of representative bureaucracy is perhaps the most explicit attempt to
address the central problem of democratic administrative theory raised by Waldo
(1952, 102): How can a theory that embraces the hierarchical and authoritarian