Representative Bureaucracy 61
More contemporary advocates of representative bureaucracy reject patronage
or spoils systems as an appropriate model for a representative bureaucracy for
exactly these reasons. Instead, most accept the need for organizational arrange-
ments as prescribed by administrative orthodoxy, namely, public agencies based
on the Weberian rational-legal bureaucracy (Selden 1997). In contrast to the spoils
system, the latter is seen as conferring various benefi ts, among them effi ciency,
making merit the basis of public-sector employment, and strengthening the role
of technical expertise in decisionmaking (Meier 1993). Although this means ac-
cepting arguments from orthodox administrative theory, advocates of represen-
tative bureaucracy reject the notion of a politics-administration dichotomy. Th e
theoretical and empirical lessons from the likes of Gaus, Waldo, Allison, Seidman,
Wilson, and numerous others simply make it impossible to ignore or assume away
the political role of the bureaucracy.
Th e theory of representative bureaucracy thus begins with the assumption
that there are good reasons for public agencies to be organized the way they are
(i.e., undemocratically) and that these undemocratic agencies exercise consid-
erable political power. As Kenneth Meier puts it, “Th e theory of representative
bureaucracy begins by recognizing the realities of politics. In a complex polity,
such as the United States, not all aspects of policy decisions are resolved in the
‘political’ branches of government” (1975, 527). Th e basis of bureaucratic power
is assumed to derive from the discretionary decisionmaking authority that, as a
practical matter, has to be granted to them because not all implementation and
enforcement scenarios can be conceived of and accounted for in statutes. Elected
offi cials may have numerous tools at their disposal to restrict bureaucratic power,
but strong forces place practical limits on the use of these tools. Public support of
programs or agency objectives, the information advantage bureaucrats oft en hold
over elected offi cials because of their technical expertise, and simple political ex-
pediency all work to limit the constraints placed on bureaucratic power.
Perhaps the best-known argument that individual bureaucrats have an un-
avoidable policymaking role is Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy: Di-
lemmas of the Individual in Public Services (1980). Lipsky’s central premise is
that street-level bureaucrats—policemen, teachers, and the like—routinely have
to make decisions that are not dictated by the mission of the organizations they
work for, or the rules they are supposed to enforce. Street-level bureaucrats thus
make policy as a result of their behavior. For example, no matter what the law
says the speed limit is, in practice it is determined by the individual traffi c cop.
Th e discretion to make such on-the-spot decisions, which in eff ect are policy de-
cisions, is going to be considerable, even for bureaucrats working within a dense
tangle of rules designed to guide their behavior. It is simply a fact of political life
that nonelected individuals, protected by civil service mechanisms and working
for hierarchical (even authoritarian) bureaucracies, wield signifi cant policymaking
power in democratic polities. Given this, a key challenge for administrative theory
is to account for this fact in the context of democratic values (Selden 1997, 13–26).