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In "Democracy and Bureaucracy "Meier argues that the bureaucracy problem in the United States is, in reality, a governance problem. Framed in this way, he argues the key problems are failures of electoral institutions rather than failures of bureaucracy. As a result, public administration needs to broaden its focus and include the study of electoral institutions as well as the study of bureaucracy. Effective governance is possible only if students of public administration return to their reformist roots and address both bureaucratic and electoral institutions. As a starting point in such a debate, Meier proposes a series of reforms for U.S. political institutions.
It hasn't been my aim to tell people what to think...I have tried, rather, to tell them how to think-specificallyof course, about public administration.
Dwight Waldo (Brown and Stillman, 1986, 164).
The United States is facing a serious problem with the interface between its bureaucracy and its electoral institutions.1Politicians often run for office by campaigning against the bureaucracy. The current antibureaucratic buzzword "reinventing government" replaced the cost-benefit analysis of the Reagan/Bush administrative presidency (Durant, 1992), which replaced Carter's civil service reform and reorganization. Zero-base budgeting, management by objectives, program planning budgeting systems, civil service reform, and reinventing government are all efforts to convince us that bureaucracy is the problem with governance in the United States.2 If we could just somehow get bureaucracy under control, we could balance the budget, eliminate poverty, reinvigorate the education system, and cure male pattern baldness.
Missing in the political debates is any serious assessment of bureaucracy, its performance, its pathologies, or its promise.3 In comparison to other industrialized democracies, however, the United States bureaucracy appears to be much smaller and leaner (Rose, 1985). It relies more on the private sector to deliver goods and services.
It is composed of technocrats rather than administrative elites. And, I will argue that it is both reasonably effective and at the same time highly responsive to legitimate political demands.
The problems in American government, in my view, are not problems of bureaucracy but problems of governance.4 In contrast to what is adequate (some might even argue excellent) performance by the bureaucracy (Goodsell, 1983), the performance by our electoral institutions has been dismal. As an illustration, Congress and the president...