In the contemporary world no political system and its main branches can function adequately without bureaucracy (Vigoda-Gadot, 2009). In fact, this is the ongoing and puzzling paradox of democracy (as we know it) and
bureaucracy (as we wish to have it). It is only since the late nineteenth/early twentieth century that bureaucracy is not simply a buttressing support to the political system, but has actually become vital to the survival of the political system. Heady (2001, pp. 190–191) distinguishesfive features of bureauc- racy in“classic systems.”First, bureaucracies are large-scale public services that develop and implement policies. Second, bureaucracies are highly specialized. That is, all governments have departments for clearly demar- cated functions: defense, foreign affairs, treasury, home affairs, justice, and so on and so forth. Given the range and scope of government functions today, third, bureaucracies are also strongly professionalized. They employ people with widely diverging backgrounds, simply because they write law and pursue policy in a wide range of areas. They further seek people with high public-sector motivation (Perry and Wise, 1990) and those who are highly committed for public service, preferably for a long career. Govern- ments initially employed people at the middle- and higher-level ranks when they had a law degree, but those days are long gone. We suspect that any degree that one can acquire at an institution of higher education is useful to some government function. Governments no longer only hire lawyers, but also theologians, musicians, philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, historians, physicists, chemists, geographers, engineers, agriculturalists, linguists, medical doctors, nurses, and so on and so forth. Fourth, bureau- cratic officials (or, as we prefer to call them, career civil servants) play a fairly clear role in the political process. We will expand on that in Chapter 8, but here it suffices to say that the expert and experiential knowledge of civil servants has become indispensable to political officeholders. As a conse- quence, the difference between politics and administration has become blurred, to say the least. Finally, andfifth, bureaucracy in a classic demo- cratic system is subject to effective policy control by political institutions and the elected officeholders who inhabit them. Sure, we know that career civil servants have exercised all sorts of tactics to trump political objectives deemed as untimely, costly, or “not done.” But we should also keep in mind that Max Weber’s worry about democracy being overshadowed by bureaucracy has not come to pass. If anything, career civil servants in mature democracies have shown that they are able to set aside their personal interests for the common good. One cannot say the same of political officeholders!
If the previous statement holds truth, we should wonder why. Are career civil servants better at serving the common good than their elected supervisors? In general, this question cannot be answered, but there is at least one explanation for why the answer to this question may be affirmative.
The answer lies in the fragmented nature of government bureaucracy itself.
People tend to think of government as a monolith, a huge organization that, to a lesser or larger degree, oppresses the“natural”freedoms people have become accustomed to, and even believe themselves to be endowed with, but which only are part and parcel of humankind’s understanding of politics since the late eighteenth century. It is no coincidence that“bureauc- racy” as a concept came to berecognized(in the middle of the eighteenth century; see Albrow, 1970; Raadschelders, 2003, pp. 316–317) shortly before democracy came to be perceived as the desired political system. Bureauc- racy wasdefinedas a type of organizational systemafterthe establishment of democracy (and we should add: in Western Europe; see next chapter).
Bureaucracy in today’s political-administrative systems is anything but a monolith.
Administrators and citizens alike know that “government” can be identified as the political party or political coalition in power but also as the set of bureaucratic departments that shore up the three branches of government. Generally speaking, people as citizens do not think of govern- ment bureaucracy as highly fragmented. And, it is in part because of that fragmentation of government bureaucracy that it has not superseded democracy. As it is, in most, and perhaps all, countries, government bureaucracies are compartmentalized in a variety of departments. Some appear to be generic, such as a Department of Defense, a Department of Justice, a Department of the Treasury, and a Department of Home Affairs.
Nowadays, there are several other departments, often split off from the Department of Home Affairs, such as a Department of Education and a Department of Labor and Economics. Sometimes, government depart- ments are established in response to a specific geographic condition, such as a Department of Water Management, or in response to an acknowl- edged and emerging need, such as a Department of the Environment.
However, no matter what the origin and rationale of government depart- ments, each country has several, if not many. We can look at these as if each one is part of that monolith, but that does not do justice to the extent to which governments have become specialized in response to various needs.
Specialization in government structure is expressed through organizational differentiation; that is, through the various units that make up each department. While the three main branches of democratic governments usually operate as three collegial bodies, it is bureaucracy that is segmented according to task and function.
This segmentation of bureaucracy and its various subdivisions (i.e., departments and units within departments) is worldwide and cannot be
better illustrated than by looking inside the organizational structure of a government’s bureaucracy. Raadschelders (2011, pp. 83–92) showed how government bureaucracy breaks down into multiple units at each level of government in the United States. At the federal level, there are 15 govern- ment departments. For one of these, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), he showed how it“broke down”into multiple subunits.
He then showed how one of the subunits of DHHS, the Administration of Children and Families, is subdivided into multiple subunits itself. One of these subunits at the federal level, the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, proved to be further fragmented into more subunits, while another of these federal subunits, the Region VI of DHHS, is also broken down into several subunits. The same pattern of organizational differentia- tion can be found at state and local levels in the United States. We expect that this pattern of organizational differentiation (i.e., of government bureaucracy consisting of thousands upon thousands of subunits) is found in most, perhaps even all, government organizations. By way of illustration, let us consider the state of Israel (see Figures 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3). As of 2012 this country had 24 government departments. We’ll take the Department of Social Affairs and Social Services as an example (see later).
Previously we mentioned that the fragmentation of government bureaucracy is one of the explanations that help us understand why it has not superseded democracy. The answer now seems simple: Government bureaucracy is organizationally fragmented, and its career civil servants advance that part of a citizenry’s interest that they are hired to protect.
There is, we think, another reason, and that is that career civil servants have become, by and large (there are always exceptions), the new guardians of democracy to an extent that even Hegel could not have dreamed of. That, however, merits further consideration in Chapter 8. Meanwhile, there is one aspect of the political (-administrative) system that requires attention in the context of this chapter, and that is the fashionable notion of multilevel and multiactor government and governance.