Bureaucracy and democracy

"Classic Sociological Theory" by Craig Calhoun, etc HM 435. C614 2007 pp270


In spite of its indubitable technical superiority, bureaucracy has everywhere been a relatively late development. A number of obstacles have contributed to this, and only under certain social and political conditions have they definitely receded into the background.

1. Administrative democratization

Bureaucracy organization has usually come into power on the basis of a leveling economic and social differences. This leveling has concerned the significance of social and economic differences for the assumption of administrative functions.

Bureaucracy inevitable accompanies modern mass democracy, in contrast to the democratic self-government of small homogeneous units. Bureaucratic principle demands for equality before the law in the personal and functional sense, it rejects privilege and doing business "from case to case." Such regularity also follows from the social pre-conditions of its origin. Any non bureaucratic administration of a large social structure rest in some way upon the fact that existing social, material, or honorific preferences and ranks are connected with administrative functions and duties.

Bureaucratization and democratization with the administrative of the state usually mean an increase of the cash expenditures of the public funds, in spite of the fact that bureaucratic administration is usually more economical in character than other forms. Until recent times, the cheapest way of satisfying the need for administration was to leave almost entire local administration and lower judicature to the landlords of Eastern Prussia.The same is true of the administration by justices of the peace in England. Mass democracy which makes a clean sweep of the feudal, patrimonial and plutocratic privileges in administration, unavoidably has to put paid professional labour in place of the historically inherited avocational administration by notables.

2. Mass parties and the bureaucratic consequences of democratization

The democratic mass parties have completely broken with traditional rule by notables based on personal relationships and personal esteem. Such personal structures still persist among many old conservative as well as old liberal parties, but mass democratic parties are bureaucratic organized under the leadership of party officials, professional party and trade union secretaries, etc.

In Germany, for instance, this has happened in the Social Democratic Party and in the agrarian mass movement; In England earliest in the caucus democracy of Gladstone and Chamberlain which spread from Birmingham in the 1870s. In Unite States, both parties since Jackson's administration have developed bureaucratically. In France, however, the attempts to compel bureaucratic organization have repeated failed. The resistance of local circles of notables against the otherwise unavoidable bureaucratization of the parties, which would encompass the entire country and break their influence, could not be overcome. Every advance of simple election techniques based on numbers alone as, for instance, the system of proportional representation, means a strict the inter-local bureaucratic organization of the parties and therewith an increasing domination of party bureaucracy and discipline and the elimination of the local circles of notables.

The progress of bureaucratization within the state administration itself is a phenomenon paralleling the development of democracy.

The term of "democracy" can be misleading. The demos itself, in the sense of a shapeless mass, never "governs" large associations, but rather is governed. What changes is only the way in which the executives leaders are selected and the measure of influence which the demos, or better, which social circles from its midst are able to exert upon the content and the direction of administrative activities by means of public opinion. Democratization in the sense here intended, doesn't necessarily mean an increasing active share of the subjects in government. This may be a result of democratization, but it is not necessarily the case.

Political concept of democracy, deduced from the "equal rights" of the governed, included these further postulates:

1). Prevention of the development of a closed status group of officials int he interest of a universal accessibility of office.

2). Minimization of the authority of officialdom in the interest of expanding the sphere of influence of public opinion as far as practicable.

Hence, wherever possible, political democracy strive to shorten the term of office through election and recall, and to be relieved from a limitation to candidates with special expert qualifications.

Thereby, democracy inevitably comes into conflict with the bureaucratic tendencies which have produced by its very fight against the notables. The loose term "democratization" cannot be used here, in so far as it is understood to mean the minimization of the civil servants' power in favor of the greatest possible "direct" rule of the demos, which in practice means the respective party leaders of the demos. The decisive aspect here is the leveling of the governed in face of the governing and bureaucratically articulated group, which in its turn may occupy a quite autocratic position, both in fact and in form.

3. Bureaucratic perpetuity

Once fully established, bureaucracy is among those social structure which are the hardest to destroy. Bureaucracy is the means of transforming social action into rationally organized action. Therefore, as an instrument of rationally organizing authority relations, bureaucracy was and is a power instrument of the first order for one who controls the bureaucratic organization. Under otherwise equal conditions, rationally organized and directed action is superior to every kind of collective behaviour and social action opposing it. Where administration has been completely bureaucratized, the resulting system of domination is practically indestructible.

The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus into which he has been harnessed. In contrast to the notable performing administrative tasks as a honorific duty or as a subsidiary occupation (avocation), the professional bureaucrat is chained to his activity in his entire economic and ideological existence. In the great majority case, he is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march.

The official is entrusted with specialized tasks,and normally the mechanism cannot be put into motion or arrested by him, but only from the very top. The individual bureaucrat is, forged to the common interest of all the functionaries in the perpetuation of the apparatus and the persistence of its rationally organized domination.