Representative Bureaucracy and Policy Preferences: A Study in the Attitudes of Federal Executives

Abstract

Public administrators are considered key actors in allocating resources among competing political forces. Administrative decisions, as Appleby so often observed, are political decisions, and controlling administrative power is a critical issue in a democratic polity (2). Among the many strategies of control suggested is (6) (24) (26) (28) (30) (31) (33) (34) (37) (47) (48) (49). The fundamental axiom/proposition underlying the concept of is: if the attitudes of administrators are similar to the attitudes held by the general public, the decisions administrators make will in general be responsive to the desires of the public. Advocates of a representative bureaucracy emphasize the apparent weaknesses of external political controls on administrative action and argue that internal controls on behavior are necessary to keep public responsive to the people. The basic element of internal control is a congruence of attitudes between administrators and the public at large that promotes responsive decisions and policies. Implicit in the attitude congruence argument is the premise of many decision theorists that if two people rationally seek to maximize a given set of values (attitudes) under identical conditions with the same information, they will arrive at the same decision (12) (19) (42) (46). Therefore, if civil servants hold attitudes identical to the public's, their actions should be within the public's zone of acceptance. This, of course, does not mean that administrative decisions and public opinion will always coincide, because administrators have access to information and expertise not available to the bulk of the citizenry. The theory of bureaucracy, thus, begins with the following definition of responsiveness: If administrators and the public share value orientations, then the administrators will advocate and pursue courses of action the public would if it were able to congregate and had the administrators' expertise and information.