I’d like to talk about bureaucracy, with the reference point being Woodrow Wilson’s 1886 essay "The Study of Administration." It can be found here:

http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/ ... cument=465

I do not intend this post to be covering the whole topic, but more of a starting point. No matter your thoughts on Wilson’s presidency – which came nearly 30 years later, mind you – this piece of work is extremely interesting. In it, his overarching argument, encompassing many other arguments that we will forgo here, is that administration should be studied as a science (For our purposes here, the words administration and bureaucracy are interchangeable).

Of course, the time frame in which Wilson wrote this matters: the American industrial revolution was taking place, and government and the nation were growing. However, for our purposes, let us look solely at Wilson’s arguments and whether or not they hold weight.

First, what, for Wilson, would make an administration efficient? “It must discover the simplest arrangements by which responsibility can be unmistakably fixed upon officials; the best way of dividing authority without hampering it, and responsibility without obscuring it,” he writes.

Wilson seems onto something here: waste. Not even the Democrats of today, who Republicans like to slam as being inefficient big government lawmakers, look to make government ambiguous and inefficient. Streamlining is something all lawmakers like. Even if their policies differ on how big or small the government should be in theory, lawmakers do not wish their administrations to be enormous and impossible to navigate.

Wilson sees this study of whether or not the distribution of authority is working as “a central constitutional question.” He writes: “If administrative study can discover the best principles upon which to base such distribution, it will have done constitutional study an invaluable service.”

I think we would all agree. We should indeed strive to find out whether or not the bureaucracy running our lives is doing it the best it can. However, when Wilson goes into specifics, and it gets a bit hazy.

Bureaucracy, according to Wilson, “lies outside the sphere of politics.” Wilson states that "The field of administration ... is a part of political life only as the methods of the counting house are a part of the life of society; only as machinery is part of the manufactured product."

For him, there is a distinction between “constitutional and administrative questions, between those governmental adjustments which are essential to constitutional principle and those which are merely instrumental to the possibly changing purposes of a wisely adapting convenience.”

A line has been drawn, though Wilson admits it is not clear in the sand where the line is. But he is right in at least one sense: the machinery is to the administration as the lawmakers are to the company producing the manufactured product. As Wilson points out, “Every particular application of general law is an act of administration." Constitutional questions are about policy, while administrative questions are about the carrying out of that policy.

You should feel as if you just hit a fork in the road, though: just how do we measure whether a bureaucracy is working, then? While Wilson states that administration is a separate enterprise from political matters, how can we judge whether it is successful unless we consider the policies it was working to apply? How can we decide whether the manufactured product has been manufactured correctly?

I think the ways to measure it's efficiency are:
- how quickly changes can be implemented.
- How well mistakes can be traced and corrected (there's always mistakes, perfection doesn't exist).


the first measure more the 'authority' part, the second more 'responsibility', though it's a mix anyway.

I think responsibility (for the good as well as the bad) is the part where a lot of public administrations fails.

I generally favor vast, Kafka-esque bureaucratic labyrinths in which I am forced into an existential panic.

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have you ever read max weber's work, friend?

ah. that was another side topic i would like to speak about was well: does the government control change, or merely react to change? or is it a mixture of both?

In many cases, government is reactive. If you look at what happened after 9/11, many of the solutions that government came up with were already around, such as the department of homeland security, waiting for the appropriate 'policy window' to come along. Once the window comes, politicians and bureaucrats implement old ideas that have been sitting on the development hell shelf.

I was thinking about change of policy that affect a particular administration and its function, decided by the 'constitutional', not a reacting change..that would fit more the 'fuck up' part..

Aren't constitutions overrated? Isn't it more fun to govern based on common law and tradition?

That is a shame.

I'll answer that once you fill out the 11-947 forms in triplicate.

i wish i knew what that meant.

Explanations aren't my department's responsibility. You'll want to go to the Explanations Division.