Democracy and Bureaucracy: Growth, Accountability, and Economic Impact

Introduction

There is a natural tendency for bureaucracy to grow larger in a democracy if left unchecked. Much of this arises because of growth tendencies that can be found in other organizations as well. However, in the democratic form of government, there are challenges present in governmental bureaucracy that are unique to this sector. For example, in private companies there are typically chains of authority responsible for decision-making that are required to be transparent and accountable to all of the organization's stakeholders. Furthermore, the operations of a private organization typically have economic restraints that are constantly monitored. By contrast, in democratic government, elected officials are generally responsible for overseeing the bureaucratic institutions that govern society, and they are often less rigorous in maintaining performance metrics.

This analysis considers the balance between democracy and its bureaucratic institutions, as well as the dynamics that mediate these relationships. It was found that increasing the size of a bureaucracy can have detrimental impacts on economic growth, and thus bureaucratic institutions should ideally be required to justify their operations regularly to the public, either directly or through elected representatives.

Understanding Bureaucracy and Democratic Governance

There are many trends responsible for creating bureaucracies in nations. Bureaucracy, in simple terms, is defined as "rule by officials." Max Weber argued that bureaucracy would increase fairness by minimizing nepotism and other types of public corruption, and further contended that it is the most efficient administrative structure for achieving organizational goals rationally (Kumar, 2012). Effective bureaucracies maintain levels of openness — that is, they provide comprehensive information about their attributes and maintain timely communications with their various publics.

When there is a level of accountability and effective oversight, bureaucracy can function to provide essential services for the public and is vital to a nation's health. Transparency refers to the availability of information for navigating a large-scale social system; it constitutes a basic map of the organization as depicted in the material it makes available to the public and to public officials about its progress and objectives. When governments and their bureaucracies maintain transparency, they can improve the quality of government and democratic policy-making.

Transparency, Accountability, and Democratic Legitimacy

Two schools of thought dominate in the international community and among academic researchers. One emphasizes the importance of representative democracy — sometimes to the degree that good government must be democratic government — while the other school, the state-building perspective, focuses not on how governments are elected but on how governments work (Dahlberg & Holmberg, 2013).

The underlying rationale for democracy is that it is a way of treating citizens as free and equal under conditions of disagreement about substantive policy issues. Citizens disagree on what justice requires, what the common good is, and many other issues, including how to balance the different considerations that ground law and policy (Christiano, 2005). Many of these decisions are complex and difficult to govern. When citizens disagree in these ways, it is important to make decisions that treat each citizen with equal respect, maintaining a position of making public decisions on behalf of society (Christiano, 2005). However, not all systems are able to maintain this balance, and there is often a strong conflict of interest that affects the bureaucracy's ability to effectively meet its objectives.

Conclusion

Democracies represent the prevailing trend among most advanced nations, to a greater or lesser degree. Democratic governments rely on bureaucracies to implement their public policy objectives, which entails building a bureaucratic infrastructure that is slow to yield power. In fact, these institutions typically exhibit behavior known as the "grabbing hand." While many institutions are necessary to uphold effective government, the size of these institutions and their policy objectives should be closely monitored to ensure that they can successfully justify the scale and scope of their operations.

It was identified that when a bureaucracy grows unjustifiably large by expanding its own scope for various reasons, there is evidence to suggest that these institutions can be economically counterproductive and may actually work against the public's interest. Accordingly, bureaucratic institutions should be held to regular public accountability — either directly or through elected representatives — to ensure that their growth serves democratic rather than purely institutional ends.

Works Cited

Christiano, T. (2005). Democracy and Bureaucracy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 211–217.

Dahlberg, S., & Holmberg, S. (2013). Democracy and Bureaucracy: How their Quality Matters for Popular Satisfaction, 37–41.

Kumar, A. (2012). Corruption, democracy and bureaucracy. Theoretical and Applied Economics, 411–447.

Libman, A. (2012). Democracy, size of bureaucracy, and economic growth: evidence from Russian Regions. Empirical Economics, 1321–1352.