bureaucratic politics approach

bureaucratic politics approach, theoretical approach to public policy that emphasizes internal bargaining within the state.

The bureaucratic politics approach argues that policy outcomes result from a game of bargaining among a small, highly placed group of governmental actors. These actors come to the game with varying preferences, abilities, and positions of power. Participants choose strategies and policy goals based on different ideas of what outcomes will best serve their organizational and personal interests. Bargaining then proceeds through a pluralist process of give-and-take that reflects the prevailing rules of the game as well as power relations among the participants. Because this process is neither dominated by one individual nor likely to privilege expert or rational decisions, it may result in suboptimal outcomes that fail to fulfill the objectives of any of the individual participants.

Most discussions of bureaucratic politics begin with Graham T. Allison’s 1969 article in The American Political Science Review, “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” although this work built on earlier writings by Charles Lindblom, Richard Neustadt, Samuel Huntington, and others. Allison provides an analysis of the Cuban missile crisis that contrasts bureaucratic politics bargaining with two other models of policy making. The first of these assumes that policy decisions are made by a unitary, rational decision maker, represented by “the state” in many formulations. Thus, bureaucratic politics is often offered as a counterpoint to realist or rationalist conceptions of policy decision making. The second alternative approach describes policies as guided by, even resulting from, previously established bureaucratic procedures, which leaves little room for autonomous action by high-level decision makers. Compared with these and other alternative conceptions of policy making, the bureaucratic politics model represents a significant and distinctive strain of organization- and state-level theory in international relations, organization theory, public policy, and American politics.

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Perhaps the most-abiding concept from the bureaucratic politics model, and the shorthand many have used to define it, is that actors will pursue policies that benefit the organizations they represent rather than national or collective interests. This idea, that “where you stand depends on where you sit,” is often called Miles’s law after the Truman-era bureaucrat who coined the phrase. A central and intuitively powerful claim of bureaucratic politics explanations, this premise has been criticized for its narrow view of preference formation. For example, critics note that it fails to explain the role of many important actors in the original bureaucratic politics case study of the Cuban missile crisis. Yet even the early bureaucratic politics theorists, including Allison, were explicit in acknowledging that other factors, such as personality, interpersonal relations, and access to information, also play important roles in the bureaucratic politics process. For these theorists, three key questions guide one’s understanding of the policy-making game: (1) Who are the actors? (2) What factors influence each actor’s position? and (3) How do actors’ positions come together to generate governmental policies?

Each of these queries masks a number of additional questions and hypotheses about the bureaucratic politics process. Whether actors are elected or appointed, high-, mid-, or low-level, and new to their stations or old hands can all affect their interests and bargaining positions. For example, actors who serve as part of a temporary political administration, such as political appointees of the U.S. president, might be likely to pursue shorter-term interests than would career civil servants with long-standing organizational affiliations. Many aspects of the policy environment also influence the bureaucratic politics dynamic. Issues that are highly salient and visible to key constituencies, for instance, may cause politically ambitious actors to alter their bargaining positions. The venue in which bargaining takes place—cabinet room, boardroom, public news media, and so forth—may also privilege some actors and some interests over others.

Important implications can be drawn from this model. A main goal of Allison’s initial analysis was to show that the assumption, common among practitioners of foreign policy, that governments act as rational, unitary actors is fundamentally flawed. To understand the actions of a state—indeed, of any large, complex organization—one must understand the rules governing its decision-making processes and the motivations of actors participating therein. The result of such a process may well indicate a compromise point without any clear internal strategic logic and may even reflect the unintended consequence of a dynamic tug-of-war among actors. Thus, it may be very difficult to interpret the intentions that underlie the seemingly strategic behaviour of complex organizations, making interactions with these bodies less predictable and, in some spheres, such as international conflict, consequently more dangerous.

Though the bureaucratic politics model has been used to describe decision making in many different contexts, it is most commonly applied to national policy making in the United States and particularly to U.S. foreign policy. This focus has meant that the theory remains underdeveloped in many policy areas, and the traditional pluralistic view of bureaucratic politics has been challenged by critics who claim alternative paths to policy making. Some critics argue that in the American context the model underestimates the power of the president, who dominates policy through the selection and control of appointed officials. Others critique the model because it places too little emphasis on the power of lower-level administrators and structures to influence policy through the control of information and implementation. Because the bureaucratic politics approach has most often been applied to studies of crisis decision making, critics have also asserted that its value for explaining ordinary policy making, particularly over time, is limited. Finally, some have expressed normative worries about the implications of the bureaucratic politics model for government accountability: if government decisions cannot be traced to individual policy makers but rather result from an opaque process of give-and-take among both elected and unelected leaders, assigning responsibility and therefore accountability for these activities becomes far more difficult.

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