Share Flipboard Email. Issues The U. Legal System U. Foreign Policy U. Liberal Politics U. Robert Longley. History and Government Expert. Robert Longley is a U. Facebook Facebook. Updated February 03, Essential Characteristics of a Bureaucracy Complex multi-level administrative hierarchy Departmental specialization Strict division of authority Standard set of formal rules or operating procedures. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Longley, Robert. What Is Hyperpluralism?
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He felt it was getting harder to run a constitutional government than to actually frame one. Therefore, administrative activities should be devoid of political manipulations. Wilson advocated separating politics from administration by three key means: making comparative analyses of public and private organizations, improving efficiency with business-like practices, and increasing effectiveness through management and training.
Rather, the bureaucracy should act with a sense of vigor to understand and appreciate public opinion. Still, Wilson acknowledged that the separation of politics from administration was an ideal and not necessarily an achievable reality.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of great bureaucratic growth in the United States: The Interstate Commerce Commission was established in , the Federal Reserve Board in , the Federal Trade Commission in , and the Federal Power Commission in With the onset of the Great Depression in , the United States faced record levels of unemployment and the associated fall into poverty, food shortages, and general desperation.
When the Republican president and Congress were not seen as moving aggressively enough to fix the situation, the Democrats won the election in overwhelming fashion.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U. In the s, the federal bureaucracy grew with the addition of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect and regulate U.
Additional programs and institutions emerged with the Social Security Administration in and then, during World War II, various wartime boards and agencies. By , approximately , U. Johnson in the s, that number reached 2. Volunteers in Service to America was a type of domestic Peace Corps intended to relieve the effects of poverty. Johnson also directed more funding to public education, created Medicare as a national insurance program for the elderly, and raised standards for consumer products.
All of these new programs required bureaucrats to run them, and the national bureaucracy naturally ballooned. Its size became a rallying cry for conservatives, who eventually elected Ronald Reagan president for the express purpose of reducing the bureaucracy. While Reagan was able to work with Congress to reduce some aspects of the federal bureaucracy, he contributed to its expansion in other ways, particularly in his efforts to fight the Cold War.
The two periods of increased bureaucratic growth in the United States, the s and the s, accomplished far more than expanding the size of government. They transformed politics in ways that continue to shape political debate today. While the bureaucracies created in these two periods served important purposes, many at that time and even now argue that the expansion came with unacceptable costs, particularly economic costs.
The common argument that bureaucratic regulation smothers capitalist innovation was especially powerful in the Cold War environment of the s, 70s, and 80s. But as long as voters felt they were benefiting from the bureaucratic expansion, as they typically did, the political winds supported continued growth.
As seen in this photograph, President Ronald Reagan frequently and intentionally dressed in casual clothing to symbolize his distance from the government machinery he loved to criticize. In the s, however, Germany and Japan were thriving economies in positions to compete with U.
This competition, combined with technological advances and the beginnings of computerization, began to eat away at American prosperity. Factories began to close, wages began to stagnate, inflation climbed, and the future seemed a little less bright.
In this environment, tax-paying workers were less likely to support generous welfare programs designed to end poverty. They felt these bureaucratic programs were adding to their misery in order to support unknown others. When he ran again four years later, his criticism of bureaucratic waste in Washington carried him to a landslide victory. While it is debatable whether Reagan actually reduced the size of government, he continued to wield rhetoric about bureaucratic waste to great political advantage.
Why might people be more sympathetic to bureaucratic growth during periods of prosperity? In what way do modern politicians continue to stir up popular animosity against bureaucracy to political advantage? Is it effective? Why or why not? During the post-Jacksonian era of the nineteenth century, the common charge against the bureaucracy was that it was overly political and corrupt. This changed in the s as the United States began to create a modern civil service.
The civil service grew once again in Franklin D. The most recent criticisms of the federal bureaucracy, notably under Ronald Reagan, emerged following the second great expansion of the federal government under Lyndon B Johnson in the s.
We often think of bureaucrats as paper-pushing desk clerks, but bureaucrats fight fires, teach, and monitor how federal candidates raise money, among other activities.
The job of a bureaucrat is to implement government policy, to take the laws and decisions made by elected officials and put them into practice. The task of running the government, and providing services through policy implementation, is called public administration. One useful approach to understanding what bureaucrats do is to examine the actions of different governmental agencies.
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