same as the title
In: 0
Bureaucracy is an administrative/decision-making process that is characterized by strict rules and protocols.
Suppose your city requires a permit to start a new business. A non-bureaucratic way of handing out that permit is to have people come to city hall and explain their proposed business to an official there. If the official thinks the business is good, they issue the permit. A bureaucratic way of handing out that permit would be to have people fill out a form describing the business and showing that it meets certain requirements. An official at city hall then reviews the form to ensure it has been filled out correctly and truthfully, and if it has, they issue the permit.
The non-bureaucratic system relies a lot on the opinion of the official. This makes it faster and more flexible, but it’s also harder to set standards for businesses and more susceptible to corruption or charisma. Someone might get better treatment just because they are friends with the official or particularly charming. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic system relies on filling out a lot of annoying (and sometimes unnecessary) forms, but those forms also provide a paper trail that makes the decision easy to review. Everyone, in principle, gets the same treatment.
When a lot of people (citizens) have a lot of needs (licenses, taxes, property deeds, voting), a lot of people (bureaucrats) are needed to meet those needs. And since a lot of people (citizens) try to cheat and get extra stuff for their own benefit, the bureaucracy has to create rules to fence in the bad actors. The more people try to get around rules, the more rules are made, and the more rules are made, the harder it is for the citizens to understand the rules, so you need more bureaucrats to help navigate those rules.
Bureaucracy is an organization made up of bureaucrats. Bureaucrats are people nobody voted for but who have responsibility for making or enforcing rules.
In the United States, for example, Congress passes laws, but Congress isn’t a bureaucracy – the Representatives and Senators were elected. But those laws don’t enforce themselves. For that, we have bureaucracies. Say Congress passes a law that says, “It is illegal to bring a moose on an airplane.” OK, it’s illegal, but how do you actually stop people from getting Bullwinkle on a 747? The law will empower somebody – probably the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of transportation safety and inspection of things getting on and off of planes, to enforce that law.
So now the bureaucracy has its instructions, but how do you carry it out? First, one part of Homeland Security will draw up specific regulations and procedures defining what “moose” means, how moose inspections will be carried out, what will be done with any moose that are discovered, what to do if a moose somehow does get on an airplane, and so on. Then another part of Homeland Security will carry out those the procedures and enforce the regulations.
Nobody voted for any of the people at Homeland Security; their leaders were appointed and most of the employees were hired through normal procedures.
—
It isn’t just government, either; any organization past a certain size will have bureaucracies, or just are bureaucracies themselves. The Human Resources Department at your job? That’s a bureaucracy. The principal at your high school is in charge of a bureaucracy. Etc.
There’s also a definition of bureaucracy as government *by* bureaucrats, but people rarely use the word this way unless they’re complaining about the administrative state.
Latest Answers