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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.
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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.
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