Representative Bureaucracy

SUMMARY TABLE OF CONTENTS

Following this table is a detailed outline of the book, retained from the original edition. Page numbers in brackets below reference the original pagination; these numbers are embedded into text in the ebook edition by the use of brackets.

Foreword [2012]

Preface [2012]

INTRODUCTION [1974]… {1}

1 • Bureaucracy and Representation: Paradox Lost and Paradox Regained… {7}

2 • Representativeness: The Emergence of the Concept and Its Dilemmas… {21}

3 • Why Bureaucracies Can Never Be Fully Representative... {42}

4 • How Bureaucracies Can (and Should) Be Representative... {63}

5 • Some Patterns of Bureaucratic Representativeness and Misrepresentativeness... {83}

6 • The American Bureaucracy as a Representational Service... {104}

CONCLUSIONS... {127}

Bibliographics… {138}

Index… {141}

About the Author

Footnotes

DETAILED CONTENTS

Page numbers below reference the original pagination, embedded into the text of this ebook edition by the use of {brackets}. Page numbers are retained for the convenience of the reader. A Summary Table of Contents precedes this one.

Foreword [2012]

Preface [2012]

INTRODUCTION [1974]… {1}

1 • BUREAUCRACY AND REPRESENTATION: PARADOX LOST AND PARADOX REGAINED… {7}

Introduction… {7}

Bureaucracies: Monsters or Servants?... {8}

Kingsley Coins (and Distorts) a Term… {10}

The Problem Looms Much Larger than Class Origin… {13}

The Emergence of the Issue in American Society… {18}

Conclusion and Summary… {20}

2 • REPRESENTATIVENESS: THE EMERGENCE OF THE CONCEPT AND ITS DILEMMAS… {21}

Introduction… {21}

Defining Our Terms… {22}

What Does Representation Require?... {24}

The Emergence of the Modern Representative and

Bureaucratic State... {25}

The Modern Ubiquity of Bureaucracy... {27}

The Modern Distrust of Bureaucracy... {28}

The Proliferation of Administrative Structure... {31}

Why Do Bureaucracies Grow?... {32}

Models of Bureaucratic Growth... {33}

The Democratic Dilemma... {35}

Legitimizing the American Bureaucratic State... {36}

Conclusion and Summary... {40}

3 • WHY BUREAUCRACIES CAN NEVER BE FULLY REPRESENTATIVE... {42}

Introduction... {42}

Government by Sampling: A Test Case... {42}

Some Basic Distinctions... {46}

Limits on Representativeness: Skills... {47}

Attributes... {52}

Interests and Personality Structure... {53}

The Intrusions of Larger Purpose... {55}

The Bureaucracy Itself: The Selfishness of Structure... {58}

Conditions of Recruitment... {59}

Summary and Conclusions... {62}

4 • HOW BUREAUCRACIES CAN (AND SHOULD) BE REPRESENTATIVE... {63}

Introduction... {63}

Size and Diversity... {66}

Social Strains and Diversity... {70}

Relations with the Environment: The Example of Multilingualism... {72}

Demographic and Nonpoliticized Representativeness... {76}

Conclusion... {81}

5 • SOME PATTERNS OF BUREAUCRATIC REPRESENTATIVENESS AND MISREPRESENTATIVENESS... {83}

India: Constitutional Provisions on Representativeness... {83}

Malaya: Unification and Division... {88}

Linguistic Conflict: Belgium and Canada... {92}

Confessional Bureaucracies: The Case of Lebanon... {97}

Ethnic Differences and Confessional Integration: The Case of Israel... {101}

Summary and Conclusions... {103}

6 • THE AMERICAN BUREAUCRACY AS A REPRESENTATIONAL SERVICE... {104}

Introduction... {104}

The History of the Service... {107}

Equal Employment, Minorities, and Discrimination... {110}

Other Characteristics and Trends... {117}

Specific Agencies and Representativeness... {119}

The Goals and Mechanisms of Representativeness... {122}

Conclusions... {125}

CONCLUSIONS

Theoretical Overview... {127}

The Justification of Bureaucratic Inclusiveness... {130}

Some Research Possibilities... {131}

Some Policy Implications—Especially for the United States... {132}

Who Imposes What Quotas?—A Vital Question... {133}

Bibliographics… {138}

Index… {141}

About the Author

Foreword

Professor Samuel Krislov’s Representative Bureaucracy remains among the most important and enduring books in the field of public administration and its intersection with political science. It takes the kernel of the idea, inchoately introduced in J. Donald Kingsley’s 1944 book by the same title, that public bureaucracies can be representative political institutions and it develops an overall analytic framework with empirically testable propositions that has served subsequent generations scholars very well. So well, in fact, that as the literature on representative bureaucracy blossomed, these propositions have become so ingrained that many younger scholars are unaware of their initial formulation and roots. That is one reason why the republication of this volume now is not only appropriate, but a critical step toward more tightly organizing the vast literature that it arguably spawned into a comprehensive empirically-based theory integrating all facets of the study of representative bureaucracy.

There are additional reasons as well. At the time of the book’s publication in 1974, representative bureaucracy was a highly contested notion. It was tied up with the then relatively new debate regarding the desirability of affirmative action and academic arguments over whether, due to recruitment and socialization processes, public bureaucrats could possibly represent anything other than their agencies’ and their own self-interest. Krislov entered into this contentiousness with unusual balance, sophistication, and nuance—and substantial success in advancing our thinking about how public bureaucracies can and cannot be representative. Drawing on a wide-range of historical and contemporary examples, his major propositions have been the basis of voluminous and continuing subsequent research:

• The issue of the composition of a country’s civil service is a basic one for political analysts and students as well as for citizens anxious to understand and activists interested in reform (pages 7-8).

• As a major vehicle for social change, the occupation of [public bureaucracy’s] positions by minority-group members has been significant in policy outcomes and in the subtle transactions that cumulatively constitute public policy (18).

• The notion that the bureaucracy is in fact representative is advanced in two separate [intertwined] ways: (1) it is seen as such in composition and in the manner of its selection; (2) it is judged in terms of substantive product, and the quality of its decisions is evaluated in the light of their accord with what is assumed to be public opinion (37).

• [B]ureaucracies are inherently unrepresentative and cannot be microcosmic reproductions of total society, . . . [yet] bureaucracy is still at least potentially more representative that other arms of government. . . . (63).

• [T]he human potentialities brought by bureaucrats to their jobs are inevitable and advantageous (81).

I have read and reread this book many times, always gaining new perspectives and additional insights on representative bureaucracy. There is no doubt that this reissued volume will serve newer generations of scholars and researchers at least equally well.

David H. Rosenbloom

Distinguished Professor of Public Administration

American University

Washington, D.C.

August, 2012

Preface

This book had its remote origins when I walked into the opening session of Bill Ebenstein’s Comparative Government seminar at Princeton six decades ago. He was later to prove a warm hearted and congenial friend, but on that day he was giving our class his excellent imitation of the imperious European Herr Professor who taught through intimidation.

Passing out a mammoth reading list, he then gave a virtuoso performance, summarizing several hundred titles, each with a punch line such as no one should leave graduate school without reading this book or already a classic or "on publication provoked a lead editorial in both the New York Times and the London Times." The implication was clear: the seminar involved the impossible task of reading a dozen or so books every week.

By the end of the first week even those of us who did not live in the dungeons of the Graduate College (known to undergraduates as goon castle) had already received the word from the incredibly accurate grapevine. From the standpoint of grades, the reading was irrelevant. The expectations involved a good research paper, class participation, and Ebenstein’s highly subjective evaluation of the student’s talents.

From the start I was able to intuit Ebenstein’s discussions and be one of the key student participants, and I certainly worked hard on my term paper, but I recognized the fact that the side of the wall in the politics reading room in Firestone Library which was dedicated to books on the list—which equaled the shelves of some six or seven other seminars—was a fantastic selection. It never would be as easy to reach up and pick out a book. So I read as if I had never received the scuttlebutt and consumed works ranging from Adorno to Weber, from dry enumeration of comparative institutions to the works of German romantic theorists, all with a heavy dose of Viennese writers. The only works I ever regretted reading were those of the British constitutional lawyer Sir Ivor Jennings. It was not just his prolix though elegant style. It also became obvious over the years whenever a British constitutional dilemma arose that the outcome Jennings predicted after amassing practices going back centuries was not really taken seriously by Parliament. There the decisions were determined by practical considerations, especially the size of the majority party.

Of all the books I read from the list, I was most fascinated by J. Donald Kingsley’s Representative Bureaucracy, but at the time I could not tell you why. It certainly was not its style, awkward at times, boring a good deal of the time. And it certainly won no prizes for its logic or argument.

The book was a polished version of his dissertation, which was a translation into public administration language of his mentor Harold Laski’s justification for non-democratic methods by a nascent socialist society in Britain. Laski was something of a prodigy with an immense reputation both in Britain and the United States, so his transition from a youthful anti-state pluralism to Guild Socialism to an almost Leninist (never Stalinist) Marxism was paid a surprising amount of attention. Oddly he remained on the executive committee of the Fabian Society. Laski essentially argued that the bourgeois British civil service would at some point revolt against serving a Labor majority. In different passages at different times, Laski suggested it would be appropriate to suspend normal democratic processes (e.g., times of elections) and carry out programs of nationalization of major industries. Even more strikingly, he suggested that physical force might be necessary against a rebellious bureaucracy perhaps even as a preemptive measure.

Laski’s star began to fade when he filed a libel suit against a British newspaper claiming it maligned him by accusing him of advocating political change by violence. Cross-examined by the celebrated Sir Patrick Hastings, Laski was humiliated by the reading of passages that plainly so advocated, responding with elaborate and unconvincing formulations. The jury returned the worst possible verdict, finding his reputation was damaged but awarding a contemptible recompense—in effect saying his reputation was worthless. His standing unraveled rapidly. His scholarship was impugned by finding his sources sometimes spurious and often unverifiable. The publication of his letters to and from Justice Oliver Holmes made beautiful reading, but are strewn with clearly dissembled efforts to appear interesting—as when he described visiting a German legalist in a small university town who had been dead for several years. Finally Laski came under attack as a poor political thinker and diagnostician.

Obviously Kingsley exercised no control over this talented but troubled mentor’s creative ways of demeaning and debasing himself. As academics know, the choice of dissertation advisor is all too often as limited as the choice of one’s parents. In his own research, Kingsley seemed to be rather exemplary as meticulous as Laski was cavalier. But it is in his acceptance of Laski’s argument about middle class rebellion that Kingsley strayed into poor analytic evidence. Even his efforts to provide a firmer base for civil service bureaucracy as middle class by demonstrating that their parents were also disproportionately bourgeois added to the preponderance of the empirical record, but were fundamentally tautological and obvious.

Bureaucracy and regulation rest on record-keeping and deciphering. The classic examples of civil service preparation—the subsidized study of Mandarins or Oxbridge training inaugurated by Thomas Babington Macaulay—are all variants on the need for literacy. As Kingsley recognized, bureaucracies are or quickly become middle class. Because social position is in all societies highly correlated between parents and children, we have a classic example of painting the lily.

To be sure, bureaucracies have resisted political power against British monarchs, Bourbon kings, and Maoist China. But in so doing their modus operandi is more generally the dragging of feet, not the bearing of arms. As Frederic Burin demonstrates, both the Russian communists and the Nazis forced oppositionists in their civil services to stay in place and train their own replacements. Most civil servants reflect suppineness and quickly surrender their abstract responsibility to society in order to avoid trouble with their overlords. Their loyalties are easily purchases for small scale rewards like promotions, special access to luxury goods, and even ribbons and other tokens.

In the light of that history, to suggest inevitable conflict and contemplate the preemptive show of force or suspension of democratic processes seems malpractice of policy analysis and even reckless disregard of logic.

In essence Laski tried to create a purist nontotalitarian but virulent Marxism. Famously, he opened a commemorative seminar in London with the thought that we all serve Marx: you in your way and I in his. Consequently he and Kingsley suffered from the crude mid-nineteenth century social categories from Marx and Engels which most Marxist analysts, especially Polish sociologists, have improved on. Fortunately for Laski, European and especially British society have a more meaningful definition of middle class than does the United States, where virtually everyone is so designated. Unfortunately, he called for the suspension of British democracy in the cause of nationalizing the coal industry—where the smog-producing soft coal was already a wasted asset —and the iron and steel industry, at a juncture requiring innovative skills that socialist enterprises seldom produce.

If this recital of flaws is accurate, why should the work have haunted me over the years and why did I so conspicuously appropriate its title? Essentially I thought that behind the book, like a modernist painting, was a great truth hidden by a distorted focus. It took only minor readjustment to bring into focus different aspects of a dominant issue of our times: the issue of equality.

To his credit, Kingsley showed signs of breaking out of his misfocused emphasis. In several passages, he did depict the great injustices civil services have, all almost universally, inflicted on women. An American and a personnel expert, Kingsley moved beyond Laski’s British class state of mind and Marxist myopia. After all, to the orthodox Marxist, the solution to female oppression is the ending of the monopoly of ownership. Isaiah Berlin famously used as an epigraph to a book a Russian saying: The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. To the orthodox Marxist, there is only the one big societal hedgehog. To be sure Kingsley emphasized the personal injustice done to women over broad societal implications, but the broadened perspective was a breakthrough.

I first expanded Kingsley’s term to its obvious American and contemporary context, namely the issue of race. This culminated in my book The Negro in Federal Employment as well as a paper presented at the International Political Science Association meetings. I also planned this volume and an expanded work for the Free Press, but when George McCune left to form his own company his successor was not interested; and so this book stands as my fullest solo statement on the bureaucracy as casting light in various contexts, including that of class and caste.

Since then others have made representative bureaucracy an important focus. Much ingenuity has gone into demonstrating that it makes a difference. Particularly with regard to the American bureaucracies a number of intricate experiments have shown the consequences of women gaining voice in the process. Interestingly enough studies have shown that difference in voice may occur on non-feminist as well as women’s issues. Perhaps the strongest verification of results emerged outside the public administration literature. The attitudinalists—notably Lee Epstein—have convinced Judge Richard Posner that male and female judges and juries have sharply different perspectives on race. On the individual level it also seems clear that the American law of pensions would have been different if Sandra Day O’Connor had not been the decisive vote in the basic interpretive decision.

In short, both experimental studies of bureaucracies and the historical records of courts have confirmed the common sense expectation that the backgrounds of decision-makers affect outcomes in both obvious and more subtle ways. As this book illustrates there is room for considerable filling in of this common sense conclusion with respect to other social cleavages as well.

Bringing the case studies explored in Chapter 5 up to date would be an imposing feat. In virtually every instance the situation has become more complex and more subtle.

As foreshadowed in the original, the situation in Lebanon—then delicately dependent on the fiction that the Maronites and other religious groups maintain the same proportion in the population as a decades-old census—exploded into full-scale civil war. Syria and its ally Hezbollah mobilized the exploited Shia. The Maronites with a drastically lower birth rate were outnumbered and desperately turned to Israel. They suffered a disaster even as they left behind a series of atrocities. A new balance now prevails that fluctuates between sometimes more, sometimes less Syrian and Hezbollah dominance. The outcome of the current Syrian conflict threatens to require new adjustments.

The Malayan Federation is now slightly less egalitarian than its already discriminatory society. The two language-contested societies, Canada and Belgium, have witnessed some diminution of language conflict, aided by relative economic successes by the French underdogs in Canada and the Flemish in Belgium. Political concessions have helped with the Belgian central government drastically reduced in power.

Israel has seemingly solved the problem that loomed so large when the book was originally written. By and large the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities are melding one into another. The conflict between religious and secular Israel which seemed to be on the mend has however taken a turn for the worse. Furthermore the Israeli-Arab population with a much higher birth rate has been restive in a period when it would seem that fewer rather than more rights and equality have been granted.

The United States, discussed in Chapter 6, has made important strides with respect to race and gender equality, but has seen wider class inequality. As yet unevaluated are the consequences of outsourcing in the Federal service. I suspect when all is calculated, outsourcing represents a decline in middle class protections, but also a general decline in equality on all fronts by McDonaldizing the tasks of, for example, prison guarding and airport security; outsourcing achieves economies, but does so by substituting pass-through neophytes for long-term committed staff.

Looking back on my efforts in this field, I am proud to have helped understanding what has emerged as perhaps the key issue of the era–the quest for equality and the demand for human dignity. With that backstory and intent for