Bureaucracy and Democracy by Eva Etzioni-Halevy

Author:Eva Etzioni-Halevy [Etzioni-Halevy, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781135027292
Google: NdNDcHtPIV0C
Goodreads: 17844569
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1983-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Can the Growth of Bureaucracy be Curbed?

In this case, however, announcing intentions and adopting recommendations is easier than carrying them out. I would argue that, indeed, here the difficulties of turning guidelines into action are so formidable as to render the process almost impossible on the longer run. This is so not so much because of the recalcitrance of bureaucracy and the fact that it wields more power than its nominal master, the government — as some adherents to the technocratic theory of bureaucracy have contended (see chapter 4). Rather, the continued growth of bureaucracy must be traced back to some features of the New Right itself and, more importantly, to some deeply ingrained characteristics and trends of Western societies that have become especially prominent in recent years.

For, in the first place, it is not clear that the pressure exerted by the New Right will uniformly be in the direction of government cut-backs. The call for such cut-backs is very much part of the movement’s7 rhetoric. And the movement does, in fact, press for deregulation, for instance in some areas of the economy, in environmental and consumer protection and the like. But the movement’s pressure for contraction in government intervention in these areas may be partly counterbalanced by its call for more regulation in other areas, especially in the maintenance of law and order. It may also be counteracted by the New Right’s special concern with abuses of the welfare system, with ‘bludging’ and fraudulent obtainment of benefits. Hence its tendency to press for more inspection and investigation. And these, of course, besides requiring additional staff, are especially intrusive types of bureaucratic activity, now aided by computerized methods of storing, processing and retrieving information.

Some New Rightists (e.g. Milton Friedman, Arthur Seldon and others) have suggested that people should be enabled to choose between government-supplied and privately supplied (or among privately supplied) social services in the areas of education, health, care for the aged, and so forth. They have also suggested that beneficiaries should exert their choice and at the same time pay for the services (or part thereof) through a system of government-supplied vouchers.8 This system, if adopted, would eventually have the effect of increasing the private sector at the expense of the public one, especially in areas where most services have previously been rendered by the government. Thus, it would have the effect of reducing the government bureaucracy’s size and power.9

Several education and welfare services are even today carried out by the private sector with financial support from the government (for instance private schools and homes for the aged in Australia). Quite possibly, a push will be made to transfer more services to the private sector in the near future. But there seems to be only a remote chance that the voucher system proper will be adopted on more than an experimental scale, even by New-Right-influenced governments, in the near future. In Australia, for instance, the voucher system in education has been publicly debated for several years. Liberal and

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