Bureaucracy and The Public Policy

In Public Policy, Bureaucracy is applied to set an array of protocols, regulations and ways in which particular or any action should be carried out within all divisions of the body. As defined, the public policy determines the course of action taken against particular prevailing issues in the state by the government which is expected to be bureaucratic for the welfare of the nation. As policies of the government involves constitutional, legislative acts and judicial decisions, it is inevitable for bureaucracy to be implemented that organizes the structure, set procedures, norms and manages activities with standardized accepted rules.

The conceptualization of bureaucracy is included in the study of sociology and political science which directly points to the procedure in which administrative execution and enforcement of legal rules are organized socially. There are four structural concepts which are widely used to define bureaucracy namely a properly segregated hierarchy of administration among person and offices, deployment of personnel system with non varying pattern of recruitment, division of defined departments in offices, regulated flow of information between organizational top employees and relevant pattern of cooperation besides stable linear career.

The term bureaucracy directly refers to the functioning of offices and it is linked often with public policy, more often than not the topic of debate is whether the action carried out based on public issue is bureaucratic or not. In the view of government, executing a public policy is a complex process that involves numerous persons working on it and the outcome shouldn’t affect the public interest besides satisfying the influential policy makers. While many pose their benefit as prime objective, it is only bureaucracy that can overcome advocacy for refined solution to the issue.

Implementation of public policies or thoughts which are mainly done so based on strong advocacy and influential powers will lead to public dissatisfaction when they claim the absence of bureaucracy which is applied to regulate the process besides submitting practical research reports to find essential solutions than theoretical practices of law.

Different types of bureaucratic agencies like production organization, procedural organization, craft organization and coping organization exist. U.S. postal service, Social Security Administration is production organizations whose output and outcome are observable. Procedural has known outputs but unforeseen outcomes where outputs are hard to assume but outcomes are easier in craft. Coping organization is vague where neither outcome nor output is observable. Bureaucracy and politics had been constantly criticized but none can deny the fact that it is essential in the legal body for regulated civil establishment.

Questions:

• How do public policy relate with bureaucracy?
• What are types of existing bureaucracies?