How to Implement Policy Term Paper

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Democracy and Bureaucracy

There is a natural tendency for bureaucracy to grow larger in a democracy if left unchecked. Much of this arises because of similar growth tendencies that can be found in other organizations. However, in the democratic form of government, there are challenges present in governmental bureaucracy that are unique to this sector. For example, in private companies there are typically chains of authority that are responsible for the decision making and are required to be transparent and accountable to all the organization's stakeholders. Furthermore, the operations in a private organization typically have economic restraints that are constantly monitored. By contrast, in the democratic form, typically elected officials are responsible for overseeing the bureaucratic institutions that govern society and they are less rigorous in maintaining performance metrics. This analysis will consider the balance between democracy and its bureaucratic institutions and the dynamics that mediate these relationships. It was found that increasing the size of a bureaucracy can have detrimental impacts upon economic growth and thus bureaucratic institutions should ideally have to justify their operations regularly to public, either directly or through elected representatives.

Bureaucracy

There are many trends that are responsible for creating bureaucracies in nations. Bureaucracy, in simple words is defined as "rules by officials" and it has been said that Max Weber argued that bureaucracy would increase fairness that minimizes nepotism and other types of public corruption and not only this, he added, it is most efficient administrative structure for achieving organizational goals rationally (Kumar, 2012). Effective bureaucracies will maintain levels of openness is the extent to which an organization provides comprehensive information about its attributes and maintains timely communications with its various publics.


When there is a level of accountability and effective oversight, bureaucracy can function to provide essential services for the public and are vital to a nation's health. Transparency refers to the availability of information for navigating a large-scale social system it constitutes a layman's basic map of the organization as depicted in the material that it makes available to the public and public officials about its progress and objectives. When governments and their bureaucracies maintain a level of transparency they can improve the quality of government and democratic policy making. Two schools of thought dominate in the international community and among academic researchers; one emphasises the importance of representative democracy, sometimes to the degree that good government must be democratic government, while the other school -- the state-building perspective -- puts focus on not how governments are elected but on how governments work (Dahlberg & Holmberg, 2013).

The underlying rationale for democracy is that it is a way of treating citizens as free and equal under the circumstances of disagreement about substantive policy issues; citizens disagree on what justice requires, what the common good is, and many other issues including how to balance the weights of the different considerations that ground law and policy (Christiano, 2005). Many of these decisions are complex and difficult to govern. When citizens disagree in these ways it is important to make decisions in ways that treats each citizen with equal respect in maintaining a position of making public decisions in the society (Christiano, 2005). However, not all systems are able to maintain this balance and there is often a strong conflict of interest that affects the bureaucracy's ability to effectively meet its.....

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