“Politicians are puppets in the hands of bureaucrats”. Discuss.

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"Politicians are puppets in the hands of bureaucrats". Discuss.

Above mentioned quotation refers to the expansion of the modern state and the increasing complexity of governmental tasks, which has led to an increase of the importance of civil servants, whose task is no longer merely administrative but also political to the extent that their advice and expertise influences agenda-setting, policy-making as well as policy implementation- a development, which has been labelled "bureaucratisation of politics" or alternatively "politisation of bureaucracy". I will argue that the role of bureaucrats clearly does no longer perform a purely administrative role but do shape policy-making processes and thereby politicians decisions but their degree of influence seems to vary substantially across countries and that they do not seem to dominate over politicians and I will therefore reject the stated hypothesis. The following will present the scholarly debate notably the findings of E. Page, who argues that the political decision-making process tends to increasingly favour the bureaucratic point of view rather than the politicians' stance followed by G. Peters who claims that the bureaucratic degree of influence depends fundamentally on a number of aspects related to the topic at stake as well as organisational factors such as size, managerial skills and goals of the bureaucracy. Empirical research has shown that whilst there has been a general increase in bureaucratic political power, their potential degree of influence depends substantially on the state's legal and bureaucratic traditions which makes bureaucracies in France and Germany considerably more dominant than in the Scandinavian countries where the ministerial administrative bodies' transparency and accountability to citizens leads to reduction in the civil servants' political influence.

With reference to the Weberian and Wilsonian conceptions of the role of bureaucracy as a purely administrative institution where civil servants only implement decisions made by the legislature due to lacking democratic legitimacy, E. Page states that the influence of bureaucrats does certainly exceed their traditional role and has led to a dominance of bureaucrats over politicians. He shows that civil servants are often involved in policy making, frequently influenced by pressure groups rather than ministers and pass policies, which will be voted upon by representative institutions i.e. parliament. He claims that officials invariably have discretion over the way of implementing policies as the conditions for "perfect administration"- a perfect correspondence between policy intentions and policy outcomes do not exist- and explains that strategies for exerting influence in implementation can vary from explicit intent to obstruct to the less conscious use of discretion granted to "street-level bureaucrats"1. With regards to the implementation of policies, Page points to the constraints on political leadership as presented especially by the lower levels of administration over which top level officials and ministers have little control.2 Even though acknowledging that these constraints may not preclude political leadership that largely have to do with personality, they do limit the frequency with one can expect to ministerial political leadership. He seems to thereby suggest that policies do owe less to the choices made by political leaders rather than present an outcome of conflicts within the policy networks of officials and interest groups and would probably agree with the hypothesis that politicians are the puppets in the hands of bureaucrats.
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On the contrary, G. Peters, even though admitting the importance of bureaucratic influence in policy making, suggests that a number of criteria would have to be fulfilled by bureaucratic institutions to be effective and dominant in the policy making process per say to provide government, which has been raised as a possibility for industrial democracies. Criteria include a set of coherent policy intentions and the implementation of those intentions. In practice, policy goals emanating from the bureaucracy tend to be narrow and partial and will tend to be confined to a single policy domain and therefore incoherent and ...

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