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Bureaucracy poses problems for democracy less because it creates powerful bureaucrats and more because political control over it can of necessity only be sporadic and occasional. Cases of outright bureaucratic sabotage, disobedience, or insubordination by top officials tend to be extremely rare in modern democracies, although this does not seem to have inhibited the development a whole sub-branch of the study of administration, the principal–agent approach, from using such bureaucratic recalcitrance as its founding myth. When political leaders with a democratic mandate and political support take decisions, those decisions will almost always stand even if the top officials in the department or agency are unenthusiastic about them, or even oppose them. Bureaucrats might seek to get politicians to change their minds or persuade them to do things differently, but it is generally the politicians’ choice to accept or reject that advice.
The degree to which politicians intervene in the activities of the government organizations they head varies substantially. Some political leaders seek actively and frequently to use their executive leadership positions to achieve major policy change in line with party pledges only, others seek to ‘micro-manage’ large parts of their ministries, while others are happier to let their departments or agencies run themselves as far as possible. Moreover, political leaders often have advisers or other staff to help them run their departments or agencies, and management systems that help them monitor what is going on within them. Yet however skilled and enthusiastic they are, and however elaborate their systems of command, supervision, and control, political leaders can generally intervene in the affairs of the bureaucracy for which they are responsible only on a tiny proportion of the total number of transactions that their ministry or agency carries out. There is simply not enough time to devote attention to the full range of activities carried out in most bureaucracies, and devoting attention to one area of activity usually means being forced to take less of an interest in another.
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