POLITICAL SCIENCES

Bureaucracy and Accountability

Bureaucracy and Accountability

Introduction

Bureaucracy we all dislike. In our view, it also combines the contradictory qualities of inefficiency and threatening power. On the one hand, it is distinguished by incompetence, red tape and care only about their own well-being, on the other - manipulation, obstructionism and Byzantine intrigue. There is almost no defect that would not have ever been attributed to it. Raining curses on the bureaucracy from across the political spectrum. Law seeks to limit it in the name of the free market; the centrists want to reform it to make it open and accountable; left hoping to replace it with government. However, the bureaucracy demonstrates an impressive ability to resist all such encroachments on their rights. Major theorist of bureaucracy, Max Weber wrote: "The dictatorship of the bureaucrat is coming." The reason for this is, as he claimed, the unique ability of bureaucracy to deal with complex management problems in a mass industrial society. Obviously, the bureaucracy is, paradoxically, is a necessary, but always causes problems (Backaert, R., & Frausto, S, 2009).

But what really is the bureaucracy? The reader interested in this matter, as a rule, quickly finds himself in a quandary, trying to understand the essence of the case. The confusion generated by the set of values ??that are given to the term "bureaucracy". The following is a list of these values ??are not limited to: government officials, system administration training, organizational inefficiency, government, non-market organization, undemocratic organization. Faced with such a diversity of values, researchers have generally used the bureaucracy one of two strategies. The first is to declare that the bureaucracy really means governance or organizational inefficiency, or anything else. This approach helps to avoid confusion, but only so long as the hands of students will not get a book by another author. The second strategy is more descriptive and is to discuss the various meanings of the term, which concludes that bureaucracy as such does not exist at all, but only a set of diverse phenomena, wrongly identified the general concept. This approach allows overcoming the confusion of course, but only at the cost of abandoning the bureaucracy as a single object of study (Tullock et al, 2005).

Accountability

What is meant by accountability? The concept of accountability refers to a specific form of link that political authorities establish between citizenship regimes and democratic representative. Unlike other forms of democracy and other forms of democracy calls delegative or populist democracies, the government combines an institutional representative's authorization to a representative Institutional framework to combine power with an authorizationdesigned to ensure accountability and responsiveness of agents authorized so that the latter comply with the law. The concept free representation that builds the link between government, governors and governed assumes a certain degree of autonomy of judgment and decision of elected representatives. In this respect the electoral delegation creates a gap that is considered healthy for the proper functioning of the representative institutions (Caulfield, 2005). However, no representative democracy postulates a blind delegation but at ...