Bureaucrats, Budgets and the Growth of the State: Reconstructing an Instrumental Model

Abstract

This article forms part of a longer-term project dealing with the impact of public choice theories in political science. The focus here is on economic models of bureaucracy, which despite their increasing theoretical significance and influence on practical politics have heretofore been little analysed, except by their exponents. I have argued elsewhere that amongst existing public choice accounts there are two seminal works, Antony Downs's pluralist treatment in Inside Bureaucracy and William Niskanen's new right thesis in Bureaucracy and Representative Government . The central innovation of economic approaches is their stress on rational officials' attachment to budget maximization strategies. In Downs's case this is a finite maximand limited by bureaucrats' conservatism and other motivations. But in Niskanen's case budget maximization is an open-ended process, constrained only by external limits on agencies' abilities to push up their budgets. None the less, despite their disparate approaches and conclusions, both these books share four failings common to almost all other public choice work in the field: (1) They operate with vague and ill-defined definitions of bureaucrats' utility functions. (2) They assume that all bureaucracies are hierarchical line agencies.

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