Bureaucracies can be daunting and haunting, as literary and cinematic works such as Franz Kafka’s Trial, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman, or Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers will attest. Joseph Heller’s Yossarian had his fair share of issues with the USAF bureaucracy during World War Two: you could only get out of flying combat missions by claiming to be crazy; but anybody who wanted to get out of combat duty was clearly not crazy. At their worst, bureaucracies can be inhumane and unforgiving, focused on rules and compliance rather than efficiency and outcomes (or even output). At their best, they provide stability, often by creating redundancy, and help further desirable social, political and economic objectives. Bureaucracies are easily ridiculed, yet essential. Oscar Wilde, passing US customs, told the officer that he had nothing but his genius to declare. The officer let him enter, presumably not finding the item the playwright was refering to on the list of items subject to duties.
Max Weber identified legal-rational authority – as opposed to traditional and charismatic authority – as an important aspect of modernity. Legal-rational authority was embodied in a rational, rule-governed and impersonal bureaucracy. Ludwig von Mises analyzed and compared the logic and performance of markets versus bureaucracies, while Karl Marx contended that the state and its bureaucracy were the handmaiden of the bourgeoisie. These analyses coincided with the rapid development (or differentiation, technically speaking) of government activities beyond the traditional confines of tax collection and the provision of domestic and external security. Bureaucracies, at least in the European context, were also becoming more “public” and more interventionist. Previously, the sovereign had often delegated the discharge of government functions to – what we today would call – the private sector. Tax farming, for example, was very common in pre-revolutionary France, and Fallstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV seemingly raises his own recruits before heading to war for the king (Slemrod & Keen 2021). The emergence of a rational bureaucracy and the rise of the modern state are synonymous.
Taxation is a central feature of, particularly, the modern state, and indeed a necessary condition for its existence. Taxation requires a bureaucracy. Without the ability to extract economic resources from its population, a state cannot exist. Surplus appropriation is also necessary in order to withstand international competition. Military bureaucracies and the necessary undergirding fiscal bureaucracy have played an important role in state formation, state development and inter-state competition (Giddens 1987, Tilly 1992). And the military itself is, of course, a bureaucracy. Like other bureaucracies, modern military organizations are characterized by a wide array of formal rules governing domestic processes and external behavior. Military bureaucracies also find it difficult to innovate (Rosen 1994, Murray and Millett 1998). Often – but admittedly not always – bureaucratic failure in the form of military defeat is required for innovation and adaptation to occur. By comparison, domestically oriented bureaucracies are rarely faced with a comparable challenge given their typically quasi-monopolistic position. After World War One, the German army was more adept at innovation than the victorious French military – though geography and resource constraints may also have played a role.
Military defeat can be conducive to bureaucratic innovation in a way victory is not. Wedded to Mahanian doctrine, the pre-World War Two Japanese navy remained centered on the battleship, failing to grasp the full extent of the operational-naval revolution brought about by aircraft carriers. After defeating the Russian navy in 1905 in a classic and decisive fleet-on-fleet engagement in Tsushima, perhaps little need was felt to make major changes to capabilities and doctrine. Moreover, senior officers who had fought at Tsushima and went on to command large battleships in the 1930s also resisted a more forceful shift towards aircraft carriers. Perhaps Upton Sinclair’s quip that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary (or prestige, for that matter) depends upon not understanding may apply here.
Bringing about innovation in hierarchical organizations like the military is difficult, absent a major setback or catastrophe. It is no coincidence that 19th century military reform in Prussia occurred right after the catastrophic defeats in the Napoleonic Wars. Bureaucratic innovation often requires “young Turks”, willing and able to challenge the conventional wisdom (like Mitchell in the USN or Guderian in the Wehrmacht), though occasionally vital innovation is instigated from the top (Trenchard in the RAF). Relatedly, bureaucracies often select and socialize their members so that the organization foregoes the “wisdom of the crowds” (Surowiecki 2004) and cognitive diversity bonuses (Page 2017). In this case, bureaucracies, if left to their own devices, may even become outright risks requiring civilian or extra-bureaucratic monitoring (Ellsberg 2018). After all, bureaucratic control and oversight are invariably characterized by the principal-agent and asymmetry of information problematic.
As for international politics and foreign policy analysis, “bureaucratic politics” featured more prominently in the academic discourse during the 1970s when a number of scholars – many of them scholar-practitioners – dedicated their research to the role that bureaucracies play in foreign-policy making. Ground-breaking works like Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Halperin 1974) and The Essence of Decision by Graham (Allison 1971) shed light on the internal workings of governments, the compromises between governmental actors as well as bureaucratic actions and standard operating procedures – and how all of these factors might affect major (and minor) foreign policy decisions. From this analytical vantage point, the hitherto dominant rational actor model looked too simplistic, too parsimonious. Although elected leaders can and do on occasion overrule bureaucracies (Krasner 1972), the bureaucratic politics is today widely accepted as a useful way to analyze foreign policy decision-making (Rodman 2008, Haass 1999, Wilson 1989). After all, Miles’ law also applies to government bureaucracies: “Where one stands depends on where one sits”. (Just watch an episode of Yes, Minister). So governmental and bureaucratic interests and bargaining can lead to decisions that deviate from the rational-actor assumption.
What bureaucracies do, how they do and why they do it is crucial to understanding many types of government actions (incl. both outputs and outcomes), big and small, including – on occasion and perhaps frequently – foreign policy decisions. No serious analyst of foreign policy can therefore afford not to be familiar with the works of the likes of Merton (1940), Downs (1964), Niskanen (1971), Luhmann (1984), Wilson (1989), March and Olsen (1989), and Tullock (2005), and of course von Mises (1944) and Weber (1921).