Bureaucracy in the American Constitutional Order

Bibliographic Data

ID4295081
AuthorsFrancis E Rourke (corresponding author)
Year1987
Volume102
Issue2
Pages217-232
Publication date1987-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Science Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0032-3195 • E-ISSN: 1538-165X
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2151350
OpenAlexW2324488025
LanguageEN
Citations received14
References cited1

The development of national bureaucracy in the United States since the 1930s in what can be called its modern era has been a truly remarkable phenomenon. Many more people now work for the government than did then. Bureaucratic organizations in Washington spend far more money today than was the case fifty years ago. They provide more services and their rules and regulations affect a much wider range of human activities. The impact of the decisions made by government agencies upon the lives of ordinary citizens covers not only the familiar trip from the cradle to the grave, but extends even beyond those traditional limits of the human experience, as survivors of the deceased struggle with the Veterans Administration or the Social Security system over death benefits, or as government officials begin to concern themselves with what happens to the fetus before he or she even becomes a citizen.1 This growth in the size of bureaucracy and the simultaneous expansion in the scope of its involvement in human affairs has generated a very strong resentment against bureaucrats and the agencies in which they work. There has been a general assumption that what is very big must also be very powerful, the lesson of the dinosaurs to the contrary notwithstanding, and the myth of an all-powerful bureaucracy has become firmly fixed in the American political imagination since

Bureaucracy · Economics · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Public Administration

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