Effectiveness, Bureaucratic

Varieties of Bureaucratic Effectiveness

It is difficult to find a single definition of bureaucratic effectiveness. A big part of the explanation for that lies in the many distinct functions that bureaucratic agencies have. Some have very defined customer service characteristics. An automobile licensing agency, for example, may be able to calculate the wait time for its customers and seek to cut that through better management. Taxing agencies might well calculate their effectiveness in terms of recovering revenue. But what, some have asked, does a foreign ministry do and how does one measure whether or not it is meeting its goals, assuming it could define them?

It is necessary to distinguish between bureaucracies in the private and public spheres. Generally, private firms measure their success, if they are public stock corporations, in the confidence of their investors. This is typically reflected in the value of its stock price and its trajectory. In the public sphere, however, bureaucratic agencies' missions are defined by legal and political authority, and usually these missions are articulated in ways that [Page 714]are highly general, aspirational, vague, and potentially even contradictory.

Bureaucracies may be effective or ineffective across many different dimensions. Some dimensions consider their prowess in politics and gaining power, others with maintaining their autonomy and organizational culture, and yet others with procuring resources sufficient for the tasks to which they have been assigned. Additional dimensions have to do with defining and gaining acceptance for favorable accounts of success, gaining reputation for innovation and efficient management, and other measurements of organizational outputs. And sometimes bureaucratic agencies have the good (or bad) fortune to have outcomes move in a favorable (or unfavorable) direction despite their own activity. The perceived quality of police agencies, for example, is often related to the rise and fall of crime rates whether or not the police actually are directly responsible for these trends. Ironically, the higher the crime rate, the more the police may be valued whereas the lower the crime rate, the more the public and its politicians may find downsizing the police acceptable. This produces perverse incentives for the police agencies, although they are not the only agencies for whom less demand threatens their resources.