Bureaucratic Identity and the Resistance of Politicization

• Date: 01 January 2018
• Published date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399715581046
• Subject Matter: Articles

Administration & Society

2018, Vol. 50(1) 30 –52

© The Author(s) 2015

DOI: 10.1177/0095399715581046

journals.sagepub.com/home/aas

Article

Bureaucratic Identity

and the Resistance of

Politicization

Christopher A. Cooper1

Abstract

Explanations of politicization tend to focus on historical trends, administrative

traditions, and government preferences. Absent from this literature are

the actions of bureaucrats themselves. Drawing on theories of employee

resistance from organization studies suggesting that changes threatening the

financial security and professional identity of employees may be resisted,

this article explores whether bureaucrats resist, and seek to deter, efforts

of politicization. Through a most likely case study design of New Brunswick

(Canada), this article finds that bureaucrats not only resisted efforts of

politicization but that such actions also deterred the government from

making any further dismissals.

Keywords

politicization, bureaucratic identity, resistance, political control, Westminster,

Canada

In many ways, the development of the modern professional bureaucracy dur-

ing the late 19th and early 20th century was the result of an effort to de-

politicize the administrative apparatus of the state. Discontent with practices

of patronage and administrative incompetence, reforms such as Britain’s

Report on the Organization of the Permanent Civil Service and America’s

1Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Christopher A. Cooper, Department of Political Science, Université de Montréal, 3150, rue

Jean-Brillant, Montreal, Quebec H3T 1N8, Canada.

Email: christopher.cooper@umontreal.ca

581046AASXXX10.1177/0095399715581046Administration & SocietyCooper

research-article2015

Cooper 31

Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, sought to improve the quality of gover-

nance by establishing an independent and permanent cadre of professional

civil servants (Dreyfus, 2000; Grindle, 2012). These reforms were based on

the presumption famously described by Woodrow Wilson (1887) that politics

and administration were separate realms, and that by impeding the accumula-

tion of organizational knowledge and discouraging the recruitment of young,

talented experts, the former’s interference in the latter was detrimental to the

well-being of bureaucracy.

The result was the transformation of the public service from an assembly

of ad hoc part-time partisan appointees into a hierarchical structure staffed

with permanent officials selected according to merit. Soon after its appear-

ance, however, observers concerned with the integrity of representative

democracy quickly recognized in the modern bureaucracy more of a foe than

a friend (Etzioni-Haley, 1983; Finer, 1941). With asymmetries in both time

and knowledge, politicians now found themselves opposite a powerful cadre

of administrative elites able to ignore, or even manipulate, their policy direc-

tives (Weber, 1998).

To overcome this dilemma, governments turned their focus to controlling

the bureaucracy. By placing individuals believed to share a similar political

orientation in key administrative positions, the power to appoint officials

became a key means for governments to increase their command over the

bureaucracy. Yet importantly, if the development of the modern bureaucracy

was an effort of de-politicization, replacing incumbent bureaucrats with per-

sons on the basis of loyalty to the government’s political agenda constituted

a move away from the principles of an independent, permanent, and merito-

cratic bureaucracy to once again introduce politics into the realm of adminis-

tration. Otherwise stated, these actions constituted a re-politicization of the

bureaucracy.

Seeking to account for variances in the degree that governments politicize

the bureaucracy, most research has focused on historical trajectories (Dreyfus,

2000; Grindle, 2012), administrative traditions (Dahlström, Peters, & Pierre,

2011; B. G. Peters & Pierre, 2004), and the preferences of newly elected

governments (Lewis, 2008) as explanatory variables. Although this body of

research offers important insights, absent from such analysis is attention to

the actions of bureaucrats themselves; this, despite the fact that there are good

theoretical reasons for postulating that civil servants have a great deal of

interest in whether governments politicize the bureaucracy.

Drawing on theories of employee resistance from organization studies,

this article contributes to the politicization literature by bringing greater theo-

retical attention to the actions of bureaucrats. Hypothesizing that politiciza-

tion stands as a direct threat to the financial security and professional identity