Holding Bureaucrats Accountable: Politicians and Professionals in St. Louis.

• Author: Reed, Leonard

Holding Bureaucrats Accountable: Politicians and Professionals in St. Louis. Lana Stein. University of Alabama Press. $19.95. Lana Stein makes another pass at the taxing question of how to make bureaucracies responsible to elected officials. Is it through patronage, detached civil servants, or wholesale reform of the rules? Some of what Stein shows is hopeful; what she says, however, is not particularly helpful.

St. Louis is a relatively "unreformed" city where the politicians have had more leverage than the bureaucrats-a phenomenon institutionalized when the merit civil service system was created in 1941. Since that time, the city's mayors have regained some lost ground by setting up new agencies outside the merit system and applying political pressure on the old agencies to hire favored (but qualified) constituents.

Stein has carefully scrutinized the St. Louis bureaucracy, distinguishing those agencies that are responsive to elected officials from those that are not. On the responsive side, for example, she cites the Traffic Division of the Department of Streets, which has erected about 1,000 four-way stop signs (compared to 34 in Kansas City) because the aldermen, responding to parents concerned about the safety of their street-crossing kids, demanded them. Similarly, she finds that building inspectors are responsive to aldermen's requests that individual buildings receive priority attention. To tenants worried about unsafe living conditions, that's an important and meaningful gesture.

Police and fire departments, on the other hand, are notoriously intractable bureaucracies. (Stein notes that in 1961, when New York Mayor Robert Wagner decided public housing areas needed more police patrols, he received a letter stating, "I, as police commissioner, having sole responsibility under the law for the disposition of the police force, will go on making determinations according to professional police judgment and with reference to the best interests of the citizens as a whole." English translation: Stick it in your ear.) The St. Louis...