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Understanding Public Support for the
U.S. Bureaucracy: A Macro Politics View
We examine two paradoxes concerning citizens’ evaluations of public bureaucracy in the United
States. The first is the truly great paradox concerning their general and specific views about the
performance of public agencies. We have long known that Americans express profound reservations
about the quality of work of public sector bureaucracies in general. The laments are numerous and at
times seemingly inconsistent. Bureaucracy is as often seen as too powerful and machine-like as it is
viewed as clumsy, unresponsive, inefficient, and hopeless mired in red tape (Goodsell 1994). At the same
time, generations of polls indicate that Americans routinely support more or the same level of public
services (Bennett and Bennett 1994, 79-108) and that they tend to be highly satisfied with their specific
encounters with public agencies (for a review of these many studies, see Goodsell 1994, 25-49). This
paradox has long been noted. But a second paradox is less commonly recognized. That is, in trying to
understand why Americans hate bureaucracy while respecting the public employees they interact with,
scholars have focused almost exclusively on one side of issue – examining citizen interactions with
particular agencies (Katz, Gutek, Kahn, and Barton 1975; Alvarez and Brehm 1998). The contexts of
these studies are by their nature narrow and highly specific to each agency. In contrast, very few studies
have been conducted on understanding variations in citizens’ overall approval of bureaucracy.
Implicit in this lack of attention to overall views about bureaucracy is an assumption that it is a
constant, a collection of ever present background presumptions that citizens maintain at a deep symbolic
level. This assumption is not, of course, entirely without foundation. Bureaucracy as a negative symbol
is firmly seated in American political culture. Still, assuming that global views about bureaucracy are a
constant against which to analyze specific encounters with bureaucracy seems inappropriate. As Alvarez
and Brehm (1998, 447) noted, to really understand the first great paradox noted above, we must first step
back and “understand the processes that help shape public opinion [about the bureaucracy] at the macro
level.” Such studies might be conducted at several different levels of analysis. Bennett and Bennett
Convention