User talk:A10brown

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[edit] Controlling the Bureaucracy

Hi Adam,

I read your personal page introduction and I read you edition at "Bureaucracy" article. I understood you professional interest is somewhat in regard the administrative service and government. In your last enter you mentioned about how much the elected government can control the bureaucrats, as the administrative service is more informed then the elected people.

I am wondering about the option of control the bureaucrats by regular people rather. You see, for example in Canada there are the standards to answer for citizen question in fifteen days, or send a letter with promise to answer in particular period because some unusual circumstances push for that. However this is only standard there is no legal responsibility to respect such standard, so in practice the bureaucrats have infinitive time to answer. In fact the infinity is the standard presage. The citizen has to beg for the answers.

I send an e-mail to all members of Ontario parliament pointing to this nonsense and asking for introduce a legal obligation and legal responsibility connected to a standard. Guess what, from some one hundred of parliament representatives I got single thanks for my letter. Thanks nothing more. Thus returning to the questions for you: What do you know and what do you think about some control of bureaucrats by regular people? If anybody in literature consider making on the bureaucrats some kind of pressure from the public? Do not you think that this kind of vector is necessary in the, from presumption, self regulating democratic system?

PS. I will look for your answer here on your discussion page. Best regards, Edgar

(Forgot to sign your comment.) Two comments. First, if elected officials can control the bureaucracy, then presumably citizens can too--by influencing their elected officials. Maybe an individual citizen wouldn't be able to, but if a significant portion of the legislator's constituents favored some change in administrative actions, the legislator would have a reason to act. Second, citizens can influence the bureaucracy in many countries (including the USA), just not necessarily by the means you mention. I don't know that I would want to compel the bureaucracy to answer any citizen question in fifteen days--I'd rather have them do their jobs than spend time responding to what could be endless emails. However, under American administrative law, there are other means that citizens have of influencing policy.

But through all this, bear in mind that the bureaucracy shouldn't be responsive to a single person--only to groups of people. That's the way democracy works--it implements the will of the majority (more or less), not just of a single person. That's why much of the scholarly literature asks whether elected officials can control bureaucrats--presumably, elected officials read what the citizens (collectively) want, then pressure the bureaucracy to provide. Maybe that doesn't happen in practice. But that's the idea.

Regardless, I'm really no expert on citizen activism. A10brown 21:00, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for you answer. I see that rather the theoretics are not considering the simple interaction needs between civil servants and the people. This is what I consider wrong since the government officials are rather interesting to silent cooperation with bureaucracy between elections. Originally I am from post communist country and there existed strict rules to communicate the civil servants with regular people in timely manner. Finally I think that the first and only job of civil service is to interact with public, obviously it is not their rule to serve government officials but public interests. Secondly the bureaucrats should not have any opportunity to ignore common day issues since the citizen can not pressure on them by organized group and in extend trough elected representative -this to long and inefficient way. However I thank you very much for the answer. I hope to know how in the West Europe the obligation to answer of civil servants to citizen question is regulated. Best regards, Edgar —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.116.31.12 (talk) 00:08, 5 October 2007 (UTC)