Overview

Political life in advanced democracies is steeped in negativity towards bureaucracy. Politicians, parties, and the media routinely blame the bureaucracy for all kinds of political, social, or economic problems. Whenever there is controversy to be processed, bureaucracy is often the scapegoat. While one might expect this negativity to be due to the bureaucracy's actual performance, or simply a reflection of more general frustrations with democracy, the truth lies elsewhere. We don't blame the bureaucracy so much because its performance is so poor or because we're fed up with how things are run in our countries, but rather because democracies are characterized by dynamics and discourses in which the bureaucracy almost

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9780198980155

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Markus Hinterleitner is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration and Political Institutions at the University of Lausanne's IDHEAP (the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration). He is the author of Policy Controversies and Political Blame Games (2020) and the co-editor of The Politics and Governance of Blame (2024). He received his PhD from the University of Bern, Switzerland in 2018 and held postdoctoral positions at UC Berkeley, Brown University, and LMU Munich.

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