Constitutionalism or democracy might serve the mutual advantage of only a part of a polity and might therefore be quite workable and enduring. Constitutional democracies have two major components: a representative system focused on an elected assembly, and an administrative system organized as a bureaucracy.
The former is needed to assure political responsibility and the latter, managerial capability. A politically responsive government that cannot manage public policies effectively soon discredits itself and loses credibility, becoming nonviable for administrative reasons. Similarly, an effective governmental regime that is not politically responsive becomes, in fact, authoritarian and oppressive. A head of government who is both politically responsive and managerially effective is needed to provide a bridge or linkage mechanism between the representative and bureaucratic organs of government.
For viable constitutional democracy to survive, its elected officials need to be able to keep the state bureaucracy under effective control. However, these officials must also permit their bureaucrats to exercise enough power-based on expertise and experience--to be able to administer public policies effectively, to share in formulating policies to cope with the increasingly complex problems of postindustrial societies. The representative system, therefore, also needs to steer a middle course between Charybdis and Scylla.
In order to see how these reciprocal aspects affect each other, we need to look at two aspects of any system of governance, the internal and the external. The external aspect of any bureaucracy is its political context-the rules and structures that impose accountability and that constrain bureaucrats to work in a responsible and efficient way. The internal aspect includes all the practices and features involved in recruiting, maintaining, and motivating bureaucrats in their day-to-day operations.
A comparative perspective on both the internal and external aspects of bureaucratic performance would be needed to understand all the major variables determining the viability.......
