Blaming Bureaucracy

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 “automatically” finds itself at the receiving end of blame. This book is the first to unpack these dynamics. For many actors, blaming the bureaucracy is the most convenient thing to do in controversial and conflictual situations-of which there are many in modern