In a context of polarization, political distrust, and the 24-hour news cycle, Dennis Grube explores the changing relationship between elected leaders and appointed bureaucrats in Western democracies. Focusing on the United Kingdom, United States, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, Grube’s comparative analysis shows how today’s civil servants have increasingly found themselves governing in public. In this new era, historic norms and conventions are being eroded as bureaucrats have greater opportunity to make public interventions that challenge the authority of elected representatives. Megaphone Bureaucracy makes an original and convincing case that these new opportunities should not only be welcomed but also embraced by civil servants so they can provide an authoritative voice in public debates that are increasingly being framed by “fake news” and misinformation.
By making this argument, Grube challenges the conventional wisdom that civil servants have been politicized and constrained by powerful governments. Instead, he suggests that new forms of social media afford civil servants a higher degree of agency than they possessed in the past. The roles that senior public officials previously performed behind closed doors are now more likely to be undertaken on the public stage. How should public officials adapt to these new conventions? Grube answers this question by developing a new approach to public leadership he describes as the “Washminster” model. As a hybrid between Westminster traditions and Washington practices, Grube proposes that officials should accept greater responsibility for the role they play in decision making while also assuming an independent identity and proactive public profile. They should have and embrace the opportunity to defend themselves from politicians’ and media criticism as well.
Grube’s key point is that such a model would enable civil servants to actively seek and deliver “public value” by providing evidence and data to enrich policy debates. He draws on Jeffery Tulis’s concept of the “rhetorical presidency,” which highlights the importance of communication as a means for presidents to assert their agenda in the face of restrictive institutions. Grube suggests that his Washminster model would allow civil servants to fulfill a similar role of “rhetorical bureaucrats.” His key point here is that bureaucrats are already operating on the public stage, yet outdated conventions restrict them from assuming the tools of the trade that would allow them to exercise their growing agency effectively. Bureaucrats need to be allowed the space to communicate their knowledge and expertise to a wider public audience and thereby maximize their contribution to the democratic process.
Megaphone Democracy makes this interesting and compelling argument on the basis of wide-ranging new empirical evidence. Grube analyzes what he describes as the “visible manifestations of bureaucracy” (p. 52) in the form of written communications—letters, briefing notes, interviews and speeches—that provide evidence of bureaucrats’ behavior. These are then compared to bureaucrats’ interpretations of their own actions, which are found in 45 semi-structured interviews with retired mandarins from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The actions and beliefs of bureaucrats are then triangulated with public records and media coverage. Grube uses this new empirical evidence not only to develop his Washminster approach to public leadership but also to document the different ways bureaucrats must increasingly engage with the public. These ways include communicating in writing, assuming roles in public leadership, appearing in front of oversight committees, publishing memoirs, and negotiating both established and new forms of social media. These examples are used to show how Grube’s Washminster system is already in operation in many western democracies today and to make the case that we should rethink the relationship between elected representatives and appointed officials to ensure that bureaucrats engage in the policy-making process more effectively.
Megaphone Democracy raises several interesting questions about transparency, accountability, expertise, and political trust. Grube makes a clear and convincing argument that the relationship between civil servants and politicians has changed, which provokes obvious questions about how such a transformation can be explained. Grube repeatedly refers to the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and social media throughout the book and how they have led to increased scrutiny of bureaucratic leaders. But given how much of the book is focused on asserting the agency of public officials themselves, I wondered about civil servants’ own role in contributing to these changes. Have civil servants actively sought to adopt a more public role, or have they passively and reluctantly been thrust into the public spotlight due to changes in the media and political communication? This raises further questions about popular understandings and expectations of democracy; in particular, precisely where did this increased demand for transparency and accountability come from?
Grube’s proposed Washminster model also raises questions about expertise and political trust. Central to the argument that bureaucrats should embrace their newfound public role in the policy-making process is the assumption that these individuals are knowledgeable and trustworthy and will thus provide evidence and insight to counter the misinformation and fake news that increasingly dominate policy debates. He argues, “Generally speaking, levels of trust in non-partisan officials is higher than it is for politicians. They have a sense of ethos emanating from their position and public service institutions they represent. They also have professional experience in dealing with data and evidence” (p. 45). Given the importance of citizens’ trust in civil servants for Grube’s Washminster model to enrich democratic debate, I thought the book would have benefited from providing some more evidence and discussion of citizens’ perceptions of bureaucrats and bureaucracy. During the Brexit and the Scottish independence referendums, experts were often dismissed as being out of touch, and their advice was commonly portrayed as fear-mongering. Within this context, when the legitimacy of expertise itself is increasingly questioned, it seems important to think about how both civil servants and politicians can effectively engage the public with evidence-based arguments.
Overall, Dennis Grube’s Megaphone Bureaucracy proposes a new and intriguing way forward for senior bureaucrats to negotiate emerging challenges facing western democracies.
