Porous Bureaucracy: Legitimating the Administrative State in Taiwan

Abstract

Scholars and politicians have sometimes presented bureaucracy as inherently conflicting with democracy. But bureaucrats themselves are rarely consulted about that relationship. In contrast, I draw on interviews and participant observation to illuminate how government administrators understand their own place in the government of Taiwan, one of the few successful third wave democracies. The administrators I work with root their own legitimacy not in separated powers or autonomous expertise, but in their ongoing collaboration with legislators and publics. They define their own accountability not just as executing legislative mandates but as producing them in the first place, and they figure bureaucracy as a key site for political participation. I put these views into historical context to elucidate how bureaucracy can compete for democratic bona fides with common democratic indicators like constitutions and elections. This article contributes to scholarship on the ethnography of bureaucracy, administrative accountability networks, and the internal law of administration. In particular, I stress the importance of administrative culture as a central aspect of political legitimation.