What are the ideas and motivations of bureaucrats within a religiously contested society?
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852315574996 |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| Author | Karl O’Connor |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
2017, Vol. 83(1) 63–84
!The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852315574996
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International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Article
What are the ideas and
motivations of bureaucrats within
a religiously contested society?
Karl O’Connor
The University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, UK
Abstract
This article reports research on bureaucrat behaviour. Where discretion exists, do
primary associations such as religious, gender or racial identity guide behaviour or
are these associations superseded by secondary learned professional or technocratic
attachments? Using the theoretical lens of representative bureaucracy and Q method-
ology to investigate bureaucrat role perceptions, two distinct bureaucrat typologies are
identified in Belfast. The evidence demonstrates that an elite-level bureaucrat may
actively represent his or her own professional interests or, alternatively, may seek
out and actively represent the interests of the political elite as a collective. The findings
have implications for representative bureaucracy research as it is demonstrated that an
elite-level bureaucrat may actively represent something other than a primary identity.
This contribution also provides a useful insight into everyday life within a bureau of a
successful power-sharing system of governance.
Points for practitioners
Politicians and bureaucrats from Northern Ireland are perpetually being invited to
‘teach the lessons’ of their power-sharing experience. This article highlights the import-
ance of the elite-level bureaucrat in sustaining power-sharing regimes and provides an
empirical basis for those seeking to draw on the Northern Ireland experience of conflict
management and post-conflict governance.
Keywords
Belfast, conflict management, elite-level bureaucrat, public administration, representa-
tive bureaucracy
Corresponding author:
Karl O’Connor,Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, The University of Ulster, Newtownabbey,Antrim
BT37 0QB, Northern Ireland, UK.
Email: k.oconnor@ulster.ac.uk
Introduction
As acknowledged by Stanfield (1996: 15), we know ‘virtually nothing’ about how
ethnically differing peoples manage to coexist peacefully. Wake-Carroll and Carroll
(2000: 120) reiterate Stanfield’s assertion, reminding us that ‘we need to know a
great deal more about the ways in which diverse ethnic communities are sometimes
able to coexist in relative harmony’. Further, in one of the seminal contributions to
the conflict management literature of the previous decade, Varshney (2002: 6)
reinforces this belief, maintaining that ‘until we study ethnic peace, we will not
be able to have a good theory of ethnic conflict’. With the intention of expanding
scholarly understanding of ethnic peace, this research draws on public administra-
tion theory to help us understand the role of the elite-level bureaucrat in sustaining
power-sharing mechanisms of conflict management.
A multitude of studies contribute to our understanding of how conflict man-
agement institutions should be designed. These institutions usually emerge from
either power-sharing or power-dividing schools of thought. However, less is known
about how bureaucrats operate within these institutional designs. Accepting that
the traditional Wilsonian politics–public administration dichotomy does not exist,
elite-level bureaucrats must surely influence the success of conflict management
regimes. This case study examines their role perceptions, focusing particularly on
their representation perceptions within the power-sharing society. When a decision
is being taken, who or what do elite-level bureaucrats represent? As it is accepted
that identification guides behaviour in instances of bureaucrat discretion, we need
to understand if secondary learned attachments can supersede the primary identi-
ties of elite-level bureaucrats. Hindera (1993) defines two types of association:
primary associations, that is, those into which we are born, such as gender, race,
ethnicity and so on; and secondary associations, which are those that we generate,
or socially construct, for example, attachment to an organisation or football club.
The lens of representative bureaucracy is used to determine these representation
perceptions.
Introduction to the case study
Until 1997, Belfast returned a majority unionist Council, which was found to rep-
resent only one community, and even then, Bollens (2000: 230) finds the interests of
this community to have been poorly served, with local politicians being more inter-
ested in the Anglo-Irish agreement than in the everyday lives of their constituents.
In 1997, the electoral results left the non-aligned Alliance holding the balance of
power. The politicians were forced to cooperate in order for the Council to con-
tinue to function. Since 1997, power-sharing, relying on informal norms and prac-
tices, has governed the functioning of the City Council.
Bollens’s (2000) pre-power-sharing research, conducted in 1994, suggests that
policymaking in Belfast was neutral or colourless.
1
Bureaucrats, he finds, employed
technical rational criteria in the allocation of resources, distancing themselves from
64 International Review of Administrative Sciences 83(1)
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