Political leaders in all forms of government must delegate policymaking authority to bureaucrats. Since this practical necessity can result in substantial authority by bureaucrats over society, concern about excessive influence by bureaucrats has a long history. Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, his eighteenth-century defense of a decentralized aristocratic society, offered perhaps the first argument that political centralization leads to a bureaucratic state and that a bureaucratic state is a distinctive form of despotism. Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, shared a similar concern about centralization and bureaucratic despotism, though his observations of the United States convinced him that decentralized federal systems could be useful mechanisms for preventing the abuse of bureaucratic power.

Max Weber, however, set the modern agenda for research on bureaucracies. In arguing that particular forms of bureaucratic organization were most effective, he also pointed out that “democracy inevitably comes into conflict” with its own “bureaucratic tendencies” (1946, 222). But Weber did not say how this conflict is resolved. On the one hand, he argued that in any form of government

On the other hand, Weber argued that bureaucracies are designed to serve the interests of the individuals at the top: