Politics of Administrative Reforms in Developing Country: The Nexus between Politicians and Bureaucrats

Administration reforms are initiated to enhance the effectiveness and improvement of bureaucracy to address people’s demands and cope with the structural and ideological challenges. Bureaucrats and politicians are the key actors in this process. This article aims to analyze the politics and behavior of politicians and bureaucrats to understand how their interaction influences administrative reforms and produces hybridized outputs. This paper utilized secondary sources of data collected from research scholarships. The study’s significant findings reveal that best practices, new management tools, and techniques from developed nations are adopted and applied in developing countries without considering their socioeconomic and cultural context. Politicians and bureaucrats try to maximize their benefits in the name of administrative reforms. Thus, the process brings less benefit to citizens and generates unintended consequences, and eventually, reform initiatives become obsolete when the political regime changes. The study recommends careful adoption of reform initiatives, which are comprehensively probed and sufficiently modified in line with the reforming country’s socioeconomic and cultural context and positively granted by bureaucrats, politicians, and civil society.