This dissertation examines how bureaucracies in democratic nations vary across a set of key bureaucratic traits and how these traits relate to citizens' attitudes toward government. The bureaucracy is an important government institution for exercising public authority, but it has received less scholarly attention relative to other political institutions. There is no consensus on what attributes of public agencies are important in democratic societies. Moreover, previous studies emphasizing the role of bureaucracies often rely on cross-national indicators without rigorous conceptualization. How bureaucracies are similar and different cross-nationally also has not been systematically examined. This dissertation aims to fill this lacuna. To better understand and compare the administrative apparatus of the state, I propose examining how a set of specific traits are presented jointly in a nation's bureaucracy. For the empirical analysis, I explore the bureaucracies of the member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED). I employ a nonmetric internal analysis of preference data which is called multidimensional preference scaling (MDPREF). The underlying structure of bureaucratic traits and how these traits are presented in national bureaucracies are investigated. The results indicate that a set of key traits--independence from politics, representativeness, impartiality, competency, and career-based system--are emphasized variously in different nations. The findings suggest that bureaucratic characteristics are not unidimensional and that relationships between traits, as well as the relative importance attached to them, vary across nations. Based on estimations from the MDPREF model, I develop a new measure of Bureaucratic Profiles. A bureaucratic profile represents the relative levels of the key bureaucratic traits presented in a national bureaucracy. Substantively, in general, higher values of this measure indicate that the relative level of impartiality in a country's bureaucracy increases, and the relative level of competency decreases, compared to other traits. Using this new measure, I examine if there is a systematic relationship between bureaucratic profiles and levels of political support. Individual-level survey data from the 2004 International Social Survey Programmes is merged with a country-level dataset--including Bureaucratic Profiles--to investigate this association in a multilevel analysis. The findings suggest that the emphasis on impartiality compared to other bureaucratic traits is important for maintaining public support for government bureaucracy and regime performance. The linkages between political support and the relative levels of other traits are also discussed.This dissertation makes important contributions to previous studies on comparative public bureaucracies by providing systematic evidence on the similarities and differences of bureaucracies across nations. Further, it makes a fruitful addition to a recent debate on how best to measure characteristics of bureaucracies cross-nationally. This project broadens our understanding of the role of bureaucracies in democratic societies by showing what specific set of bureaucratic traits jointly influence citizens' attitudes toward government in these societies.
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