Various categories of bureaucrats may characterize the system, nationality, and time they come from.
Classical A classical definition of a bureaucrat is someone who starts at a low level of public work and does not have to express opinions of their own in their professional capacities. Such bureaucrats follow policy guidelines and rise to increasingly higher ranks within a bureaucratic system. Tax collectors, government accountants, police officers, fire fighters, and military personnel exemplify classical bureaucrats.
American American bureaucrats differ from some other types because they operate within a
republican form of government, and the political culture traditionally seeks to limit their power.
Chinese So-called
"Mandarin bureaucrats" filled important official roles in Chinese administration from 605 to 1905
CE. The
Zhou dynasty of to 256 BCE provides the earliest records of Chinese bureaucrats. In the 3rd century CE a
9-rank system developed, each rank having more power than the lower rank. This type of bureaucrat operated until the
Qing dynasty of 1636 to 1912. After 1905, the Mandarins were replaced by modern
civil servants. In 1949, the
Communist Party took control of mainland China; according to their theory, all people were bureaucrats who worked for the government.
European Bureacrats in Europe are sometimes called "Mandarins", the term stemming from the Chinese word for a government employee. Bureaucracy did not catch on in Europe very much due to the many different governments in the region, and constant change and advances, and relative freedom of the
upper class. Following the translation of
Confucian texts during the
Enlightenment, the concept of a
meritocracy reached intellectuals in the West, who saw it as an alternative to the traditional administrations in Europe.
Voltaire (1694-1778) and
François Quesnay (1694-1774) wrote favourably of the idea, with Voltaire claiming that the Chinese had "perfected moral science" and Quesnay advocating an economic and political system modeled after that of the Chinese. This system was modeled on the imperial examinations system and
bureaucracy of China based on the suggestions of Northcote–Trevelyan Report. Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in
Guangzhou, China argued in his
Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China, published in 1847, that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only", and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution
meritocratic. A Eurocrat is a bureaucrat of the European Union.
Prussian The civil service of Prussia, as developed under
Frederick William I () and
Frederick the Great (), acquired an enviable reputation for efficiency and consistency.
Russian Tsarist Russia (1547 to 1917) developed from
Byzantine, Mongol and German models a
Tsarist bureaucracy; it had a reputation for inefficiency and corruption. After 1917, Soviet Russia faced the problem of governing a very large country with a largely hostile inherited bureaucracy. The
Bolsheviks quickly promoted their own loyal party-members
to supervise and replace tsarist officials, but many issues of corruption and rampant
officialdom persisted among the .
Modern The digital age and the Internet have revolutionized bureaucracy, and the modern bureaucrat has a different skill-set than before. Paper forms and communications that had to be physically written on, moved, or copied are increasingly replaced by technologies such as
email and
HTML forms, which allow data to be collected, duplicated,or transferred anywhere in the world in seconds. Also, the Internet lowers the corruption-levels of some bureaucratic entities such as police forces due to social media and
pro–am journalism. ==Attributes of bureaucrats==