The Ottoman bureaucracy around 1900 was not as efficient as France or Germany in the same era. Those may be the wrong comparisons to make. Their institutions were probably not notably "weaker" than other large and comparatively poor Eurasian empires like Russia or China. It also varied by region. Central provinces like Thrace or Western Anatolia would probably be comparable to places in central Europe under Austrian or Russian rule. Further provinces like Yemen, Libya, or Baghdad would have less efficient ottoman bureaucracies.

Defining our parameters would help. The twentieth century Ottoman Empire had an efficient telegraph, railroad, and postal infrastructure. With terrain as mountainous as Anatolia and as vast and open as the Syrian desert and Hejaz to cover, it was less dense than most of Europe, but still very much presen . This supported other institutions: state run primary and secondary education (including for girls) that led to the recruitment of talented people from all over the empire to become trained bureaucrats, a military with a conscription mechanism that ended up being sophisticated enough to keep an army in the field long enough to effectively fight the British for 4 years in World War I, and local ruling councils that had varying degrees of local elected representation.Career paths in the military and bureaucracy were attractive and created a large class devoted to the empire over their home regions to the point where a clandestine organization of them revolted in 1908 and instituted a constitutional monarchy. The parliament that held elections all over the empire. Scholars such as Kayali argue this parliament was effective in distributing government resources to even very remote parts of the empire. Newspapers and journals in Arabic and Turkish were vibrant, even if the population of the empire was far less literate than most of Europe.

Their effective bureaucracy had a dark side. The Ottoman bureaucracy was effective at keeping statistics and resetting refugee Muslims from Europe and the Caucasus. They repurposed those skills to effeciently exterminate the Armenians of Anatolia in the first modern genocide.

By World War I, the Ottomans had a bureaucracy and institutions at a level comparable to their neighbors such as Russia. They had been running a parliament that (although increasingly autocratic) had been responding to the demands of the population since 1908. Representative local councils had been running in many areas for far longer than thathe. They were citizens in a state that was a member of the concert of Europe. During World War I, they outlasted the Russians and held off the British for many years, including the bulk of the Indian regiments as part of an empire that conscripted its citizens and appealed to their nationalism. Contrary to current Turkish amd various Arab nationalist claims, if you go to the graveyard at Galipolli today, you will see many, many grave markers indicating Damascus or Baghdad as the place of birth.

If anything, the lack of intuitions institutions comes from the deliberate annihilation of institutions by the British and French in the mandates. Arab citizens who had been educated and conditioned to think of themselves as citizens of a modern state were stripped of input in the rule of their own countries. While France and Britain were supposed to give assistance to teach them self rule, they in practice ruled them as they did their other colonies. Bureaucrats were brought in to rule from Europe instead of being educated from local populations. Sectarian and ethnic differences were catalogued then exploited to divide and rule. In revolts, the French turned their artillery on the suburbs of Damascus while the RAF pioneered bombing as a method of revolt suppression. The Ottomans had created institutions that were respectable for their time, although it is hard for us to picture that because the British and french were so effective at dismantling them.