INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION - Deneme Sınavı - 4

The politics-administration dichotomy traces to the origins of modern public administration. Woodrow Wilson (1887) set out the most formal and rigid version of the dichotomy by arguing in his seminal essay on modern public administration that politics should not meddle in administration and administration should not meddle in politics.

Because the politics-administration dichotomy is the primary assumption in the control-of- bureaucracy theory, the next section defines and describes the logic of bureaucratic control using the dichotomy.

Svara sets out the four-part model, which uses four categories of governmental activity (mission, policy, administration, management) and describes illustrative tasks for political officials and bureaucrats in each category.

In one form of this theory, the industries regulated or licensed (airlines, railroads, telephones, electric, gas, and other utilities) come, through time, to heavily influence or even to control their regulators.

First, the seminal research on client responsiveness theory was done by Michael Lipsky in his classic Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services.

According to Gruber’s research, the bureaucrats believe in democratic government and in political and policy control over their work, although they tend to define the legitimate range of these controls rather narrowly, limiting it to winning elections, passing statutes, making policy, and approving budgets.

This chapter closes with a review of the most popular contemporary theory of political control of bureaucracy: principal-agent theory or, more simply, agency theory. This new framework has been widely applied to studies in the influence of principals, particularly parliament and the president, and agents, namely, the civil service. The initial premise in this theory was that bureaucracies are either out of control or at least very difficult to control. The bureaucracy as if it were a maximizing or self-seeking individual or firm in a market. In this premise, the bureaucracy hoards information (information asymmetry), seeks autonomy, and shirks.

The assumption is that bureaucrats either cooperate or resist. Martino Golden argues that this assumption is too simplistic.

How do bureaucracies respond to political control? In their review of agency theory research of federal agencies, Wood and Waterman conclude that there are dynamic bidirectional relationships in which legislators signal preferences to bureaucrats and bureaucrats signal preferences to legislators.

Functional Description: Public administration is the work required by law and the processes and activities involved in implementing public policy decisions.

Politics is generically defined as the authoritative allocation of values, or the process of deciding “who gets what, when and how”.

The question of who should rule is one of the five key issues.

Waldo argued that administrative scholarship was itself driven by a particular philosophy of politics.

Graham Allison wrote the book Essence of Decision in 1971.

Allison articulated three theoretical models.

The bureaucratic politics paradigm (Model III): Model III explains government actions as the product of bargaining and compromise among the various organizational elements of the executive branch.

The theory of representative bureaucracy thus begins with the assumption that there are good reasons for public agencies to be organized the way they are (i.e., undemocratically) and that these undemocratic agencies exercise considerable political power.

Robert K. Merton argued that institutions structured as classic bureaucracies shape the personalities of the people who work for them.

Accountability: It is the obligation to explain and justify the reasons for the decisions taken, works and expenditures made in the management.

Administrative centralization is the determination of policy regarding public services, making decisions, supervising their execution, and execution of financial management and personnel policies regarding services by the central government.