INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Theories of political control of bureaucracy, then, have a basic objective to explain and ensure how administration can be accountable and subordinate to the formally designated institutions of democratic decision-making. This objective implies the key challenge in this project: conceptually and empirically separating administration from politics.

The most promising framework in which to coherently distinguish and link the administrative and political elements of government is agency theory. This theory is grounded in economics and describes a contractual relationship between elected and appointed government actors.

Agency theory is grounded in economics and describes a contractual relationship between elected and appointed government actors. Elected officials are the principals in this relationship—they seek to persuade bureaucracy (the agents) to follow through on their policy preferences. Bureaucratic agents do occasionally resist the control of their political principals, but when this happens, it is as likely to be resistance in the name of the public interest as it is an attempt to undermine the superior policy role of principals.

In rejecting the politics-administration dichotomy, advocates of theories of bureaucratic politics were deliberately removing the keystone supporting the intellectual edifice of traditional public administration. The architect of the bureaucratic politics movement was, of course, Waldo.

In practice, administration is not about efficiency, or even effectiveness. It is about politics, and once that basic fact is grasped, the confusing jumble of agencies and their roles and relations to the rest of the polity becomes much easier to understand.

In public administration, the term “institution” typically refers to a public organization that can invoke the authority of the state to enforce its decisions. In this context, institutions are generically defined as the social constructs of rules and norms that constrain individual and group behavior.

New Public Management (NPM) is closely associated with conservative political ideology and tends to equate corporate values with democratic values.

Postmodern theory is a subjective approach to studying social phenomena that focuses heavily on language, the context of human interactions, and the social construction of reality. Postmodernists believe that there are no absolute truths and therefore that any given question will have several possible answers, all of which may be equally valid.

The father of decision theory is Simon, who laid down the basic concepts and logic in his classic work Administrative Behavior. At the heart of Simon’s argument was the proposition that the basic objective of any purposive organization was to discover or define those purposes and take the necessary actions to fulfill them.

Rational choice (also known as public choice) is premised on the belief that the central behavioral assumption of neoclassical economics is universal, that is, that rational self-interest is the primary motivator of purposive action.

The underlying utility of any theory is its capacity to describe, explain, and predict.

By doing so, it should provide a platform to make probabilistic assessments about the likely consequences or outcomes of specific actions (or nonactions) that reflect a more accurate understanding and a greater predictive power than arguments reliant upon intuition, common sense, political expediency, ideological preference, or individual experience.

Some scholars have suggested that comprehensive, useful, and reliable theories are not possible in the arena of public administration. Others have suggested that the fragmented nature of the field, coupled with the tendency of public administration scholars (and academics generally) to “work in their silos,” potentially threatens useful practical and theoretical developments.

The field is too broad, too disjointed, too multidisciplinary, too undefined for any intellectual framework to usefully achieve any of the purposes of theory.

Theories of political control of bureaucracy, then, have a basic objective to explain and ensure how administration can be accountable and subordinate to the formally designated institutions of democratic decision-making. This objective implies the key challenge in this project: conceptually and empirically separating administration from politics.

From a purely theoretical standpoint, systematic thinking about public administration is aided enormously by sticking with the politics-administration dichotomy.

The inaccurate portrayal of the real world represented by the dichotomy lessens the replicative, descriptive, and predictive capacities of the theory.

Waldo made a persuasive argument that at a fundamental level administration is a powerful form of politics and that any attempt to separate the two is likely to fail.

Rebuilding a firewall between politics and administration that can withstand the battering ram of Waldo’s critique is an extraordinarily difficult challenge. In answering that challenge, scholars have avoided the orthodox mistake of simply assuming a clean separation between administration and politics, seeking instead a realistic accounting of the working relationship between administration and politics.

The most promising framework in which to coherently distinguish and link the administrative and political elements of government is agency theory. This theory is grounded in economics and describes a contractual relationship between elected and appointed government actors.