Democracy, Bureaucracy, And The Study Of Administration

Camilla Stivers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813398099
• eBook ISBN: 9780429980664
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This anthology addresses several of the most central ideas in the field of public administration. These ideas are as relevant to public budgeting as they are to performance measurement or human resource management. Collectively and individually the essays explore what Dwight Waldo referred to as the ?political theories? of public administration: issues that are ultimately unresolvable yet crucial to understanding the nature of public administrative practice. How can democracy and efficiency be balanced? Can there be a science of administration? How should we think about administrative accountability? What is the nature of the relationship between citizen and state? Is professionalism an adequate mechanism for ensuring accountability? How efficient can or should bureaucracy be? What is proper leadership by administrators hoping to address political democracy and managerial efficiency? This ASPA Classics Volumes serves to connect the practice of public policy and administration with the normative theory base that has accrued and the models for practice that may be deduced from this theory.

Part One
Politics and Administration

In his famous 1887 essay "The Study of Administration," Woodrow Wilson advocated systematic examination of administrative processes, so that administrators could do the best possible, most efficient and businesslike job of carrying out orders issued by legislatures. Wilson (1887) argued in much the same vein as Alexander Hamilton had in the Federalist Papers: Running the nation required an administration with large powers and unhampered discretion, yet susceptible to serious public criticism. Wilson's views were somewhat more complex and sophisticated than the simplistic "politics-administration dichotomy" he has been credited with (or accused of). In any case, his article established the relationship between politics and administration as a—perhaps the—central question in the emerging field, and set in motion a long-lasting debate.

By now it is widely accepted that politics permeates administrative processes; but a fundamental divide still exists between two views. One sees administration, despite the undeniable presence of politics, as basically concerned with questions that appear to have right answers, such as: Given particular circumstances, how can administrators get the most bang for the buck? Or, What is the most effective way to motivate employees? Or, What managerial control system is most likely to ensure results? In this view, politics is treated as, in a sense, a contaminant of what would otherwise be rational administrative processes. The other perspective sees administration not as polluted by politics but as itself fundamentally political because of the power wielded by tenured, unelected bureaucrats in the exercise of discretionary authority. In this view, public administration is as much about wrestling with questions to which there are no final answers, such as What is the public interest in this situation? as it is with questions of efficiency or results.

These two perspectives have contrasting implications for the relationship between politics and administration. You may believe that all or nearly all the important administrative questions have right answers, though we may not know what they are yet. If so, you are more likely to see administration as a search for those answers. This could be through drawing on the results of rigorous scientific study or on a blend of research findings and judgment. On the other hand, you may believe that many important administrative questions have no final right answers, though they may have good answers in the sense that solid arguments can be made in defense of them. In this case you are more likely to see administration as encompassing a great deal of systematic reflection in addition to relying on empirical analysis. The two landmark essays in this section explore the tension between politics and administration; in the following section, we expand the discussion by considering various views of how to study administration.

David M. Levitan's "Political Ends and Administrative Means" appeared in Public Administration Review (PAR) in mid-1943. While it would count in any context as an important contribution to the ongoing dialogue about the relationship between politics and administration, this essay has a special resonance in that it was written by a practitioner during the thick of World War II. As he and his colleagues struggled to find effective ways of carrying on the work of the War Production Board, Levitan evidently sensed the utterly practical implications of a rather theoretical-sounding question: Can public administration be confined to a scientific study of techniques? His answer is a resounding "no."

The central point of the essay is that "democratic government means democracy in administration, as well as in the original legislation." This insight, Levitan argues, was shared by the field's founders, including Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow, Leonard White, and William Willoughby, but has been lost sight of in the quest for a science of administration. Levitan suggests that administrative techniques must not only be consistent with the political philosophy on which a government is based but also with contemporary social and economic conditions. The search for proper techniques must entail a search for ways to saturate administrative machinery with democratic philosophy.

Barry D. Karl's "The American Bureaucrat: A History of a Sheep in Wolves' Clothing," was published in a 1987 issue of PAR commemorating the centennial of Woodrow Wilson's essay. Karl provides broad historical context for the question of the relationship between politics and administration, particularly the extent to which bureaucratic efficiency and democratic government can be reconciled or harmonized. He sees Americans as fundamentally suspicious of bureaucratic power and willing to tolerate considerable inefficiency in order to control it. This complicates the quest for "best ways" of administration, since best solutions are determined by experts, such as scientists or other professionals, rather than through democratic processes. Karl thinks of American negativism toward bureaucracy as a reaction against the views of the framers of the U. S. Constitution, who deplored party politics and sought to keep government in the hands of an educated elite. This goal was later adopted in modified form by civil service reformers, Progressives, and advocates of professionalism in administration. But it has always sat uneasily in the context of American devotion to democratically accountable government. The result, Karl argues, is that citizens will always be likely to judge efforts to improve the efficiency of the bureaucracy on political rather than administrative grounds.

The issue of the relationship between administrative methods and political goals permeates most of the essays in this collection. As Wallace Sayre pointed out in a 1950 PAR essay (not included here because of space limitations), the central question in the field of public administration is "whether it shall strive to be primarily a non-normative science divorced from values, or whether it shall aspire toward a theory of governance which embraces the political and social values of a democratic society as well as the 'facts' of administrative behavior" (Sayre 1950, 5).¹

Note

1. Editor's references are on page 498.

1
Political Ends and Administrative Means

David M. Levitan

I

More than half a century has elapsed since Woodrow Wilson published his essay on "The Study of Administration."¹ This marked the first effort, in America, at a systematic delineation of the scope and meaning of the field of administration. The essay was soon followed by Goodnow's Politics and Administration, in which the subject matter of administration was again emphasized. Great progress has since been made in the clarification and systematization of the discipline brought to light by these earlier works. In fact, the outstanding development during the twentieth century in the field of public administration has been the evolution of a separate discipline concerned with the execution of public policy, as distinguished from the function of policy determination. The study of administration has become a study of techniques, a study of the "means" as distinguished from the "ends"—a concept aptly summarized in White's statement that "administration is a process."

This identification of administration with techniques, most elaborately developed by Willoughby, has been called the "institutional" approach, perhaps because of its resemblance to the approach of institutional economics. Whatever the origin of the term, the attention focused on administrative techniques, processes, and procedures has contributed much to the improvement of administration in the modern state.

But, valuable as the institutional approach has been for the development of administration, it has also led to the appearance of some dangerous tendencies in modern administrative theory. It is easy to advance from the concept of "administration is a process" to the view that its principles can be scientifically stated, that it can be developed as a separate science, and that, once discovered, administrative principles have universal applicability.

In regarding administration as a separate discipline no one, of course, claims that administration exists in a vacuum; it is generally recognized as a tool for putting into effect policy decisions—for carrying out the purposes of the state. But it is in the tendency to regard it as a tool which, once perfected, can be used for the effectuation of any policy decisions, for carrying out any purposes, that the danger lies.

Two specific instances may be cited of trends resulting from this view which have highly dangerous potentialities. The first is its effect on administrative personnel, present and future. If sound administrative principles and techniques are equally applicable in any situation, it follows logically that a good administrator need know only these principles and techniques in order to fulfill his functions adequately. And, in fact, the emphasis on administration as concerned only with techniques fosters among some present administrative employees the development of a bureaucratic point of view and a total unconcern with the broader implications of administrative action or, in the case of those with broader training, a deep feeling of resentment as to the lack of importance of their work. Almost every day in Washington one encounters some friend of college or school days who bemoans his plight with red tape, his total frustration as a result of his preoccupation with "administrivia." Most of these people have simply failed to see the fundamental nature of their work and its relation to the broader aspects of government and public policy, because it has so often been emphasized to them that their job is to deal with techniques and that broad questions of policy and theory are outside the scope of administration. They no longer search for the more fundamental. They see only a "paper-shuffling" job.

The same emphasis portends some serious shortcomings as to the training of future administrative officials. The tendency is clear. The growth of schools of public administration with their type of program is indicative of the trend with respect to the scope of the training of the administrative official of the future. The emphasis is on courses dealing with "Introduction to Administration," "Principles of Personnel Administration," "Techniques of Classification," "Principles of Budgeting," Principles of Overhead Management," and the like. This type of training, unless founded on a broad theoretical and historical background, will greatly influence the type of students who turn to the study of administration and as a result will greatly influence the type of administration. The administration of the modern service state places a premium upon administrative officials with imagination and insight; yet students with a flair for the broad and endowed with a faculty for assimilating the general will view askance the study of administration. There is a very real concern among many administrators regarding the supply of younger administrators—men with broad vision and understanding. Mr. Paul Appleby, Undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture, emphasized this problem in a paper read before the Washington Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration in the fall of 1942, stressing the importance for higher administrative work of broad training, imagination, and capacity for abstract thinking.

The second unfortunate tendency which has its genesis in the view of administration as a tool which can be used for the effectuation of any policy is the (again logical) extension of this idea to include the belief that administrative machinery can be transplanted from one system of government to another; if it works well in the one, it will work well in the other. Wilson has stated this belief succinctly:

If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it; and so, if I see a monarchist dyed in the wool managing a public bureau well, I can learn his business methods without changing one of my republican spots.²

The dangerous fallacy implicit in this view needs to be clearly understood in order to avoid transplanting into this country from other governments administrative techniques intrinsically incompatible with the underlying philosophy of democratic government.

It should be pointed out that the men who were responsible for the development of the institutional approach themselves realized the importance of the relation between the administration and the broad underlying philosophy of a government. The emphasis on administration as concerned with techniques and means rather than with ends has been so great that sight is often lost of an equally definite aspect of their philosophy of administration. Wilson, after stating the value of a comparative study of techniques of administration, showed that he fully realized the dangers inherent in transmitting systems of administration without regard to the local philosophy:

By keeping this distinction in view—that is, by studying administration as a means of putting our own politics into convenient practice, as a means of making what is democratically politic towards all administratively possible towards each—we are on perfectly safe ground, and can learn without error what foreign systems have to teach us.³

Even more pointed is his admonition that "the principles on which to base a science of administration for America must be principles which have democratic policy very much at heart."

Similarly, Goodnow recognized the close relation between administration and the underlying philosophy of the government. He stated clearly that the nature of the state is as much influenced by the administrative system as by the underlying philosophical principles, that "a system of government" refers to both its principles and its administrative system. "The administrative system has, however, as great influence in giving its tone to the general governmental system as has the form of government set forth in the constitution."⁴ And he refers with approval to the view of the German jurist and administrator, Gneist, that "English parliamentary government could not be understood apart from the administrative system."

Other students of the administrative process have also emphasized the closeness of the relationship between administration and political and social philosophy. For example, White, writing in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, says:

The general character of administration has always been governed by the physical basis of state organization, by the prevailing level of social and cultural organization, by the development of technology, by theories of the function of the state and by more immediate governmental and political traditions and ideals.

There is, therefore, nothing new in the recognition of an organic relationship between the basic principles of a system of government and its administration. In view of the dangerous tendencies already noticed, however, it would seem to be necessary to reemphasize and to clarify this concept. That a need for such reemphasis and clarification exists is made further evident by such statements as that of Schuyler C. Wallace in his Federal Departmentalization (pp. 231–33):

There exists a tendency on the part of many of those who deal with administration to concentrate upon some particular aspect of the general field and to ignore or neglect its relations to the process of government as a whole. . . . Those who deal with administration generally do not look upon the study of that subject as requiring the study of government as a whole—much less as necessitating a broad consideration of the economic, social, and psychological characteristics of the society in which they are operating.

At this time, when many are turning their attention to the solution of the problems related to the establishment of a postwar world order, a genuine understanding of the significance of the administrative and procedural is especially important.

II

Administrative procedural machinery is much more than a tool for the implementation of a political ideology. Administrative procedural machinery is an integral part of each political ideology—it is a part of a system of government.

Any system of government is composed of the sum total of its political and philosophical principles and the administrative procedural machinery established for their effectuation. The democratic system of government includes not only such principles as that government is based on the consent of the governed, that the individual is the basis of all legitimate governmental authority, and that the dignity of the individual must be preserved, but also the fundamental administrative procedural machinery to implement these principles. It follows that a system of government cannot be considered as a democratic system, even though its theoretical foundation be the principles included by politic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• Part One Politics and Administration
• Part Two The Study of Administration
• Part Three Responsibility, Accountability, Responsiveness
• Part Four Citizens and the Administrative State
• Part Five Professionalism in Public Administration
• Part Six Bureaucracy
• Part Seven Leadership
• Editor's References
• About the Editor
• Index