Building the Compensatory State

An Intellectual History and Theory of American Administrative Reform

Robert F. Durant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000586879
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Contemporary public administration research has marginalized the importance of "taking history seriously." With few exceptions, little recent scholarship in the field has looked longitudinally (rather than cross-sectionally), contextually, and theoretically over extended time periods at "big questions" in public administration. One such "big question" involves the evolution of American administrative reform and its link since the nation's founding to American state building. This book addresses this gap by analyzing administrative reform in unprecedented empirical and theoretical ways. In taking a multidisciplinary approach, it incorporates recent developments in cognate research fields in the humanities and social sciences that have been mostly ignored in public administration. It thus challenges existing notions of the nature, scope, and power of the American state and, with these, important aspects of today's conventional wisdom in public administration.

Author Robert F. Durant explores the administrative state in a new light as part of a "compensatory state"—driven, shaped, and amplified since the nation's founding by a corporate–social science nexus of interests. Arguing that this nexus of interests has contributed to citizen estrangement in the United States, he offers a broad empirical and theoretical understanding of the political economy of administrative reform, its role in state building, and its often paradoxical results. Offering a reconsideration of conventional wisdom in public administration, this book is required reading for all students, scholars, or practitioners of public administration, public policy, and politics.

Chapter 1

Fuzzy Pictures in Our Heads?

Contemporary public administration scholarship has made significant strides in advancing our understanding of the topical areas that it has emphasized since the 1980s. However, it has largely marginalized the field’s traditional appreciation of the importance of “taking history seriously” in public administration research. With few notable exceptions (e.g., Cook, 2014; Peters, 2001; Raadschelders, 2017; Stillman, 1990, 2017), little scholarship has emerged in the field that looks longitudinally (rather than cross-sectionally), contextually, and theoretically over extended time periods at “big questions” in public administration (Durant, 2014a, 2014b; Durant & Rosenbloom, 2017; Milward et al., 2016; Peters & Pierre, 2017; Pollitt, 2017; Roberts, 2013).

One such question in the field of public administration involves the evolution of American administrative reform¹ and its link since the nation’s founding to American state building (for notable and insightful exceptions, see Cook, 2014; Raadschelders, 2017; Stillman, 1990, 2017). This, despite the major contributions of empirically grounded, cross-sectional, and historically informed scholarship (e.g., Adams, 1992; Box, 2018; Carpenter, 2001, 2010; Lee, 2008, 2013, 2016; Roberts, 1994, 2012; Schachter, 2010; Stivers, 2000; Van Riper, 1958; and others in the Public Administration Theory Network). As such, the public administration literature on this topic is largely atheoretical, metaphorical, and decontextualized (for partial exceptions in public administration, see Raadschelders, 2017; in political science, see Skowronek, 1982, and much of the American political development literature). Even Leonard D. White’s (1948, 1951, 1954, 1958) contextually rich, multi-volume study of public administrative reform focused on singular reform eras (and concluded its analysis in 1901). Moreover, although Dwight Waldo’s 1948 classic, The Administrative State (1984), was historically and philosophically grounded, reexamination of its arguments in light of developments since then has been rare (e.g., Rosenbloom & McCurdy, 2006). Indeed, more recent trends in the public management literature show a narrowing of the analytical lens of the field that rhymes in some ways with the early 20th-century scientific management focus. This, by failing to integrate analytically such traditionally important contextual factors as politics, power, and the law, and to marginalize comparative research over extended time periods.

This book addresses these gaps in subject, scope, and methodology by analyzing in empirical and theoretical ways the evolution of American administrative reform and its links to state building since the nation’s founding. In taking a multidisciplinary approach stressing intellectual history, it incorporates recent developments in cognate research fields in the humanities, the law, and the social sciences that have been mostly ignored in public administration. Consequently, the book also takes seriously Marcel Proust’s advice to pursue the voyage of discovery by seeing familiar landscapes with new eyes. It thus challenges existing images in public administration of the nature, scope, and power of the American state and its reciprocal relationship to the evolution of American administrative reform. It also challenges other important aspects of today’s conventional wisdom in public administration and finds paradoxes in the field’s development. Demonstrated in doing so is the wisdom of the novelist, William Faulkner (2011), who wrote that the “past isn’t dead. It’s not even past” (p. 73).

The book argues, first, that the image of a compensatory state comprised of networks of public, private, and voluntary actors (now called nonprofits) has always best captured the link between the evolution of American administrative reform and state building. Elected officials have repeatedly relied on the private and nonprofit sectors to compensate institutionally for a conscious effort to hide the visible size of government (especially the federal government) from Americans. Thus, the reigning image that contemporary networking trends are new is false: instead, they must be seen as amplifications of historic trends. Moreover, although the contemporary image of increasing administrative complexity differentiates it from earlier instances of this networking approach, the roles of Americans’ self-image and of administrative reformers in amplifying this complexity are typically overlooked.

Discerned from the analysis is a “legitimacy theory” of American administrative reform and its reciprocal relationship to state building that captures and explains these dynamics. The book also shows that deterministic views of the evolution of each must give way in public administration to a more structured agency approach featuring choices among conflicting alternatives. Specifically, the compensatory state has been repeatedly driven, shaped, and amplified since the nation’s founding by various elements of a corporate–social science nexus of actors. This nexus has repeatedly sought to gain, retain, regain, or enhance members’ legitimacy (and the expressive, material, and authority gains it brings) by promoting reforms based on instrumental rather than substantive (e.g., democratic administration and the law) rationality. In offering a “pulse model” of administrative reform derived from the analysis, the book shows how this nexus’ relative power has triumphed over proponents of alternate models of administrative reform and state building—despite uneven impacts and recurring disappointments with their results. This, because of “inefficient” path dependency (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010; Stinchcombe, 1968), a “pentimento effect” (Adams, 1992), and better resonance with Americans’ “self-conception,” exceptionalist values, and millenarian vision. It also shows how and why conflict and power disparities linked to legitimacy within the nexus itself have privileged larger over small businesses, urban over rural concerns, and economics over other social science disciplines in the minds of reformers.

The book also shows that, despite reform proponents’ consistent promises of enhancing democracy, their instrumental rationality project (IRP) has ironically contributed to citizen marginalization, and even estrangement, from government in the United States. Political theorist Harvey Mansfield’s (2001) critique of the social sciences applies to American administrative reformers as well: a misguided faith exists that a focus on “facts” and “reason” will eventually bring agreement (which is good), while a focus on values breeds political conflicts (which are bad, but reduceable by reason). But debate—or disputation—over basic assumptions, facts, and values is inherent in politics, administration, and a democratic republic. And without free and open disputation, incorrect, extreme, and heinous views and values cannot be countered democratically (see, e.g., Berlin, 1992; Pinker, 2002).

The remainder of this chapter elaborates on these points and sets the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical premises discerned from analysis in the remaining chapters of the book. It begins the process of seeing with new eyes and with a broader scope by reviewing the challenges from other fields to the foundational basis—viz., the peculiar stateless origins of the American state (Skowronek, 1982; Stillman, 1990, 2017)—of much conventional wisdom in public administration, including the evolution of American administrative reform and its relationship to American state building. After making this case for the compensatory state as a more useful image and accurate basis for understanding these dynamics, the chapter reviews how and why our current images in public administration of the evolution of American administrative reform are metaphorical, misleading, and atheoretical. This is followed by a discussion of why this gap in our understanding is important—specifically, because it distorts this and other key aspects of our conventional wisdom in public administration. After reviewing what is lost by not taking history seriously (and, especially, the constraining effects of American exceptionalist values), the chapter then reviews how and why a legitimacy theory of American administrative reform and state building is useful for understanding its evolution since the nation’s founding. Specifically, a nexus of business and social science interests has resulted in administrative reformers persistently opting since the nation’s founding for business and market-based solutions (i.e., the IRP) rather than alternative reform approaches, and how this political economy of interests has inadvertently helped create self-defeating and paradoxical results in our democratic republic and in public administration.

*****

In his classic book, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann (1922) wrote that the “pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside” (p. 19). Nonetheless, these pictures go unquestioned and, thus, distort people’s perceptions of “realities” deduced from them. This book argues that such is the case when it comes to contemporary discussions about the evolution of what Dwight Waldo (1984) famously called the “administrative state” in America (p. 90). Moreover, these fuzzy pictures have led to other misinterpretations of the evolution of American administrative reform since the nation’s founding. The essence of the administrative state is expert unelected bureaucrats in public agencies “tasked with important governing functions through loosely drawn statutes” that permit them to make policy decisions for society (Rohr, 1986, p. xi). And because of its European roots, the term “state” evokes the image that the source, scope, and power of the state resides in federal government agencies.

Conventional wisdom in public administration sees the creation and expansion of a modern, specialized, and expertise-based administrative state occurring in the 20th century as the inevitable consequence of the societal complexities of the modern era.² As the 20th century dawned, a major mismatch occurred between existing institutional structures of the state—typically called a “state of courts and parties”—and the socioeconomic, commercial, and military challenges facing the nation (Skowronek, 1982; Stillman, 1990, 2017; but see, e.g., Carpenter, 2001). Thus, the United States had no choice. It had to discard the nation’s “peculiar stateless origins” and create a modern administrative state in Washington comprised of hierarchically structured, expertise-based, and scientifically informed and managed agencies in the federal government.

Moreover, the narrative continues, the development of expertise-informed bureaucracies in the administrative state happened because no alternative was available and has not arisen since. Bureaucracy—in all its various formats (see du Gay, 2005)—was the “best way of getting work done [efficiently and with economy] because it is the only form of organization that deals [successfully] with [organizational] size, complexity, and the need for accountability”—what governing in modernity requires of its institutions (Thompson & Alvesson, 2005, p. 91; also see du Gay, 2005; Jaques, 1990; Meier & Hill, 2005; Perrow, 1979; Raadschelders, 2017).

Proponents of this element of the IRP claimed that the administrative state would do all this logically and objectively by (re)aligning administrative structures and processes to gain policy, program, and state-building goals. Reduced, if not alleviated, would be politics, demagoguery, corruption, and emotionalism from policymaking, administration, and state building—all dysfunctional characteristics of pre-20th-century American governance. Proponents saw the IRP as necessary for bringing “order” (meaning the ability to guide society) out of political, social, and economic chaos. They also argued that the IRP was necessary to advance the cause of democracy.

This deterministic narrative then continues that the administrative state apparatus based in Washington reigned until the late 20th century. From its Progressive Era origins, subsequent expansions of federal administrative capacities and power occurred through the 1970s, but especially during the New Deal in the 1930s and the Great Society in the 1960s. Yet, there began in the 1980s a largely Republican Party effort to undermine existing administrative agencies by reducing the size, scope, and power of the administrative state apparatus in Washington. They were joined by other, more positive-state critics who again stressed a mismatch between contemporary problems and expertise-based public agencies. Together, these led to calls by administrative reformers for “post-bureaucratic organizations” gaining efficiencies and responsiveness through another form of the IRP—the business-inspired rationality of markets (e.g., contracting), quasi-markets (e.g., enterprise management in agencies), and networks consisting of public, private, and nonprofit organizations. Wrought was a new kind of state: a disarticulated state (Frederickson, 1999) where state power was shared or coordinated within and among members of public–private–nonprofit networks (Durant, 2000; Kettl, 1993; Light, 2019; Milward & Provan, 1998; O’Toole, 1997; Salamon, 1989, 2001).

In embracing this narrative, public administration scholars joined those in other academic fields by using continental European notions of what constituted the state, its scope, and its power. The characteristics of the state were “unification, centralization, rationalization, organization, administration, and bureaucratization” in nations’ capitals (Novak, 2008, p. 761; Stillman, 1990, 2017). Scholars thus saw a laggard and relatively powerless US state in comparison to European nations prior to the 20th century, because it lacked a visibly strong national administrative apparatus (e.g., Boorstin, 1953; de Tocqueville, 2012; Hartz, 1955; Lipset, 1996; Lipset & Marks, 2000; Schlesinger, Sr., 1949).

This narrative is accurate to the extent one works within the continental European paradigm of the state. However, since the 1980s, a robust body of scholarship outside of public administration has grown and challenged this narrative and its accompanying imagery. So powerful has the impact of this research been that a “burgeoning historical revision” of the stateless origins thesis has occurred (see Novak [2008] for a comprehensive summary of this robust literature).³ Spearheading this revisionism is a multidisciplinary group of political scientists and sociologists in the American political development (APD) movement (e.g., Skocpol, 1992); proponents of the “organizational synthesis” in business history (e.g., Galambos, 1970); legal historians (e.g., Storrs, 2013); scholars in policy history (e.g., Balogh, 1991); religious historians (e.g., McLoughlin, 1978); economic historians (e.g., Chandler, 1993); students of political culture (e.g., Appleby, 2001; Bailyn, 1992); gender historians (e.g., Storrs, 2013); diplomatic historians (e.g., Herring, 2008); social historians (e.g., Katz, 1986); and researchers in political and administrative history (e.g., Carpenter, 2001; Zelizer, 2012). Thus, “historians can no longer depict the 19th century as a wasteland for federal governance … and … the roots of the twentieth century can be traced from these [earlier] decades” (Zelizer, 2012, p. 97). Even within public administration, Leonard White’s classic four-volume administrative history offered its own examples of the direct power of the federal government in the 19th century.

Grounded firmly in the pragmatist tradition of such American theorists as John Dewey, Henry James, and Charles Peirce, these researchers came to this conclusion by abandoning continental European definitions of the state in favor of examining governance in “practice” and in “consequence” (Dewey, 1935; James, 1907).⁴ They argue that, although the continental European paradigm of the state and its concentrated power fit the historical development of these nations, it is inappropriate to apply it to America. This, because of the United States’ very different historical, constitutional, and institutional experience of separate institutions sharing power, checks and balances, bicameralism, and federalism (what de Tocqueville called an “incomplete national government”).

Thus, the state should not be measured in the United States merely by the amount and scope of federal legislation, the number and power of federal agencies, the size of federal budgets, and the number of federal bureaucrats in agencies. Rather, the “reach of public authority” is the real basis for discerning the contours of the state and its power, not merely the constitutional and bureaucratic “organization of officialdom” in Washington (Novak, 2008, p. 762). As Michael Mann (1986) puts it, the breadth of the state and its power is comprised of those actors able “to ‘penetrate civil society’ and implement their policies throughout a given territory” on behalf of society (Novak, 2008, p. 763).⁵ Taking this “infrastructural” perspective on the state means focusing on the “institutionalized relations between the government and societal actors” who wield public policy authority—regardless of level of government or sector (public, private, or nonprofit) (Sparrow, 1996, p. 15).

Consequently, the federal administrative apparatus and the power it wields is one important part of the compensatory state, but it is only one part.⁶ The state that emerges from an infrastructural perspective is also comprised of bureaucratically structured subnational governments, as well as similarly administered private and nonprofit actors delegated authority to act on behalf of society. They compensate for conscious decisions since the nation’s founding to limit the visible size and administrative capacity of the federal government (Eisner, 2000a). Relatedly, what economist Mariana Mazzucato (2015) identifies as state entrepreneurialism (viz., providing research and development [R&D] funding for existing and new products and markets) has been characteristic of the compensatory state since the nation’s founding. Moreover, nongovernmental actors do these things without altering their status as private or voluntary organizations. This, because not all aspects of their operations are involved in wielding what is normally government authority and enterprise on behalf of society (e.g., certifying eligibility for welfare applicants and affording R&D money for projects leading to the Internet, Tesla, and iPhones).

This is not to say that national and subnational actors agree on policy or that the federal government always gets its way. They do not, and this is not a bad thing. Learning from the fall of ancient Rome and Athens, respectively, that both extreme centralization and decentralization produced regime failure, the Founders⁷ saw federalism as a check and balance on the power of the federal government and reserved certain powers for the states alone. Much as constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin (1952) wrot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Biography
• Acknowledgements
• Epigram
• 1 Fuzzy Pictures in Our Heads?
• 2 The Founding Era, the Corporate–Social Science Nexus, and American Administrative Reform, Circa 1730–1824
• 3 Inflexion Politics, the Corporate–Social Science Nexus, and American Administrative Reform, Circa 1824–1880
• 4 Industrial Agonistes, the Corporate–Social Science Nexus, and American Administrative Reform, Circa 1880–1920
• 5 Post-War Boom and Bust, the Corporate–Social Science Nexus, and American Administrative Reform, Circa 1920–1940
• 6 World War II, the Cold War Nexus, and American Administrative Reform, Circa 1940–1980
• 7 Neoliberalism, the Corporate–Social Science Nexus, and American Administrative Reform, Circa 1980–2016
• 8 Seeing With New Eyes?
• Bibliography
• Index