Module 7 Political Science PDF

Political Science MOOC on Administration and Public Policy: Concepts and Theories Module- 7 Politics and Administration SCRIPT As a field of distinct systematic study, Public Administrati...

Political Science MOOC on Administration and Public Policy: Concepts and Theories Module- 7 Politics and Administration SCRIPT As a field of distinct systematic study, Public Administration cannot claim to have a very long history of trajectory. However, with the growing importance of government in the wake of expanding public functions, a need was felt by practitioners and academics alike for better management of public affairs through scientific studies and analyses. This need was keenly felt in the U.S.A. and an article entitled ‘The Study of Public Administration’ published in the ‘Political Science Quarterly’ in 1887 by Woodrow Wilson, who was teaching Political Science at the Princeton University, and who later became the President of U.S.A. is considered to bring in a symbolic beginning of a fairly autonomous discipline of study. Wilson famously wrote: “There should be a science of administration which shall seek to straighten the paths of government, to make its business less unbusinesslike, to strengthen and purify its organization, and to crown its duties with dutifulness.” Wilson’s contribution to Public Administration can be seen from four interlinked standpoints: a) His advocacy of a ‘science of administration’; b) His emphasis on the special nature of administration distinguishing administration from politics; c) His apparent predilection for private or business administration; and d) His early initiative for comparative study of administration. Woodrow Wilson’s advocacy that “there should be a science of administration” has to be seen in the historical context. Writing against the background of widespread corruption, ‘science’, to Wilson meant a systematic and disciplined body of knowledge, which would benefit the domain of politics. He was very critical of the fact that American administrative practice was devoid of any scientific method. By contrast, he thought administrative science was well developed in Europe in the hands of the French and German academics. Wilson felt, an important reason for the slow growth of the science of administration in America was the reigning concept of popular sovereignty – “the multitudinous voice called public opinion”. To him, more important than the debate on constitutional principles was the need for the systematic analysis of administration leading to the development of a ‘science of administration’. Because of this, Wilson wrote: “It is harder to run a constitution than to write one”. To him, the real challenge was not simply how authority would be defined, but how it was to be actually used on regular basis by those administrators who must operate the on-going functions of government and implement new policies. When Wilson said that administration was “removed from the hurry and strife of politics”, he meant, the need was to carve out a field essential for proper and efficient management of government’s business. His principal argument was that administrators could concentrate on operating the government rather than on substituting their judgment for that of elected officials. It was this basic idea that came to be called the ‘politics-administration dichotomy’. He sought to make a distinction between ‘political activity’ and ‘administrative activity’ in public organizations. Wilson maintained: “Administration is business and like business it does not involve itself in questions of politics”. However, Wilson was well aware of the fact that Public Administration was essentially political in nature. As he wrote in 1891: “Administration cannot be divorced from its connections with the other branches of Public Law without being distorted and robbed of its true significance. Its foundations are too deep and permanent principles of Politics.” Woodrow Wilson was a scholar-administrator who was deeply engrossed both in the practice and theory of government. His writings were conditioned by the tone and temper of his times. As Peter Self observes, Wilson’s basic postulate was that “it was possible to achieve a self-sufficient ‘science’ of administrative means, so constructed as to leave administrators perfectly amenable to political leadership (of any type) while remaining free of political considerations in the conduct of their work. Wilson’s theories may have been naïve, but they provided an ideological basis for measures which most people approved: namely the curbing of political patronage, the advancement of professional skills, and a tighter framework of internal administrative co-ordination.” This politics-administration dichotomy rests on a functional-structural view of government, dividing governmental authority between elected and administrative officials along functional lines. As such, government is conceptualized as though it has two discrete domains as politics and administration, with each one occupied separately by elected and administrative officials. With contributions from numerous scholars, Wilson’s rudimentary ideas have gradually evolved into a model of public administration that had tremendous influence on the intellectual identity of public administration until the mid 1940s. As a result of substantive critiques that followed in the post-Second World War period, the politics-administration dichotomy lost some of its theoretical and normative appeal, and consequently, gave rise to development of alternative models. The fading primacy of the dichotomy, however, has not ended the controversy over the role of public administration in the political process. This long-standing controversy is important to both academics and practitioners because it relates intimately to identity of the discipline as well as future development of public administration profession (Whicker et al., 1993; Rutgers, 1997; Miller, 2000). That the stakes are high is one reason to understand why the intellectual inquiry into this big question of public administration has failed to come to a successful conclusion. Three Schools of Thought During the last decades, public administration scholars proposed numerous explanations and theoretical models in their attempts to understand the role of Public Administration in the political process. Here, we speak of these scholarly efforts under three schools of thought, which are called Separation, Political, and Interaction schools. The Separation School The term ‘separation’ is used to denote this school of thought because the scholars supporting this school speak for separating politics from administration to the extent possible for both normative and practical reasons. The separation scholars view the governmental realm as divided into two zones, that is, politics and administration. They take a functional approach to analyze the relationship between politics and administration. The function of politics is to provide guidance, or what Wilson (1887) said, “setting the task for administration.” The function of public administration, on the other hand, is to provide neutral competence to the policy process. To them, elected officials provide political guidance through policy leadership and legislative oversight. Policy leadership links elected officials to citizens, while legislative oversight links them to public administrators. On the other side of the policy process stands public administration whose primary responsibility is to enable public policies into concrete implementation in conformity with legislative intentions and instructions. The separation school treats public administration as a world in its own with values, rules, and methods divorced from those of politics. As understood by the separation school proponents, primary values that guide public administration include neutrality, hierarchy, and expertise, which altogether refer to a defining feature of public administration: neutral competence. The overarching goal of public administrators is to provide neutral and competent policy advice to elected officials. In Kaufman’s words, neutral competence is “the ability to do the work of government expertly, and to do it according to explicit, objective standards rather than to personal or party or other obligations and loyalties”. Three constitutive components of neutral competence, neutrality, expertise, and hierarchy, help public administrators maintain distance from politics while ensuring their contributions to policymaking process. Bureaucratic neutrality encompasses both political and policy neutrality. More specifically, neutrality means that “public employees and activities be non-partisan, apolitical, and void of any particular policy agenda.” Expertise is given significant weight in separation school. In its best application, administrative expertise ensures competent and non-partisan contribution to the policy process. The separation school proponents rest their conclusions on the premise that public administrators are in possession of special knowledge and skills, and elected officials are eager to incorporate administrative knowledge and skills into policy process. The proponents of the Separation School express support for a clear structural division of authority between elected and administrative officials to eliminate or minimize undue political influences on public administration as well as potential conflicts. Hierarchical nature of the administrative organization helps minimize undue political influences over public administrators, while policymaking prerogative of elected officials proves to be highly effective in resolving conflicts on disputable policy issues. Political influences on public administrators are considered to be leading to corruption that is, making of administrative decisions on the basis of partisan political considerations. The leading assumption that inspires the proponents of this school is that “politics and administration work best as independent variables, capable of being improved in isolation without endangering or interfering with the other side” The school draws attention to the potential negative consequences of free interaction between politics and administration. The Separation School also advances a pragmatic argument that rational bureaucratic structure makes public administrators less effective in fulfilling the political function, managing conflict in matters of public importance. Both normative arguments (eliminating political corruption and administrative tyranny) and pragmatic arguments (fulfilling the political function effectively) lead the separation school proponents to embrace a functional and structural division between politics and administration. The Political School The Political School represents a group of public administration scholars that emphasize and support a broad policy role for public administration. This school positions itself against the Separation School and is characterized by outright rejection of the politics- administration distinction. The political school proponents consider public administration as an inseparable part of the political process (e.g., Long, 1954; Bosworth, 1958; Pfiffner, 1985; Miller, 1993). The political school takes administrative discretion as a point of departure to rationalize the policy role of public administrators. Of many reasons, vague and ambiguous legislations, lack of technical knowledge and resources available to elected officials, and difficulties in monitoring and controlling bureaucratic behavior are a few used to signify the critical role of public administrators in the policy process. Consequently, for Political School proponents, there are strong grounds to view public administrators as policy makers (e.g., Lipsky, 1980). The argument for political public administration is advanced on both normative and pragmatic grounds. From a normative standpoint, the political school advocates that public administrators should not confine their domain to mere implementation of policies, but expand their role to include policy advocacy and formulation. Directing attention to detrimental consequences of unquestioned obedience to political masters, the Political School supports that public administrators critically examine moral implications of policies prior to figuring out the most efficient and expedient means of accomplishing them. Assured by the fact that public administration has a constitutive character as well as instrumental, the political school searches for policy agendas that public administrators should pursue to accomplish desirable goals. Representatives of the Political School assign a broad policy role for public administration. For Rohr (1986), public administrators should work to maintain the balance between three branches of government, implication of which is that public administrators have autonomy to choose which masters to serve. They make this choice to safeguard fundamental values of the regime such as liberty and equality (e.g., Rohr, 1986). Some public administration scholars, representing the political school, rest their arguments on pragmatic grounds. In their view, political power in the U.S. governmental structure is widely diffused, and this fact makes it essential for public administrators to engage in politics, and build and maintain coalitions (e.g., Long, 1954). Abney and Lauth (1985), among others, even argue in favor of interest group-public administration interaction on the belief that interest groups complement the electoral process, which has certain deficiencies. The political approach to public administration rejects the subordinate, instrumental role of public administration in relating to elected officials. Moreover, for the proponents of the political school, public administrators are not just policy makers, but should also be actively involved in policy making. What determines the legitimacy of public administration is not a function of official authority granted to them by legislative enactments, but whether the policy goals they pursue are socially and politically desirable. Although there are some differences in the goals promoted as desirable, establishing and maintaining a democratic society constitutes a common ground that would unite many scholars in this school. To accomplish a democratic society, the Political School scholars first identify barriers and then propose workable strategies to overcome these barriers. Having acknowledged and even promoted a political role of public administrators, the Political School proponents turn to the art of political decision-making. The action question, for them, is how to best prepare public administrators for political tasks so that they can get things done. Numerous skills are offered as important, and practicing public administrators are recommended to equip themselves with these skills. In the ideal world of the political public administration, as envisioned by the political school, public administrators work with other members of the political community to search for effective solutions to the policy problems, in pursuit of their ultimate goal of a democratic society. The Interaction School The Interaction School is represented by a group of public administration scholars that emphasize a high degree of collaboration between elected and administrative officials while maintaining each one’s traditional roles and unique perspectives. In a sense, the Interaction School seeks a middle ground between the Separation and Political Schools. In the words of this school’s earliest representatives: As we all should know by now, politics and administration is inextricably intermixed. Both are central to effective action. One problem is to bring them together in a symbiotic association yet keep each in its proper place. The Interaction School acknowledges the differences between politics and administration in a number of ways such as logical and psychological differences between politics and administration, or dissimilarities in the perspectives, values, and formal positions of elected and administrative officials.. Yet, what makes the interaction school somewhat different from the Separation School is its emphasis on ongoing cooperation between elected and administrative officials in the process of policy making. The Interaction School allows a broader policy role for public administrators for mostly pragmatic reasons. Our attention, by this school, is drawn to the increasing complexity and dynamism in the political, social, and economic environment of policymaking, a fact that makes intense interaction between elected and administrative officials an essential requirement for success (Nalbandian, 1999). Excerpting from an elected official, Nalbandian points out, “hierarchy is of little use in handling those problems that require independence, creativity and innovation, connectedness, communication, and cooperation.” The Interaction School is less reliant on formal hierarchical structures of government that traditionally defined the relationship between elected and administrative officials in superior-subordinate terms. This school makes itself distinguished from the Political School, however: (a) it clearly views the elected body of government as senior partner in the relationship, thus requiring public administrators to fully remain accountable and responsive to elected officials, and (b) accepting the role of administrative competence for sound policy making. However, when it comes to policy and administration issues, the interaction school supports overlapping roles, reciprocal influence, and mutual deference between elected and administrative officials. In the ideal world of political-administrative world, as envisioned by the Interaction School, public administrators maintain a productive partnership with elected officials, partnering with, informing and helping them in the policy process, yet remain accountable and responsive to their elected officials. In the end, one should expect both administrative competence and political responsiveness to reach their fullest potential. Conclusion: In conclusion, it can be suggested that the controversy over the proper role of public administration in the political process is far from being concluded. Despite scholars’ best efforts to garner overwhelming support in favor of a particular school, the evidence used and the arguments presented have been mixed and inconclusive, far from compelling us to adopting the perspective of one particular school. Each school of thought seems to be equally powerful, and supported by a wide array of research approaches. In the end, public administration, as an intellectual enterprise, seems to lack an agreed-upon foundation on which further intellectual inquiry can be built. Instead, the scholarly efforts did and continue to flow in different directions that are inspired and supported by discrepant foundations. Some pragmatic steps can be taken to improve the communication between the three schools, and to help answer some questions, at the very least.