Politics and Public Administration

I enjoyed reading about Tulsa, Baltimore and Annapolis discussing moving to the City Manager form of government. I do truly believe that it is the best form of city government. The problem is the need supporters feel to oversell the product. Wilson originally oversold public administration because he wasn’t able to fully articulate his theories and definitions of public administration. The problem for him then as now is the constant tension in the selection of a point for balancing between political issues of democratic responsiveness and administrative efficiency.

Still, Wilson was making a simple statement – “Seeing every day the things which the state ought to do, the next thing is to see clearly how it ought to do them.”[1] The “what ought to be done” was clearly a part of the American political system that Wilson wanted to preserve. What he wanted to change was the “how it ought to be done” part of the governmental system. Wilson wanted the American system of government to produce the desired outcomes and felt that bureaucracy joining forces with scientific management[2] would provide an efficient way to deliver the public goods and services.

Wilson could have been overwhelmed by the issues of public policy formulation, policy execution and monitoring and evaluation of policy outcome and failed to take any action. Instead, Wilson must have decided that it was better to use the separation between the political environment and public administration to change the governments of his time.

There are so many issues that get dropped when attempting to change form of government. Just the selection of the City Manager can make a huge difference in the functioning of the government. The charter organization and the Council's commitment to formulating policy and not legislating administrative orders. The expectation of total separation of policy and administration on the executive side becomes points of confrontation. The way schools teach government and make an elected executive practically a religious requirement.

Wilson, at some level, recognized the dichotomy of politics and public administration. He discusses the fact that there are no lines of demarcation and that there are problems of trying to separate the elements of each. I don’t think he believed that the pure efficiency of outcomes generally pursued by scientific management would adequately deal with the overlay of political environments.

Wilson decided to advocate a politics-administration dichotomy saying that administration would best be done outside the sphere of politics. This wasn’t a methodological base for orthodox public administration, but an opening shot at the existing spoils system.[3] Still, this dichotomy prompted the development of the so-called "Technical Theory of Public Administration." This tradition was based on a system that relied on hierarchy, unity of command, political neutrality, recruitment and promotion on the merit principle, public service accountability, objectivity, and probity. [4]

The success of our government depends on the quality of the legislation generated from the political process providing for the operationalization of public administration. Given the broad nature in which legislation is framed and the political climate within which public administration takes place, public administrators are often directly or indirectly given authority to frame the legislative question and then interpret delegated legislation. Due to the sociocultural factors of American democracy, its evolving intellectual expectations and its inferred values, democracy and thus public administration are not constituted by a single set of principles and concepts.[5] Being time and place bound, and acknowledging changes in our culture and levels of development within our society and country, public administration is forever in ferment and a state of flux. This is the nature of our system and is to be welcomed as it reflects the dynamics of our government and the discipline.[6]

The citizens of these cities should believe that the City Manager form of government is neither a paradigm nor a panacea, but more fairly represented by this Churchill statement "the worst form of government, except for all the others." The government seeks to "improve" things in terms of making social arrangements more just, but there are so many variables in the administration that they should start with modest expectations for success and work up from there. In the words of T.S. Eliot: “There is only the trying; the rest is not our business.” The City Manager and his staff is the government’s toolbox for trying.


[1] Wilson, Woodrow (1887). The Study of Administration, Political Science Quarterly, 2 (June):197-220.
[2] Taylor, Frederick W. The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Bros., 1911).
[3] Imasato, Shigeru. Toward a Public Science: A Paradigm Shift of Public Administration. Journal of Law and Politics (March, 1993).
[4] Dwivedi, O. P. Challenges in Public Administration from Developing Nations. University of Guelph, Canada. November 1, 2001.
[5] Jones, Chuck O. An Introduction to the Study of Public Policy. Brooks/Cole Publishing Company. 1984 (Third Edition)
[6] Abakholwa Sindane, “Public Administration vs. Public Management: Parallels, divergences, convergences and who benefits? ” (September 2003)