Public Administration in Theory and Practice

Raymond W Cox III, Susan Buck, Betty Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351003926
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Hailed for its timelessness and timeliness, Public Administration in Theory and Practice examines public administration from a normative perspective and provides students with an understanding of the practice of public administration. Combining historical, contextual, and theoretical perspectives, this text give students a truly comprehensive overview of the discipline and focuses on the practical implications of public administration theory. This substantially revised third edition features:

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• Increased emphasis on and expanded coverage of management skills, practices, and approaches, including an all-new "Managerial Toolkit" section comprising several new chapters on important topics like transboundary interactions, cultural competencies, citizen engagement, and leadership and decision-making.

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• Expanded part introductions to provide a thematic overview for students, reinforce the multiple conceptual frameworks or lenses through which public administration may be viewed, and provide guidance on the learning outcomes the reader may anticipate.

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• Still deeper examination of the connections between historic theoretical perspectives and current practices, to help students think through practical and realistic solutions to problems that acknowledge historic precedence and theory, yet also leave room for creative new ways of thinking. This expanded analysis also offers a forum for comparative perspectives, particularly how these practices have emerged in other countries.

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• PowerPoint slides, Discussion Questions (with a focus on practice), Learning Outcomes, and "Things to Ponder" at the end of each chapter that may be used as lecture topics or essay examination questions.

Public Administration in Theory and Practice, third edition is an ideal introduction to the art and science of public administration for American MPA students, and serves as essential secondary reading for upper-level undergraduate students seeking a fair and balanced understanding of public management.

Part I
Theoretical Foundations

What is the basis of government by bureaucracy? Upon what theoretical and practical foundations rest the work of civil servants in government? These are necessarily enduring questions that can be addressed only by a close examination of the character of a specific government and the role that appointed officials play in that government. The next two chapters, therefore, are about American bureaucracy, not from any sense of superiority about that form of government, but from the need to connect political theory to administrative theory. This would be an easy task if the political theory upon which this nation’s government was founded included an examination of the role of the “civil servant” in the affairs of state. Unfortunately, American political theory directs little attention to this question beyond a few somewhat vague admonitions of the need for good administration. In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton pronounced that the “true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce good administration” (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, 1961, p. 414). Two points are obvious: (1) the political and constitutional responsibility of elected officials is more clearly documented than that of appointed officials, and (2) the responsibilities of elected and appointed officials are intertwined. The difficulty is that the first point has produced a tradition that contradicts the second point. As Carl Friedrich commented, “It is characteristic of our age that legislation is looked upon as policy-deciding. Hence, policy-making in the broadest sense is not supposed to be part of administration” (Friedrich, 1941, p. 168). If, as Friedrich went on to point out, policy making is “continuous,” then fixing the political and constitutional responsibility of the appointed official is a necessary corollary to understanding how government does and should run.

The issue of responsibility of public officials, while closely connected to ethics, is not the same. Administrative ethics is concerned with the behavior of officials in the performance of their regular duties, while administrative responsibility looks at their relationship to their government and its underlying political philosophy.

A normative foundation for public administration is necessary to fit together the disparate political and administrative pieces of public policy making. These linkages can be established only through an examination of the concept of administrative responsibility. There is no simple answer to this task, and any conclusions we may draw might well be as much a matter of perspective as of fact.

In the first chapter of Part I it is argued that despite public perception to the contrary, American public administration does fulfill a constitutional role. In attempting to make that case, we must begin by discussing the impact of the Roman administrative apparatus on continental law, contrasting this with the post-feudal development of the English civil government. This will show how the early bureaucratic structure of American government was patterned on the English system. The concluding sections demonstrate how, in response to the industrial revolution and subsequently the welfare state, the national government began to rely upon the functions of the bureaucracy to implement policy. The final sections return to the question of administrative responsibility and, ultimately to a statement of the legitimate foundations of bureaucrat decision-making in government.

The second chapter of Part I explores the issues of ethics management and ethical management. It is asserted that ethical behavior (my European colleagues would call this integrity) is the means by which the normative foundations discussed in the first chapter are manifest in practice. The norms and values that are associated with more bureaucracies in representative democracies are the values that underlie ethical behavior and ethical judgment.

Learning Outcomes

At the conclusion of Part I a student should be able to:

• Define public administration as a academic discipline, with an emphasis on the unique aspects of public administration practice
• Explain why many academics define public administration as an unofficial fourth branch of American government
• How theoretical perspectives influence current practice and how current practice influences theory development
• Distinguish between ethics and integrity as both organization constructs and as differing approaches to public decision-making
• Explore how the ethics is first and foremost about decision-making practices
• Define the concept of administrative responsibility and how it is manifest in practice
• Provide examples of behaviors which are exemplars of competent and professional administration
• Define professional public administration

Bibliography

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. New York: The New American Library. 1961.

Chapter 1
Normative Foundations of Public Administration

Ancient History

Even in ancient times, bureaucratic organizations were part of the institutional design of government (for an extended discussion see Heady, 2005). By 1500 b.c., the Chinese Shang dynasty had a bureaucratic government with ministries. This type of hierarchical and ministerial government continued through many dynastic changes. Even today China retains many of the essential characteristics of the ancient bureaucracy. The Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Mediterranean civilizations were also governed by bureaucratic systems. The first formal legal code, the Code of Hammurabi, dates to the eighteenth century b.c. Egypt also had a long history of successful administration as an integral part of the Pharaohs’ rule:

[c]learly one of the reasons for Egyptian institutional longevity was the high level of administrative services achieved, ranking the Egyptians with the Chinese as creators of the most impressive bureaucracies in the ancient world.

(Heady, 1984, pp. 150–151)

Of course, the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church are the “dominant” historical influences on development of Western political and administrative institutions (Heady, 2005). Weber would not have found anything amiss with the institutions of Roman government. The Roman pattern based on control by citizens, hierarchy, and division of labor was familiar to Western rulers coping with the demands of a post-feudal age. Those nations with a history of Roman conquest, such as France and Spain, retained the hierarchical and functionally separated forms of government and designed their legal systems to reflect the Roman codified law. It was otherwise in England, which had never been completely controlled by Rome and, indeed, was abandoned by Rome in a.d. 407.

As its language reflects, Britain was not greatly influenced by its interactions with Rome. Roman place names and ruins still dot the countryside, but the political history of England is molded by Saxon invasions and Celtic disagreements. Only in legend does Arthur unify the nation, and in fact, after the withdrawal of the Roman legions, Britain divided into small kingdoms controlled by warring and short-lived lords.

Each titled landowner controlled his various manors absolutely, and manorial courts decided disputes based on their own individualized customs and politics. Some continuity was provided by the church, which despite its abuses, remained a training ground for clerks and scholars and the repository of learning. Often the church itself was a landlord; the larger abbeys and their abbots were as rich and powerful as any hereditary lord.

As the barons yielded power to the king, the king’s various courts and administrative offices became regularized (Feilden, 1895). The treasury developed accounting devices and routinized records, while the courts began to reconcile local court decisions with each other. This is the beginning of English common law, a system that, unlike the Roman system of codified law, developed piecemeal from judicial efforts to accommodate varying and often conflicting legal decisions. However, the royal power still rested with the person of the sovereign, and the legal system often bent to his personal desires and policies. When the feudal system in Britain began to decline, the organizational structure of the royal administration was riddled with nepotism, corruption, and incompetence.

As the absolute power of the kings waned and the middle class grew, a professional cadre of clerks and accountants developed to assist England’s mercantile empire. The notion of professional administration was familiar to the government ministers.

In the reigns of George I (1714–1727) and George II (1727–1760), the ministers became increasingly important because these Hanoverian kings were incapable of governing. The ministers were forced to govern because the kings could not; during this time, the king’s ministers began to meet without the king being present. Thrown on their own resources during a period of imperialism, the civil service became an elite governing force with strong professional standards. Staffed by the younger sons of the aristocracy (who could not inherit land and thus chose the army, the Church, or the government as careers), the British civil service evolved into a prestigious and essential arm of the British government, renowned for its impartiality, discretion, and professionalism. Reformed after the Northcote-Trevelyn Report of 1854 to include merit hiring and the abolition of patronage, the British model was the basis for the modern American civil service.

Bureaucracy in the Founding Period

Just as we search the Constitution in vain for references to political parties, judicial review, or executive orders, we also cannot find mention of bureaucracy. In fact, the words administration and bureaucracy are not found in the original Constitution; the closest we come is the admonition that the Executive “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed” (Article II Section 3) and Article II Section 2, the President “may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices,” which surely implies administrative departments. In Federalist 72, Hamilton defined what he meant by administration:

The actual conduct of foreign negotiations, the preparatory plans of finance, the application and disbursement of the public moneys in conformity to the general appropriations of the legislature, the arrangement of the army and navy, the direction of the operations of war—these, and other matters of a like nature, constitute what seems to be most properly understood by the administration of government.

(Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, 1961, pp. 435–436)

It is unlikely that Hamilton or, indeed, any of the framers envisioned the size and complexity of today’s bureaucracy. In 1791, the year the Bill of Rights was ratified, the federal government employed 4,479 people; by 2018 it employed nearly two million and contracted for the services of three times that number. Only four cabinet-level positions were created in the early years of the republic: State, War (changed in 1947 to Defense), Justice, and Treasury, all of which were established in 1789. Sixty years passed before the fifth department, Interior, was established. By 2005, there were fifteen cabinet agencies; two agencies with “cabinet” status, and another dozen departments working directly for the president. How can this large structure, which is not even mentioned in the Constitution, be reconciled with the normative foundations of American political theory? More specifically, does it need to be reconciled?

Informal Constitutional Amendment

Over the past several centuries, the Constitution has been formally amended only twenty-seven times (and ten of those amendments were the Bill of Rights, a condition for ratification of the Constitution), although thousands of amendments have been proposed. However, informal changes—fundamental rearranging of our political institutions—have occurred more frequently and with arguably greater impact. Among these informal changes are the power of the federal courts to review and to shape legislation, the virtual monopoly of political parties on elected offices, the greatly expanded power of the president and the phenomenal growth of the federal bureaucracy. While the impacts of these changes often raise controversial issues, for example, when court decisions overturn long-standing cultural norms, rarely is their legitimacy questioned, in part because the changes were accomplished in the early years of the republic. However, the controversy over more recent changes, especially those connected with the New Deal and the rise of the welfare state, revolves around their legitimacy as well as their impacts.

The increase of both the size and role of the administrative state is regularly criticized by the media and the electorate. Because each person’s daily life is affected by some government agency, the bureaucracy is a constant individual irritant. While court decisions or party activities may provide headlines, unless a citizen is directly affected, these issues soon fade from memory. Not so the bureaucracy. We must inspect the car, vaccinate our dogs, pay taxes, sign wills, fly on airplanes, watch (or not watch) cable television. The homeless beg from us on the streets, and at the grocery store we watch people use food stamps. Bureaucracy is resented because, for most citizens, it represents only a negative force. The protective activities we rarely see. And because we believe that government is for the people, we deeply resent government activities that interfere with our own freedom to act. Resenting the bureaucracy reduces its legitimacy.

In The Case for Bureaucracy, Goodsell identifies “dangerous manipulation of political power” as one of the central criticisms of bureaucracy (1985, p. 6). Among the basis of this criticism are two themes with important ramifications for our understanding of the connection between bureaucratic theory and representative democracy.

First is the Weberian concern for the preservation of parliamentary democracy. Weber sees bureaucracy as an indestructible instrument of power. Using this power converts the bureaucrat from a dedicated servant of the elected politician to the master. Viewers of the BBC program, Yes, Minister, will understand Weber’s concern. The bureaucrat, who has technical expertise, experience, and longevity, can at least partially subvert any political agenda his or her elected superior presents. The only protection from this behavior is the sense of responsibility developed by or forced upon the bureaucrat. The second theme accuses bureaucracy of an inherently elitist bias that protects the status quo:

Bureaucrats engage covertly in the formation and manipulation of policy, despite an official ideology that separates politics from administration. They are seen as taking bold initiatives, abusing discretion, forming alliances, and co-opting other centers of power in order to steer the ship of state in the desired conservative directions. In short, representative government is sabotaged, and democracy becomes overwhelmed by bureaucracy.

(Goodsell, 1985, p. 8, [emphasis added])

According to this perspective, bureaucrats have a vested interest in protecting their own agencies and jobs; organization theory leads us to predict more expansion and growth of bureaucracy as a way to increase each civil servant’s own prestige.

Rosenbloom (1989) proposes a third critical theme, the conflict between the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to Third Edition
• Introduction and Overview
• Part I Theoretical Foundations
• Part II Organizational Functions and Competencies
• Part III The Managerial Toolkit
• Part IV Outside Looking In
• Suggested Readings
• Index