Public Admimistration

Ifeoma Amakom

Mid-Term Exam

11th Oct 15

Question 2.

      It has been recognised for some time that the discipline of public Administration is plaque by a weak or absent theoretical. This has led to conclude that there is no such subject as Public Administration, no science or art can be identified by this title, least of all a single skill or coherent intellectual discipline. (Rosenbloom).        

James Q Wilson argues that public Administration faces a serious and seemingly irresolvable problem in continually seeking to maximize the attainment of mutual incompatible values.  There are multiple aspects revolving around the legitimacy of Public Administration first and foremost as an acceptable field of study and secondly as an acceptable field of practice.

       Federalist and anti-federalist debate  that since the constitution didn’t directly mention the creation of an administrative system but instead focused on the separation of power, which in turn has produced the ambiguities of whether Public Administration is legitimate or not. They argue that the founding fathers when they drafted the constitution and designed the three branches of government with checks and balances mechanism, left out Public Administration because they believe it wasn’t a democratic process due to its  hieratical structure and therefore didn’t  have a legitimate place in government. The reason is because the constitution regards people as not always rational and must rely on formal rules and structure, and government establishes its legitimacy through the federalist view. Other scholars like Rohr suggest that the legitimacy problem occurs due to different interpretation of the constitution, and the solution to government legitimacy problem is Public Administration since administrators are closer to the people.

    Due to the legitimacy crisis, the field of Public Administration has been open to different interpretations and definitions by scholars, practitioners and students; the identity crisis resides in their perception towards different governance approaches: in traditional governance, the method is command and control; in marketing governance, the method is self-interest; and in collaboration governance, the method is trust and negotiation. How administrators identify which approach should take depend on their beliefs and perception. On the other hand, the methodological aspect of identity crisis in the academic study of Public Administration revolving around whether Public Administration is an art that surround different values and perspectives; or a science that focus on analyzing facts.  

     In an effort to address the legitimacy crisis that engulfed public administration a new school of scholars  emerged, each seeking to give public administration some form of validation. The contemporary seeks to give public administration its legitimacy by diving it into three approaches to answer the basic question of what is Public Administration. Each of these approaches has respected intellectual, traditional, emphasizing different values, and promoting different types of organizational structure. One of the new approaches is conveniently labelled managerial (Fredrick Taylor), political (Paul Appleby) and legal (Frank Good now), these directions tend to follow the pattern of the separation of power established by the constitution.

The presidency has taken on a vast number of roles and functions but a major feature of its constitutional power is to make sure that the laws are faithfully executed. This is largely the role of implementation, which is the focus of the managerial approach. The political approach is closely associated with the legislative concern. It views Public Administrators as supplementary law makers and policy makers, hence its emphasis on representativeness, responsiveness and accountability. The legal approach is closely related to the judiciary as its concern with individual rights, adversary procedures and equity.

 Critics of this view believe they cannot be synthesized because they are an integral part of a political culture that emphasizes the separation of power rather than integrated political action.

          The next came after the Minnow brook conference with a new definition of what Public Administration should be, championed by Herbert Kaufinar who believed that Public Administration is all about the pursuit of these basic values: representativeness, politically neutral competence, executive leadership and social equality.

   Some of the critics of the NPM have claimed that it’s all hype and no substance, a true product of the style conscious, also the assertion that the NPM has damaged the public service while being ineffective in its ability to deliver on its control claim to lower costs per unit of service. The claim is that it is a self serving movement designed to promote the career interest of an elite group of managers.

 Waldo strongly disagree with Public Administration as a value-neutral discipline that applies scientific method to pursue efficiency, he argues that efficiency is essentially a value also, and emphasize on efficiency alone will sacrifice other normative values.

     The legitimate crisis is a serious challenge facing Public Administration for scholars, lectures and students and i fear more important issues are being overlooked, as the debate of what is Public Administration and who a Public Administrator should be, the course will end up as a subfield for another discipline like political science or Sociology. I feel a lot of other disciplines don’t take Public Administrators serious because of its ambiguous nature, nobody clearly knows what a Public Administrator does and why they are relevant in the first place. I find myself constantly explaining and defining my course to friends and family.  Public Administration is clearly a large, complex and flexible field and maybe a single definition is not feasible because it means different thing to different people, Even though everybody feels they have valid points and even citing reasons to support it, the differences should be embraced and move on from that. Public Administration is fast losing its relevance if the disagreement and debates don’t stop. While the discipline of Public Administration includes various schools of thoughts with their different opinions, it gives both lectures and student a variety of options so they can decide for themselves what they believe the discipline of Public Administration should be, but the down side of this is that too much information might be over whelming for the students.

Question 3:

    In the words of Frank J Goodnow: politics has to do with policies or expressions of the state’s will. Administration has to do with the execution of these policies, lack of harmony between the law and its execution results in political paralysis.

Before we start let’s consider some of the definitions of Politic and Administration. Politics itself lacks a clear definition, the concept has been used synonymously with government, and therefore one might say Politics refers to what government do. “Politics is the authoritative allocation of values in the society” (Easton, 1953). Here politics refers to the formulation of polices as to who is to get what portion of societal resources, at what time and how. It is what political leaders are actually elected to do. On the other hand Public Administration refers to the activities of the administrative (bureaucratic) agencies of government that actually implement policies and programs. Notably, government policies become laws and these laws provides for the creation of administrative agencies with the mandate to implement these policy programs. From this definition it is clear to see that interdependency exists between politics and administration.