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Emerging Conflicts in the Doctrines of Public Administration*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Herbert Kaufman
Herbert Kaufman
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

As a self-conscious discipline among the cluster of specialties or “fields” encompassed by political science, public administration came late and grew fast. Its recent arrival and rapid growth sometimes obscure the fact that its origins are to be found in a process of experimentation with governmental structure that long preceded the appearance of public administration as a subject of systematic study and is likely to continue as long as the nation exists. This process of experimentation goes on vigorously today, and the development of new forms is generating discord more profound and far-reaching than any that has ever hitherto divided students of public administration. It is with the sources and significance of that discord that this paper is concerned.

The central thesis of this paper is that an examination of the administrative institutions of this country suggests that they have been organized and operated in pursuit successively of three values, here designated representativeness, neutral competence, and executive leadership.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 1956 , pp. 1057 - 1073
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1956

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Footnotes

*

This is a revision of a paper prepared for the Panel on “The Study of Public Administration Since Woodrow Wilson” at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association on September 7, 1956, at Washington, D. C.

References

1 “Although the art of administration has been practiced for centuries, it has not been widely written about until recent times …. The study of public administration has advanced to an extraordinary degree since 1920 …. (T)he study of public administration is still primarily American.” White, Leonard D., Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 4th edition (New York, 1955), pp. 9, 10, 11 Google Scholar.

2 To be sure, the three values, which will be examined in turn, are not the only ones to be fulfilled by the governmental system, but the design and functioning of the government have been such that these appear to have received prime stress in the ordering of our political life.

3 It is impossible to date any of the periods with precision, except arbitrarily, and it is probably unnecessary to do so for most purposes, but their origins can be identified, and so, roughly, can their zeniths.

4 New York and Massachusetts. These states provided important models for the federal executive, which ultimately was set up as an even stronger—and perhaps better —office than its prototypes.

5 There were notable exceptions of course. Cleveland became President after serving as Governor of New York, Hayes and McKinley had both been Governors of Ohio before moving to the White House, and other governors became influential in national politics. As a general rule, however, the governorship was not a springboard to power or prominence.

6 Proponents of this value generally did not demean representative institutions; on the contrary, they claimed their programs would strengthen those institutions by rationalizing governmental operations and improving their quality to such an extent that elected officers would be in a position to exert greater control over policy than they ever could hope to do in the prevailing political jungle. The case for neutral competence has normally been made not as an alternative to representativeness, but as a fulfillment of it.

The disillusionment of some was so thorough, however, that they lost faith completely in representativeness, in the capacity of a people to rule themselves, and returned to advocacy of rule by an aristocracy of talent. Civil service reform was, in fact, a movement which found its leaders among the grandsons and great-grandsons of the “Patricians” of early days, among the “Old Whigs” and their sons, among those who had been enamored of, or grew up under, British or German or French institutions (for example, the Adamses, God kin, Schurz, Villard, Rosengarton), and among the urban mercantile and older businesses or professions rather than among the new industrialists. Distrust of the populace may still be observed in some modern writers and even in some current supporters of the neutral competence idea, but, for the most part, the concept of representation was so deeply ingrained in American thinking—and, indeed, in American emotions, for the word has become a revered one—that few dare to attack it openly whatever their beliefs may be.

7 The states and localities were slow to follow suit. By the turn of the century, only two states had enacted civil service legislation and only a few of the largest cities. Even today, the formal merit system still has a long way to go at these levels: states and localities remain the prime targets of the civil service reformers. But they have made some impressive gains during the last quarter-century, and the idea is still spreading.

8 Criticisms, that is to say, of the fragmentation “in general.” When it came to the particular fragments over which they exerted their greatest influence, legislators, bureaucrats, party organizers, and interest groups were often defensive of their special positions and hostile to integrating remedies which might disturb their control.

9 Party bosses occasionally did serve this function, but only occasionally, for it must be remembered that our political parties are really congeries of smaller organizations in most places and therefore hardly equipped to provide governmental integration. Besides, they were phenomena from which governmental designers were seeking to deliver the governmental process.

10 And no clearer or more scholarly justifications of this value than Herring, E. Pendleton, Public Administration and the Public Interest (New York, 1936)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 This point of view received additional support at the state level, although in restrained tones, from Fesler, James W. in his The Independence of State Regulatory Commissions (Chicago, 1942)Google Scholar.

12 See also, for example, Key, V. O. Jr., “Government Corporations,” in Marx, Fritz M., ed., Elements of Public Administration (New York, 1946)Google Scholar.

13 To be sure, the Committee also advocated expansion of the merit system, and restated the argument that stronger executive leadership would mean greater popular control of government (i.e., representativeness), thus indicating how deep-seated these parallel values were. But this cannot obscure the basic premises of the Committee's Report, nor negate its general impact: it is overwhelmingly for executive leadership in sentiment.

14 “Merit system” and “spoils system,” as used in this section of this paper, include, but are not restricted to, personnel management. Patronage, it will be seen, is but one aspect—albeit the principal one—of spoils, which includes contracts, purchases, and other “favors.” The remedies of the reformers were aimed at every aspect.

15 Staff Report on Civil Service, State of New York Legislative Document No. 42 (1953); Modern Management for the City of New York (1953), Vol. 2, pp. 216 ff.Google Scholar; The Federal Government Service (New York: Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, 1954)Google Scholar, with special emphasis on Chapter 2, “The President, Congress, and the Federal Government Service,” by Herman M. Somers.

16 Cf., Powell, Norman J., Personnel Administration in Government (New York, 1956), pp. 164–71Google Scholar.

17 E.g., Somers, Herman M., “Some Reservations about the Senior Civil Service,” Personnel Administration, Vol. 19, pp. 10 ff. (January-February, 1956)Google Scholar; and Van Riper, Paul P., The Dialectics of the Civil Service (mimeo., Cornell University, 1956)Google Scholar.

18 See the papers (mimeo.) delivered by Harlan Cleveland and Wallace S. Sayre at the Conference on the Political Executive, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton, New Jersey, March, 1956.

19 See Temporary (New York) State Commission to Study the Organizational Structure of the Government of the City of New York, Four Steps to Better Government of New York City (1953), Chapter 2; Sayre, Wallace S., “The General Manager Idea for Large Cities,” Public Administration Review, Vol. 14, pp. 253 ff. (Autumn, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 There would seem to be an emergent split within this group. Some backers of a professionalized public service are apparently thinking in terms of a corps of administrative generalists to occupy the top levels of administrative agencies regardless of agency subject matter. Others seem to conceive of an administrative elite of occupational specialists—engineers, lawyers, doctors, social workers, foresters, etc.

21 One may even hazard the guess that the American Society for Public Administration will remain firmly in the hands of the neutral competence group while the executive leadership school in public administration looks more and more to the American Political Science Association as its forum.

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