POLITICS-ADMINISTRATION RELATIONS: THREE SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

The role of public administration in the political process has been of great concern since the emergence of public administration as an academic field in the late 1880s. Woodrow Wilson, in his famous article The Study of Administration (1887), outlined what later happened to be called the politics-administration dichotomy, a theoretical model that emphasizes distinct features of public administration and politics. 

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-war period, the politics-administration dichotomy lost some of its theoretical and normative appeal, and consequently, gave rise to development of alternative models. 

During the past decades, public administration scholars proposed numerous explanations and theoretical models in their attempts to understand the role of public administration in the political process. Their scholarly efforts are examined under three schools of thought, that are called separation, political, and interaction schools.

1. The Separation School

The term “separation” is used to denote this school of thought in that a group of scholars advance an agenda for separating politics from administration to the extent possible for both normative and practical reasons. The separation scholars tend to 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.

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 (1956) 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,” “administering the affairs of the [polity] with integrity and efficiency and loyalty to the [elected leadership], without participating in or allowing their work to be affected by contending programs or partisans,” and “maintaining a neutral stand on policy issues that divide the community”. 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 separation school defines clear roles for elected and administrative officials. Public administrators are linked to elected officials in subordinate position. That is, administrators look up to elected officials for policy direction, while making expert contributions to policy process by engaging in how to do questions.

2. 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. 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. 

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. The proponents of this school have rejected the subordinate, instrumental role of public administration in relating to elected officials. Public administrators are not just policy makers, but should also be actively involved in policy making. One of the leading proponents of this school Frederickson (1971) rejected subordination of public administration to political leadership.

Public administrators are recommended to equip themselves with these skills. 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.

3. 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. 

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. Furthermore, the interaction school seeks an expansion of the value set of public administration.

The interaction school allows a broader policy role for public administrators for mostly pragmatic reasons. The 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.

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. The interaction school makes itself distinguished from the political school, however: 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 accepting the role of administrative competence for sound policy making.

The interaction school develops a number of prescriptions as to what is acceptable behavior for elected and administrative officials. Partisan type of politics is prohibited to public administrators, while elected officials are not allowed to interfere with the daily routines of management. 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.

Conclusion

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.