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CHAPTER ONE: Politics and Administration

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Chapter Summary

Chapter 1 reveals that politics is at the core of the administrative process. This creates an impossible dilemma because although Americans are suspicious about the exercise of political power, they expect efficiency, effectiveness, and equity from their government. This dilemma has historical roots, and the chapter explores how the Founding Fathers were necessarily ambiguous about the details of public administration, leaving big administrative questions for later leaders to work out due to the politics of the time. The Progressives, in the late nineteenth century, grappled again with these questions and helped to further develop American ideas around executive power. Woodrow Wilson, among them, helped to outline a central difficulty in public administration referred to as the policy-administration dichotomy, where elected officials, accountable to citizens, make laws, but administrators, who are accountable to these elected officials, are the ones who actually carry out the laws.

Next, bureaucratic responsibility is defined. One element of bureaucratic responsibility is accountability: faithful obedience to the law, to higher officials' direction, and to standards of efficiency and economy. This accountability depends on systems of control made more complicated by the fact that elected officials tend not to desire clear chains of responsibility. Different ways to measure performance comes from these elements of accountability: fiscal, process, and programmatic accountability.

The other element of bureaucratic accountability is ethical behavior: adherence to moral standards and avoidance of even the appearance of unethical actions; standards that are higher than those of the private sector. The choices of administrators when faced with conflicting directions from controllers can be either voice (remaining in their positions and fighting for what they think is right) or exit (resignation). The challenges specific to government service, accountability, and ethical behavior often make it difficult to recruit the best people for the jobs, who often go to the private sector instead.