EFFECT OF POLITICS ON PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN AKWA IBOM STATE
EFFECT OF POLITICS ON PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Abstract
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. The question of how
public administration relates to the political process is of pivotal importance to scholars and
practitioners alike as it bears implications for disciplinary identity (and autonomy) and
institutional development of public administration. Despite a voluminous literature on the
subject, the question remains unanswered. This paper identifies three major schools of thought
on politics-administration relationship, and examines the state of research that has flowed in
three strands as historical, conceptual, and empirical. In the end, the paper makes an overall
evaluation and lays out some suggestions.
Introduction
The proper role of public
administration in the political process has remained an important question
since the emergence of public administration as a field of study in the late
1880s. In his famous article, Wilson (1887) outlined what later happened to be
called the politics-administration dichotomy, a theoretical model that
emphasizes distinct features of public administration vis-Ã -vis politics. In
Wilson’s (1887) words, public administration “lies outside the proper sphere of
politics.” (p. 210).
The politics-administration dichotomy rests on a
functional-structural view of government, dividing governmental authority
between elected and administrative officials along functional lines As such,
government is conceptualized as though it has two discrete domains as politics
and administration, with each one occupied separately by elected and
administrative officials. 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. The fading legacy of the dichotomy, however, has not ended
the controversy over the proper role of public administration in the political
process. This long-standing controversy is important to both academics and
practitioners because it relates intimately to identity of the discipline as
well as future development of public administration profession (Whicker et al.,
1993; Rutgers, 1997; Miller, 2000). That the stakes are high is one reason to
understand why the intellectual inquiry into this big question of public
administration has failed to come to a successful conclusion.
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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. In this paper, we examine these
scholarly efforts under three schools of thought, which are called separation,
political, and interaction schools. The two of them, the separation and the
integration schools, appear to stand as polar extremes, representing
fundamental differences among scholars with respect to public administrators’
political role. In the middle of the two schools lies what we call the
interaction school, which carries some features of both extremes yet offers a
unique understanding of how public administration does and should relate to
politics. Each school has strong advocates undertaking historical, conceptual,
and empirical approaches to their study and coming up with propositions to
support the schools with which they feel affiliated. This paper (1) articulates
the three schools of thought (2) analyzes past research that produced an
arsenal of findings and insights on policy administration relationship, and (3)
lays out some suggestions to study policy-administration relationship.
Politics affect public administration in a number of ways, including:
1. Line-staff
conflict: Every level of a bureaucratic, hierarchically organization tends to
believe that they know best how to effectively administer the tasks of the
organization as a whole.
2. Bureaucratic
Imperialism: Offices in any organization will have incentives to try to expand
their responsibilities in order to capture more of the organization’s budget.
3. Clientelism:
Organizations that serve particular classes of people or groups will cater to
their needs to the exclusion of more general needs or desires.
4. Suboptimization:
(related to bureaucratic imperialism) every subunit of a complex organization
will tend to envision its contribution to achieving the goals of the
organization as the most central, i.e., important, to accomplishing the
organization’s mission.
5. Goal
succession: If an organization somehow manages to accomplish its goal, it will
seek an new goal in order to maintain its continued existence.
6. Goal
displacement: Every organization really has two goals or missions: first, to
maintain itself (see immediately above); and, second, to accomplish its stated
mission.
Conclusion
The point is, contrary to Wilsonian thought, public
administration is inherently political because administration necessarily
involves influence.
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