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week1_lecture.docxCHAPTER 1 Approaching the Study of Public Administration
Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world—or to make it the last.
John F. Kennedy,
United Nations address, New York City,
September 20, 1963
The governor of a large state publicly disagrees with the legislature on the condition of state government finances, taking issue especially over the question of which state employees and services are necessary to cut. A police officer is injured and requires emergency medical treatment following a traffic accident while pursuing a dangerous driver who has stolen a car. A teachers' union rejects an attempt by the school board to charge teachers higher fees for health insurance coverage. The Lieutenant Governor of California and the Governor of Kansas publicly assert that National Guard troops stationed in Iraq are needed at home to provide assistance after the wildfires and tornados that ravaged their states. The chairman of the powerful state legislative appropriations committee in a large Southern state bluntly announces that “We don't want any more government.” To meet severe budget deficits, several states increase university fees and tuition for college students, cutting health care programs for the poor and elderly, closing state parks and recreation areas, and releasing prisoners before the end of their sentences. The city of Costa Mesa, in affluent Orange County, California, lays off nearly half of its employees. Record high oil prices contribute to an energy crisis that threatens major segments of the U.S. economy. Local government bargaining teams negotiate around-the-clock with a transportation workers' union in an effort to avert a threatened strike only days away. During the presidential campaign, a candidate promises to cut the size of the federal bureaucracy in half. The president and Congress fail to agree on federal budget priorities and, as a result, national parks must close, economic reports are delayed, and Social Security recipients fail to receive benefits.
What do these examples, all drawn from real-life situations, have in common? They represent critical aspects of public administration, one of the most important dimensions of the American governmental process and one with increasing influence both inside and outside of government.
Public administration in America today is a large and highly complex enterprise made up of thousands of smaller units that encompass the everyday activities of literally millions of citizens and government employees. The actions and decisions of public administrators touch the daily lives of virtually every American. The growth and reduction of government activity and public bureaucracy are among the most significant social phenomena of recent decades. The composition, mission, and size of bureaucracy have become the subject of heated debate among citizens, legislators, scholars, and practitioners. At the same time, politicians of every stripe have criticized bureaucracy at all levels of government.
Many politicians have run successfully “against” the bureaucracy: in 1976, Jimmy Carter promised to “clean up the bureaucratic mess in Washington”; in 1980, Ronald Reagan promised to “get the federal government off your backs”; in 1996, Bill Clinton declared prematurely that “the era of Big Government is over”; during the controversial 2000 presidential campaign, Republican candidate George W. Bush accused his opponent, former Vice President Al Gore, of representing “the government” while he (Bush) represented “the people.” As president, however, George W. Bush led one of the largest expansions of the federal bureaucracy in history to maintain domestic security after September 11, 2001, respond to natural disasters, and implement U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, President Bush was labeled by his political opponents as a “big government conservative.” Typically, conservative chief executives such as Bush, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush gain public support and win elections by criticizing bureaucracy and by pledging to reduce government; once elected, however, they must inspire and lead the same government officials to achieve their own policy goals and respond to crises. The task for George W. Bush was even more challenging because he centralized government functions and expanded both presidential power and the role of the federal bureaucracy as no recent president has, primarily because of his administration's decisions to conduct protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chief executives at all levels of government are elected by making similar promises and increasing bureaucracy to achieve them; ultimately, they are judged by the voters on their ability to fulfill those promises. The extent of Barack Obama's success as president depends almost entirely upon economic recovery and job growth, sectors of the economy that are only indirectly affected by presidential policies.
(1) a formal organizational arrangement characterized by division of labor, job specialization with no functional overlap, exercise of authority through a vertical hierarchy (chain of command), and a system of internal rules, regulations, and record keeping; (2) in common usage, the administrative branch of government (national, state, or local) in the United States; also, individual administrative agencies of those governments.
Our awareness of bureaucracy varies according to domestic and international conditions and situations in which we find ourselves. This awareness is usually higher before, during, and after a presidential election cycle; when we cast votes for other elected officials or fill out our income tax returns (especially when we have to pay additional taxes on April 15); apply for government loans to finance a college education; seek federal assistance after a natural disaster; or deal directly with the most visible street-level bureaucrats—“first responders” such as police officers, emergency service workers, and firefighters. We are less conscious of the role of bureaucracy under other more routine circumstances. (Throughout the book, key terms and concepts are highlighted in bold print, defined in the margins, and listed at the end of each chapter.) Much bureaucratic decision making is obscure or just not directly meaningful to most of us. Consider, for example, decisions by the U.S. State Department to change eligibility formulas for determining international student visas. Proposals such as these may be important to subsets of citizens (and noncitizens as well) and may even lend legitimacy to the final actions taken by public agencies, but they typically generate little media publicity or public attention by themselves. Some of the most important work of government agencies takes place away from public view. Yet everyone has a general opinion—usually negative—about bureaucracy and politics.
All Americans are far more aware of the role of bureaucracy in their daily lives as a result of tragic events such as September 11, 2001, the inept governmental response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the assassination attempt on U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, in early 2011. All forms of security have become much tighter, more intrusive, and time-consuming; international students enrolled in American universities are subject to more thorough background checks; university graduations, public gatherings, and sports and entertainment events have faced increased security precautions and added extra expenses as a result. The era of inexpensive and secure air travel that spurred the development of the global economy is over. Airlines and travel-related rental car, cruise line, hotel, and restaurant businesses worldwide are struggling to regain customers who lost confidence in the ability of government to protect them. Scarce public resources are being diverted from much-needed domestic economic development and social programs to bolster security for Americans who are now more alert and aware of the protective and service responsibilities of public agencies.
Regardless of our level of awareness (or frustration) concerning particular bureaucratic activities or decisions, the institution of bureaucracy sparks strong emotions among millions of Americans. It has even been suggested that the language of bureaucracy (its jargon) has harmed the English language as a whole. In one way or another, most of us are familiar—if not always comfortable—with government bureaucracy. Mention of “the bureaucracy” usually evokes a strong response; bureaucrats are unpopular with many of those they serve. Bureaucracy has been blamed for many of society's current ills, for several reasons. Government agencies are clearly influential, and in all but a handful of cases, bureaucrats are not elected by the public; thus they are convenient and increasingly visible targets who in most instances cannot be removed from office by popular vote. We hear a great deal about the growing power of bureaucracy and bureaucrats, the arbitrary nature of many decisions, lack of accountability, questionable ethics, poor service quality, impersonal treatment, wasteful spending and cases of simple incompetence. On the other hand, when natural and man-made disasters strike, citizens turn to government and its bureaucratic institutions for emergency relief and protection. Shifts in public opinion also reflect variations in confidence and trust in government, and are generally associated with government's ability to deliver services, maintain economic growth, protect citizens, and resolve basic social issues. Expressions of trust or mistrust in government largely reflect feelings about the condition of the economy and the incumbent national administration. Thus, as efforts to curb inflation bore fruit in the early 1980s, public confidence in government moved upward noticeably, but to a level still below that of the 1960s. Public trust in government reflects the national mood, which declined from the mid-1980s until the early 1990s. Trust moved up sharply in the mid-1990s as a result of strong economic growth and policies of the Clinton-Gore administration (1993–2001) (see Figure 1-1 ). As more citizens are affected by economic decline and job losses, their anger and frustration are focused on government and politicians.
power defined according to a legal and institutional framework and vested in a formal structure (a nation, organization, profession, or the like); power exercised through recognized, legitimate channels. The ability of individual administrators in a bureaucracy to make significant choices affecting management and operation of programs for which they are responsible; particularly evident in systems with separation of powers.
Bureaucracy often becomes a focal point of discontent not only because of its obvious discretionary authority but also because of the widespread perception of its mismanagement of scarce resources, its relatively obscure and secretive decision-making processes, and the degree to which it is insulated from or vulnerable to direct (elective) political controls. Protests against the actions of local school boards, taxing authorities, and police departments; impatience with inefficiency and red tape; and negative public responses to regulatory actions all testify to the intensity of feeling and, more generally, to growing frustration and a widening sense of distance between the people and their governing institutions. Our attitudes toward both public and private bureaucracies (that is, toward all large organizations) have been affected by the larger complex of feelings and reactions toward corporations, governments, and other major institutions in American society, such as business, labor, the mass media, the military, and especially education. Americans' confidence in our institutions has declined significantly since the 1960s, a decade of divisive social conflict, followed by the Watergate scandals and a decade of economic decline. The “taxpayers' revolt” that surfaced swiftly and intensely in the late 1970s was followed by decentralization, deregulation, and devolution of decision-making authority from the federal to state and local governments, in part as a reaction against perceived bureaucratic excesses. The 1980s brought a new Republican administration to Washington and optimism based on tax cuts, higher corporate profits, and less regulation of the economy. As economic conditions improved during the 1990s, public attitudes toward government also began to change for the better, notably in the form of rising support for government deregulation, tax relief, and reductions in government spending. Corporate scandals and the “downsizing” of many jobs resulting from globalization of the economy have significantly influenced people's feelings about their futures, leaders, and institutions in the early 2000s. President George W. Bush presided over a “Lost Decade” of unpopular wars, outsourcing jobs, tax breaks for the rich, and the loss of income for nearly 90 percent of the entire U.S. workforce. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 renewed optimism and hope for the future, but the nation has faced continued hardships and economic difficulty since.
FIGURE 1-1 Trust in Government and Views of National Conditions (2011)
To the extent that governmental activity is directed toward dealing with these problems but perceived by the public to be ineffective, public confidence is adversely affected. So, too, have been the electoral fortunes of incumbent presidents seeking second terms: Gerald Ford, a Republican, in 1976; Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, in 1980; and George H. W. Bush, a Republican, in 1992. Public trust in government is always a significant concern and, although the level of trust declined measurably during the late twentieth century, it increased in the mid-1990s and surged after October 2001. Since then, trust and confidence in both the Congress and the president have receded, related in part to a drop in public support for the war in Iraq. Public support for both Congress and President George W. Bush reached historic lows (38 percent and 28 percent respectively) in the months before the 2008 presidential election. 1
By contrast, support for selected federal agencies, such as the U.S. Coast Guard, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. military services, the National Park Service, and the Social Security Administration, has improved dramatically. Fluctuations in public confidence, respect, and trust appear to be associated more closely with the strength or weakness of the national economy than the political party in power. For example, a worsening economy in the early 1990s was a major factor in Bill Clinton's victory over George H. W. Bush in the presidential election of 1992. The Clinton-Gore victory in 1996, the first time in thirty-two years that Democrats had been reelected for a second presidential term, reflected a positive national mood about the economy, lower federal budget deficits, job growth, and continued low rates of inflation. The election also reinforced a public preference for “divided government,” with Republicans maintaining majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate as well as many statehouses. George W. Bush was first elected president in 2000 without strong support or a majority of popular votes in one of the closest elections in American history. President Bush was reelected in 2004 by wider electoral and popular vote margins. During his second term (2005–2009), federal budget deficits and public debt ballooned as more money was allocated for unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; ironically, the federal bureaucracy under Bush expanded more than at any other time since the New Deal (1932–1939). Public discontent with Republican policies contributed to Barack Obama's election to the presidency. It remains to be seen how voters will respond to the continued frustrations facing the nation currently.
Whether public attitudes toward government bureaucracy in general and bureaucrats in particular have followed broader opinion patterns exactly is unclear. What is certain, however, is that the public's regard for public administrators has fallen far below what it was seventy years ago, when the civil service was considered an esteemed profession. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, and throughout World War II, public administrators and their organizations enjoyed greater public confidence than they do today. 2 The general public, through its elected officials, looked to the administrative apparatus of government to take on increasing responsibility. Congress, state legislatures, and city councils, as well as presidents, governors, and mayors, all delegate certain amounts of discretionary authority to administrative officials, in effect directing them to make the day-to-day choices involved in applying laws and enforcing regulations. No national referendum was held on the question, “should bureaucrats be given more responsibility?” But public acceptance of greater governmental involvement in a wider range of societal activities outweighed any opposition to growth of government in general and government bureaucracy in particular. Indeed, once bureaucratic policy making began to increase, heightened public demand for government services ensured continuation of greater administrative activity; this pattern may have been interrupted by Republican election victories in 2010, reflecting voters' long-term concerns about federal spending, deficits, and debt.
emphasizes productivity management, measurable performance, privatization, and change.
Variations in bureaucracy's public standing have coincided with greater demands for a wider range of public services, the increasing complexity of the nation's problems, and much higher levels of competence and professionalism among government workers. Even as presidents such as Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton tried to reduce the size and change the role of bureaucracies, they acknowledged the honesty, integrity, and demonstrated talents of the vast majority of administrative officials. George H. W. Bush, the forty-first president, was openly supportive of public administrators. President Bill Clinton placed considerable emphasis on “empowering” federal employees so that they might do their best work. Clinton went further than any other recent president in suggesting that it was “time to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government that generates change from the bottom up. We must reward the people and ideas that work, and get rid of those that don't.” 3
Public administration scholar Charles Goodsell, as well as others, has suggested that government bureaucracies and administrators do not deserve such harsh criticism. 4 The essence of his argument is that, despite shortcomings inevitably found in all complex organizations, America's government bureaucracies perform quite well. This is the case whether bureaucratic performance is measured by objective standards, in comparison with that in most of the other nations of the world, or (as noted earlier) in terms of citizens' satisfaction with their dealings with government administrators. Goodsell realistically summarizes his position this way:
Our government agencies are riddled with examples of incompetence, negligence, inflexibility, and many other flaws. So, too, our government bureaucrats include men and women who should not be in their positions for reasons of sloth, bad manners, poor judgment, and other faults. My point, however, is that the flaws and the faults are far fewer on a proportional basis than is generally thought. And they are more than outweighed in frequency and importance by instances of dedicated service on behalf of public missions important to all citizens. Most governments of the world would be pleased to possess a public bureaucracy of the quality of our own. 5
Goodsell focuses attention on the sometimes unthinking criticisms of bureaucracy that have characterized much of our national dialogue in the recent past. Scapegoating (that is, blaming bureaucracy as a whole, and individual bureaucrats, for societal ills) only makes it more difficult for the rest of us to acquire a clearer understanding of what it really is and how it really operates in our governmental system and our society at large.
At the same time, although people vent their frustrations on bureaucracy in general, there is strong evidence of favorable citizen reaction to direct dealings with individual bureaucrats and bureaucracies. 6 It has even been suggested by a reputable observer that public administrators “could not be engaged in more important or more honorable work … however they may be judged by the public they serve.” 7 Why, then, has public respect for these officials varied so much?
Part of the answer is that they may appear to constitute something of a government “elite” in an era of economic scarcity when angry and cynical voices are heard more forcefully. Or, perhaps, the very complexity of the problems currently confronting government decreases the likelihood of complete solutions, despite the serious efforts of competent people. The more complex the problems, the greater the discretionary authority vested in bureaucracies to attempt to deal with them. Finally, perhaps, the public has come to expect too much from government (sometimes encouraged by the mass media and public officials themselves) and has made bureaucrats into scapegoats for not meeting public expectations. Whether bureaucrats are deserving of these harsh sentiments is another matter.
What Is Public Administration?
Public administration may be defined as all processes, organizations, and individuals (the latter acting in official positions and roles) associated with carrying out laws and other rules adopted or issued by legislatures, executives, and courts. This definition should be understood to include considerable administrative involvement in formulation as well as implementation of legislation and executive orders; we will discuss this more fully later. Public administration is simultaneously a field of academic study and of professional training, from which substantial numbers of government employees currently are drawn.
(1) all processes, organizations, and individuals acting in official positions associated with carrying out laws and other rules adopted or issued by legislatures, executives, and courts (many activities are also concerned with formulation of these rules); (2) a field of academic study and professional training leading to public-service careers at all levels of government.
bureaucrats, elected officials, groups of citizens, and organized and unorganized interests affected by the decisions of federal, state, and local governments; those having a stake in the outcome of public policies.
Note that this definition does not limit the participants in public administration to administrative personnel, or even to people in government. It can and does refer to a wide and varied assortment of stakeholders , that is, individuals and groups with a common interest in the consequences of administrative action. Among stakeholders, the foremost perhaps are the administrators themselves. Also included are members of the legislature, legislative committees, and their staffs; higher executives in the administrative apparatus of government; judges; political-party officials whose partisan interests overlap extensively with issues of public policy; lobbyists (that is, leaders and members of interest groups) seeking from the government various policies, regulations, and actions; private contractors who perform services or produce goods for public agencies; mass-media personnel (particularly in their “watchdog” role over the actions and decisions of public officials); and members of society at large who, even when they are not well organized, can have some impact on the directions of various public policies. Furthermore, public administration involves all those just mentioned in shifting patterns of reciprocal (mutual) relationships—in state, local, and federal governments as well as in national-state-local (that is, intergovernmental) relations. The politics of administration involves agency interactions with those outside the formal structure as well as interactions among those within administrative agencies; we are concerned with both.
The Managerial Role
a field of practice and study central to public administration that emphasizes internal operations of public agencies and focuses on managerial concerns related to control and direction, such as planning, organizational maintenance, information systems, budgeting, personnel management, performance evaluation, and productivity improvement.
a conception of organizational structure, especially in service organizations, whereby managerial duties focus on providing necessary support to frontline employees (particularly those whose work centers around information and information technology) who deal directly with individuals seeking the organization's services.
information communication technologies (ICT)
various forms of New Media technology connecting Internet users with service providers and websites. ICTs methods include communication protocols, transmission techniques, communications equipment as well as systems for computer storage and information retrieval.
Let us consider another dimension of public administration: the managerial, or management, side. Although the emphasis in this book is on the “politics of bureaucracy,” as some have called it, managing government performance has always occupied a place of major importance in the discipline of public administration and is becoming increasingly important in making government more productive. 8 Managerial aspects of public administration have as their primary focus the internal workings of government agencies, that is, all the structures, dynamics, and processes connected with operating government programs. The terms public administration (as used in this text) and public management are both concerned with implementing policies and programs enacted through authoritative institutions of government. But, even though they may appear to be interchangeable terms, the latter emphasizes methods of organizing for internal control and direction for maximum effectiveness, whereas the former addresses a broader range of civic, electoral, and social concerns.
Despite these differences, there is general agreement that managerial skills and relevant experience are essential prerequisites to operate public agencies. Networking and organizing skills that can be performed with more or less competence are the indispensable foundation on which actual operations are built and sustained. An important point for the public manager is that action is expected, even if it is not necessarily advisable or convenient. Managers must often take actions to move the organization in the face of strict deadlines within a range of choices that is far less than ideal. (One of the reasons the Bush administration suffered a “competence gap” following its delayed response to Hurricane Katrina was the absence of experienced leadership in key positions within agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA].) 9 These elements make up a large part of the public manager's existence in, and contribution to, the totality of public administration.
Another concern is the growing emphasis on individual character and leadership (stable personalities providing vision and direction for an organization) as opposed to simply managing established, routine operations (see Chapter 6 ). There is also a continuing interest in improving the quality and reliability of services provided in both public and private organizations and, with it, the possibility of a new conception of the relationship among managers, frontline service providers, and their “customers.” Unlike the traditional top-down bureaucratic chain of command, this conception envisions a reverse pyramid with line workers responsive to the customers of public-service organizations, and managers at the base of the triangle, supporting the frontline employee (at the point or tip of the triangle). Another concern is the prospect of transforming organizational structures—given the many changes in information communication technology (ICT) and its enhanced uses regarding the changing roles of managers and leaders. 10 Still other concerns for managers include the challenge of providing career development and job enrichment for employees, encouraging participatory management, and applying emergent customer service management techniques to the tasks of running large, complex bureaucratic organizations. Public managerial responsibilities have become more complicated and, at the same time, more challenging and potentially beneficial to employees, citizens, managers, and their organizations.
Principal Structures of the National Executive Branch
Constitution of the United States
The U.S. Constitution is silent on the subjects of public administration and management, except to refer to Congress's legislative authorization and appropriation authority and the president's responsibility to “faithfully execute the laws.” The structures that exist today are products of congressional action, as are many of the procedures followed within public administration. The national executive branch is organized primarily into five major types of agencies, four formal bases, or foundations, of organization, and four broad categories of administrative employees. These deserve consideration because they affect both the way administrative entities function and the content of policies they help to enact.
Cabinet-Level Executive Departments
Sometimes referred to simply as “departments,” they are the most visible, though not necessarily the largest, national executive organizations; this is also true in most states and localities. There are fifteen departments in the national executive branch—examples include the Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, the Treasury, Justice, Labor, and the Interior (see Figure 1-2 ). Each department is headed by a secretary and a series of top-level subordinates, all of whom are appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate (such approval is rarely withheld). Their main function is to provide policy leadership to their respective departments on behalf of the president but, in practice, they also speak to the president for their departments (see Chapter 6 ). One of the newest cabinet-level divisions is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) , the product of controversial reorganization of all or parts of twenty-two existing federal agencies with nearly a $50 billion budget (which more than tripled its available resources following Hurricane Katrina) and 180,000 employees, that centralizes functions as diverse as customs, immigration, transportation security, the Secret Service, and emergency management (see Figure 1-3 ).
Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
a U.S. federal “mega-agency” created in 2002 by merging twenty-two existing agencies. Its mission is to respond to natural and man-made disasters, secure our borders, and prevent domestic terrorism and violence.
FIGURE 1-2 The Government of the United States
The U.S. Customs Service (Department of the Treasury), Immigration and Naturalization Service (Department of Justice), Federal Emergency Management Agency (General Services Administration), the Transportation Security Administration (Department of Transportation [DOT]), and the U.S. Coast Guard (DOT) were transferred from their former departments (in parentheses) to the reorganized DHS. One of the major functions of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the hiring and training of all of the new federal airport security screeners. In addition, the TSA has many other responsibilities under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001. Security at U.S. ports as well as safety on other forms of commercial travel is also a responsibility of the TSA. The TSA and DHS Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security are charged with ensuring the safety of traveling Americans and coordinating efforts with law enforcement so that intelligence gathered concerning possible threats to transportation safety can be shared and appropriate steps taken to ensure security.
in bureaucratic politics, the area of programmatic responsibility assigned to an agency by the legislature or chief executive; also a term used to describe the territory within the boundaries of a government entity such as “a local jurisdiction.”
Departments are composed of many smaller administrative units with a variety of titles, such as bureau, office, administration, and service. Within DOT, for example, one finds such diverse units as the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is subsumed within the Interior Department; and the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), the Public Health Service (PHS), and (most significant) the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are all part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The fact that bureaus or offices are located within the same departmental structure does not necessarily mean that they work cooperatively on any one venture; in fact, conflict among agencies within the same department is not uncommon (though efforts such as the creation of a Department of Homeland Security have been made to reduce such conflict). Finally, departments and their subunits generally are responsible for carrying out specific operating programs enacted by Congress; they have, and attempt to maintain, fairly specific program jurisdiction and often concrete program objectives. For examples of the various divisions of the DHS, and the approximate percentage of total 2011 budget devoted to each agency or function, see Table 1-1 . The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), for instance, received the largest share (20 percent) of the total DHS budget; the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) received 18 percent; TSA was allocated 14 percent; and FEMA 12 percent.
Independent Regulatory Boards and Commissions
Among such organizations are the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Reserve Board (FRB), National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC). These organizations are a second major type of administrative entity and differ from cabinet-level departments in a number of important ways. First, they have a different function—namely, to oversee and regulate activities of various parts of the private economic sector. Second, their leadership is plural rather than singular; that is, they are headed by a board or commission of several individuals (usually five to nine) instead of a secretary. Third, they are designed to be somewhat independent of other institutions and political forces. Members of these entities are appointed by the president with Senate approval (as are senior department officials) but have more legal protection than do Cabinet members against dismissal by the president; in addition, they normally serve a term of office longer than that of the appointing president. In relation to Congress, these entities are supposedly somewhat freer to do their jobs than are departments and their subunits; in practice, this is questionable, but the design does have some impact. Finally, these entities are designed to regulate private-sector enterprises in a detached and objective manner and are expected to prevent abuses, corruption, and the like. Some controversy has existed, however, over just how detached and objective these organizations have been in relation to those they regulate.
TABLE 1-1 Percent of Total Budget Authority by Organization, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Fiscal Year 2011.
Independent regulatory boards and commissions are not, however, the only government entities having regulatory responsibilities. A phenomenon of considerable importance is the growth of government regulation since the 1960s through a wide variety of other administrative instruments. Examples include the FAA, state departments of transportation, the NTSB, and the FDA. These agencies play important roles in their respective policy areas with regard to setting rules and standards for those in the private sector. The increasing incidence of government regulation has spawned rising political discontent over the scope and content of regulatory activity. Former President Clinton and Vice President Gore ordered a cost-benefit analysis (detailed in Chapters 10 and 11 ) of what were called “important” regulations and recommended the dissolution of those that were deemed “insignificant.” They found that it is very difficult in a large bureaucracy to eliminate the bad rules and make the good ones easier to understand. Sorting out the necessary from the unnecessary is a task—involving significant discretionary authority—heavily influenced by private interests, congressional intent, and procedures governing regulatory agencies, boards, and commissions. The Obama administration has attempted to broaden the scope of regulation to include consumer protection, financial institutions, and the provision of affordable health care to millions of Americans. In Chapter 11 , we will explore the politics of regulatory reform more fully.
Government Corporations
These are national, state, or local government organizations that are identical to private corporations in most of their structures and operations except one—they are government-owned. Also, while some (such as the National Railroad Passenger Corporation or Amtrak and local public utilities) seek to make a profit, others (such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC] and the Lower Colorado River Authority of the state of Texas) do not. These are conceived as corporate entities for a number of reasons. First, their legislative charters allow them somewhat greater latitude in day-to-day operations than other agencies enjoy. Government corporations also have the power to acquire, develop, and dispose of real estate and other kinds of property while acting in their own names (rather than in the name of the parent government). Finally, they can bring suit in a court of law and are legally liable to be sued, also in their own name. Each is headed by a board of directors, much as private corporations are, and is engaged in a wide variety of governmental activities. Three of the newest and largest of such entities are Amtrak, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the U.S. Postal Service (with nearly 550,000 employees, almost one-fourth of all civilian federal workers); two of the oldest, both founded in the 1930s, are the FDIC and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
Executive Office of the President (EOP)
The EOP is a collection of administrative bodies that are physically and organizationally housed close to the Oval Office and designed to work for the president. Several of these entities are especially prominent and important: (1) The White House Office consists of the president's key staff aides and staff directors. (2) The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) assists the president in assembling budget requests for the entire executive branch and forwards them to Capitol Hill as the president's annual budget message, coordinates operating and regulatory programs, develops high-quality executive talent, and improves management processes throughout the executive branch. (3) The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is the president's principal research arm for economic policy; it frequently influences the president's economic thinking. (4) Entities such as the National Security Council (NSC), designed originally as forums for generating a broad overview of policy directions, consist of the president, vice president, key cabinet secretaries, and other officials. The formal purpose of these entities is to monitor and assess administration policies. Most of these entities become directly involved in policy making to a greater or lesser degree, according to each president's preferences. As staffs have grown larger, however, actions can be taken without direct presidential supervision, as the Iran-Contra affair during the second Reagan administration (1985–1989) involving the NSC clearly illustrates (for elaboration, see Chapter 6 ). 11
Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
an important entity in the Executive Office of the President that assists the president in assembling executive-branch budget requests, coordinating programs, developing executive talent, and supervising program management processes in national government agencies.
Other Independent Executive Agencies
Finally, there are miscellaneous independent agencies that have no bureaucratic departmental “home” but fit no other category we have discussed. Among these are the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), formerly combined as the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which together oversee the national government's personnel system; the U.S. Mint; the General Services Administration (GSA), the government's office of procurement, property, and supply; the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) discussed in Chapter 5 ; and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Foundations of Organization
The foundations of organization, mentioned earlier, are function, geographic area, clientele, and work process. The most common organizational foundation is according to function, indicating that an agency is concerned with a fairly distinct policy area but not limited to a particular geographic area. Organization according to geography indicates that an agency's work is in a specific region; examples include the TVA, the Pacific Command of the Navy, and the Southern Command of the U.S. Army.
Clientele-based agencies are agencies that appear to address problems of a specific segment of the population, such as the (old) Veterans Administration (VA) or the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the “new” Social Security Administration (SSA), which was separated from the Department of Health and Human Services and became an independent agency on March 31, 1995. The label clientele-based agency may be misleading for two reasons. First, every agency has a clientele of some kind—a group or groups in the general population on whose behalf many of the agency's programs are conducted. For example, farmers are clients of the Department of Agriculture, skilled and semiskilled laborers are associated with the Labor Department, and coal interests are linked to the Bureau of Mines. Similarly, the decision to reestablish a separate SSA in 1995 (as an independent agency as it was before merging with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953) recognized the increasing the political influence of its clientele as well as the importance of domestic spending of about $2.5 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and other human resources in fiscal year (FY) 2011—over 65 percent of all funds appropriated by the federal government. (According to austere 2011 federal budget estimates, total spending for these three programs and their administrative agencies is estimated to decrease slightly to $2.4 trillion in 2012.)
The label also may be misleading because these clienteles may not always be satisfied clienteles. The VA and the BIA are, in fact, excellent illustrations of agencies whose clienteles often have complained about some aspect of agency performance. In 1975, various veterans' groups and individual veterans protested vigorously about the VA's alleged shortcomings in awarding and processing veterans' benefits, to the point that a virtual sit-in took place in the VA director's office. Likewise, the BIA was, for a time, a principal target of the American Indian Movement and others who expressed dissatisfaction with government management of Native American problems on and off the reservation. With both the VA and the BIA, a clientele was the most dissatisfied group—a not uncommon situation in bureaucratic politics. Likewise, the decision to re-create an independent SSA anticipated the intergenerational conflict and continuing controversy over the future of federal Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare, the federally funded health care program for the elderly. 12
Work process agencies engage predominantly in data gathering and analysis for some higher-ranking official or office and rarely if ever participate formally in policy making. Agencies such as the Economic Research Staff of the Department of Agriculture, the Economic Studies Division of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Soils Research Staff of the U.S. Geological Survey fall into this category.
Individual administrators occupying the multitude of positions in the various agencies can be categorized several different ways. For example, most national government administrators are merit employees, which means that they are presumably hired, retained, and promoted because they have the skills and training necessary to perform their jobs. Of the approximately 3.2 million full-time civilian employees in the federal government, about 92 percent work under a merit system of some kind. The remaining 8 percent include unionized employees not subject to merit hiring procedures as well as political appointees, some of whom can be removed by the president. In the latter group, numbering some 3,000 individuals, are the highest-ranking officials of the executive branch, including cabinet secretaries and undersecretaries, regulatory commissioners, and EOP personnel (see Chapter 7 ). Another way of viewing administrative employees is as either specialists or generalists. The term specialist refers to employees at lower and middle levels of the formal hierarchy whose responsibilities center on fairly specific programmatic areas. The term generalist is used to describe those in the higher ranks of an agency whose responsibilities cover a wider cross section of activities within the agency, involving some degree of supervision of various specialists in the ranks below.
The national executive branch, then, is organized primarily into five major types of agencies, with four formal bases of organization (function being the most common) and four broad categories of employees. State and local governments are different, though, and are worth considering briefly for the same reasons that we have examined the national executive branch: the administrative structure has some impact on the way the machinery of government functions and on the content of policies it helps to implement.
State and Local Government Structures
In general, states and larger local governments resemble the national government in composition and organization of their executive-branch agencies. Most states now have numerous cabinet-level departments; states also have a wide variety of regulatory bodies, some government corporations, and miscellaneous agencies. Similarly, most governors have fairly strong executive-office staffs responsive to the governor's leadership (see Chapter 6 ).
There are more than 88,000 governments within the United States and, except for the federal and state governments, all are local governments such as cities, counties, townships, and school or special districts. Individual state and local agencies are smaller and more numerous than their federal government counterparts. Despite the relatively large number of governments, over 90 percent of all public agencies are comprised of fewer than fifty employees. There are also more elected local officials than state and federal ones: 96 percent of all 513,195 elected officials serve on elected boards or commissions in states or local governments ( Table 1-2 ). These elected governments are small governmental units averaging only about six elected representatives per jurisdiction. States and communities also vary in terms of climate, economies, geography, population size, topography, type of government, and urbanization, as well as the individual characteristics of residents. For example, the state of Hawaii has only twenty-one governments (and only one municipal or city government) as compared to the state of Illinois with 6,723 governments. Citizens of Hawaii have just 1.7 governments per 10,000 residents, whereas citizens of North Dakota have almost 243 for the same number of residents. These extreme variations among states and local governments reflect a history of independence from the federal government and a tradition of self-governance and local control.
TABLE 1-2 The Number of Governments and Elected Officials in the United States
Some state agency structures reflect past or present influences of particular interest groups more than those in Washington do. One example was Pennsylvania's powerful Department of Mines and Mineral Industries, indicative of the role played in that state's economy by coal mine owners over the years. Another is the Illinois Department of Aging, created in response to the emergence of a growing constituency with common problems of senior citizenship. These so-called special interests have “their” agencies in the national government, of course, but a pattern found in many states is the creation of somewhat higher-level agencies in response to constituency pressures. Another distinctive feature of some state executive structures is greater legislative control over some individual agencies' budgets and personnel, in comparison to Congress's hold over national government agencies. This varies, however, from state to state.
Larger cities like New York, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles have bureaucratic arrangements not unlike those in state and national governments. There is a great deal of administrative specialization, a directly elected chief executive (mayor) with a highly developed executive-office staff, and similar bases of organization.
There are, however, some differences between local governments and state and national governments. Local party politics frequently play a more prominent role in shaping municipal policy making (notably in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York), and local public-employee unions have a great deal of influence in many cities. Local government activity is more heavily oriented to providing such essential services as water, sewage disposal and sanitation, and police and fire protection than to broader policy concerns, such as education, health care, welfare reform, and mass-transit development.
In smaller communities, as well as in many counties and townships, bureaucratic structures are not very numerous or sophisticated. This can sometimes mean that professional expertise is not as firmly established in local government as it is in most state governments and the national government. This lack of expertise is often reflected in the limited quantity and quality of programs enacted by many local governments, a pattern particularly visible in some rural county governments, many smaller towns and villages, and most special districts. As noted earlier, many local governments concentrate on providing basic urban services, with less emphasis on the sort of operating programs and regulatory activities that characterize state and national administration. The larger the unit of local government, the more likely its bureaucracy is to resemble state and national administrative agencies.
Politics, Policies, and Organizational Structure
This section reviews several traditional conceptions relating to bureaucratic activity and discusses how our political system has affected American bureaucracies in light of these conceptions. This is an introductory treatment only, for our complex political processes cannot be described adequately in a few words; the same is true of the impacts of political complexity on our public administrative institutions. Even this brief discussion, however, will help to set the stage for a fuller exploration of the political values that underlie our governmental processes, the administrative values that have helped to shape the conduct of public administration, and the many facets of intergovernmental relationships (see Chapter 3 ).
At first glance, questions of organizational structure may not appear to carry major political overtones. But formal organizational arrangements do not simply appear, and they are anything but neutral in their consequences. The choice of organizational structure may both reflect and promote some interests over others because a particular structure is the product of decisions reached through the political process by a particular majority coalition, whether directly (as through congressional action) or indirectly (as when the president proposes executive reorganization). Those who organize or reorganize an agency in a certain way obviously have reasons for doing so, one of which is usually promotion of their own policy interests. For example, President George H. W. Bush highlighted his concern for our nation's military veterans and expanded the access of veterans' groups to top policy makers in Washington by creating the Department of Veterans Affairs in March 1989. Similarly, the Clinton administration's decision to separate the SSA from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services highlighted the importance of recognizing the rights of disabled, elderly, and retired persons, and all others who might be eligible for supplemental social-insurance income. In effect, the SSA was protected from future presidents who might seek to change, dismantle, or privatize the agency's basic functions. Despite George W. Bush's concerted lobbying efforts to fulfill his 2004 campaign promise to make fundamental changes in the Social Security system, opposition from bureaucratic interests, among others, contributed to the defeat of several legislative proposals in 2005 to privatize a portion of individual Social Security contributions for younger workers. President Obama has also undertaken major health care reforms that will require significant structural changes.
The Politics of Organizational Structure
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)
federal office created in 2005 by restructuring fifteen intelligence agencies to coordinate national intelligence-gathering and analysis efforts.
Another important dimension of administrative organization is the political setting in which agencies operate; at the same time, structural arrangements can have significant political implications for administrative agencies. Here we will take a closer look at the political importance of structural arrangements, at both the national and local government levels, using as illustrations the establishment of the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) by the first Bush administration, the DHS in 2003, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in 2005, both by the second Bush administration. The generalizations cited below apply with equal force to the executive branches of state and local governments.
Organizational form can signify a number of things. First, a particular organizational structure demonstrates commitment to one set of policy objectives instead of another. It can also foreshadow adoption of a distinct policy direction, either in an individual policy area or in broader policy terms. The first President Bush's action to promote the Veterans Administration (VA) to cabinet status as the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) was taken in opposition to career administrators and even some influential leaders of the president's own party. It contradicted the general strategy of other Republican policies (such as the New Federalism of the 1980s) that were designed to reduce bureaucracy, save expenses, and weaken federal management of government programs. Despite these concerns and intraparty inconsistencies, however, the DVA was organized, largely in response to pressures from veterans' groups.
Second, a particular structure helps to order priorities by promoting some programs over others. President George H. W. Bush was a decorated World War II veteran himself, and elevation of existing veterans' services agencies into the cabinet changed both the symbolism and reality of administrative politics. The relatively higher priority of issues affecting veterans was also highlighted by the creation of a cabinet department to deal with them; such status carries with it increased prestige, not to mention visibility, both of which can be very useful to an agency. Furthermore, that sort of commitment from the chief executive, combined with more prominent organizational status, often leads to increased access to committees and influence in the legislature.
Finally, a particular structure may provide greater access to influence for some interests and less for others. Structure and jurisdiction are at least indirectly related and, although changes in jurisdiction may not necessarily be accompanied by a change in structure, any change in structure will inevitably result in some reallocation of program jurisdiction.
Access and jurisdiction are also related. Stakeholders have meaningful access, at best, only to those administrators responsible for the programs with which these groups are concerned. Changes in jurisdiction, however, will often force affected groups to reestablish lines of access. Such changes could cause difficulties for these groups, especially in persuading new working partners to their points of view. Furthermore, stakeholders normally prefer to have all related programs clustered under one administrative umbrella because that allows them to influence the full range of programs. It is also likely that such an arrangement will be managed by administrators sympathetic to programs for which they are responsible. Scattering the same programs among different agencies and administrators may result in more hostile treatment of both programs and interest groups. Executive reorganizations involving the merger of existing agencies and congressional relationships may also create problems for stakeholders.
The politics surrounding structural rearrangements are often highly controversial, as the second Bush administration discovered while implementing its cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 exposed conflicts and lack of coordination and communication among federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, and fragmentation of information-sharing procedures and capabilities. Creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of the federal government since the Department of Defense was established in the late 1940s, illustrates the dynamics that fostered the very problems the new department is expected to solve ( Table 1-1 ). Combining agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Customs Services into a single “superagency” did not erase historical lines of communication between constituents, officials, and members of Congress that have existed for decades. Although Congress agreed with the reorganization of homeland security functions, no changes were made in the committee structures responsible for authorization and appropriation of funds for the various components of the new agency. 13
After several years of congressional debate, extensive public hearings, and the publication of a critical investigating commission report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was created by Congress in early 2005. 14 Amid similar post-September 11 controversies, the DNI was forged by the merger of fifteen agencies—including various defense intelligence agencies and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—to encourage greater cooperation and coordination among intelligence functions ( Figure 1-4 ). Although the new office now reports directly to the president and controls about 70 percent of the total national nondefense budget for intelligence gathering and analysis, it has yet to define its jurisdictional boundaries. In this case, centralization could negatively impact agency influence and access to congressional authorization and appropriation committees. In addition, some observers note that separating the DNI from the analytical offices of each of the operational agencies may complicate rather than simplify the overall intelligence analysis effort. 15 Despite the additional bureaucracy and centralization of The U.S. Customs Service (Department of the Treasury), Immigration and Naturalization Service (Department of Justice), Federal Emergency Management Agency (General Services Administration), the Transportation Security Administration (Department of Transportation [DOT]), and the U.S. Coast Guard (DOT) were transferred from their former departments (in parentheses) to the reorganized DHS. One of the major functions of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the hiring and training of all of the new federal airport security screeners. In addition, the TSA has many other responsibilities under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001. Security at U.S. ports as well as safety on other forms of commercial travel is also a responsibility of the TSA. The TSA and DHS Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security are charged with ensuring the safety of traveling Americans and coordinating efforts with law enforcement so that intelligence gathered concerning possible threats to transportation safety can be shared and appropriate steps taken to ensure security.
in bureaucratic politics, the area of programmatic responsibility assigned to an agency by the legislature or chief executive; also a term used to describe the territory within the boundaries of a government entity such as “a local jurisdiction.”
Departments are composed of many smaller administrative units with a variety of titles, such as bureau, office, administration, and service. Within DOT, for example, one finds such diverse units as the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is subsumed within the Interior Department; and the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), the Public Health Service (PHS), and (most significant) the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are all part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The fact that bureaus or offices are located within the same departmental structure does not necessarily mean that they work cooperatively on any one venture; in fact, conflict among agencies within the same department is not uncommon (though efforts such as the creation of a Department of Homeland Security have been made to reduce such conflict). Finally, departments and their subunits generally are responsible for carrying out specific operating programs enacted by Congress; they have, and attempt to maintain, fairly specific program jurisdiction and often concrete program objectives. For examples of the various divisions of the DHS, and the approximate percentage of total 2011 budget devoted to each agency or function, see Table 1-1 . The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), for instance, received the largest share (20 percent) of the total DHS budget; the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) received 18 percent; TSA was allocated 14 percent; and FEMA 12 percent.
Independent Regulatory Boards and Commissions
Among such organizations are the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Reserve Board (FRB), National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC). These organizations are a second major type of administrative entity and differ from cabinet-level departments in a number of important ways. First, they have a different function—namely, to oversee and regulate activities of various parts of the private economic sector. Second, their leadership is plural rather than singular; that is, they are headed by a board or commission of several individuals (usually five to nine) instead of a secretary. Third, they are designed to be somewhat independent of other institutions and political forces. Members of these entities are appointed by the president with Senate approval (as are senior department officials) but have more legal protection than do Cabinet members against dismissal by the president; in addition, they normally serve a term of office longer than that of the appointing president. In relation to Congress, these entities are supposedly somewhat freer to do their jobs than are departments and their subunits; in practice, this is questionable, but the design does have some impact. Finally, these entities are designed to regulate private-sector enterprises in a detached and objective manner and are expected to prevent abuses, corruption, and the like. Some controversy has existed, however, over just how detached and objective these organizations have been in relation to those they regulate.
TABLE 1-1 Percent of Total Budget Authority by Organization, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Fiscal Year 2011.
Independent regulatory boards and commissions are not, however, the only government entities having regulatory responsibilities. A phenomenon of considerable importance is the growth of government regulation since the 1960s through a wide variety of other administrative instruments. Examples include the FAA, state departments of transportation, the NTSB, and the FDA. These agencies play important roles in their respective policy areas with regard to setting rules and standards for those in the private sector. The increasing incidence of government regulation has spawned rising political discontent over the scope and content of regulatory activity. Former President Clinton and Vice President Gore ordered a cost-benefit analysis (detailed in Chapters 10 and 11 ) of what were called “important” regulations and recommended the dissolution of those that were deemed “insignificant.” They found that it is very difficult in a large bureaucracy to eliminate the bad rules and make the good ones easier to understand. Sorting out the necessary from the unnecessary is a task—involving significant discretionary authority—heavily influenced by private interests, congressional intent, and procedures governing regulatory agencies, boards, and commissions. The Obama administration has attempted to broaden the scope of regulation to include consumer protection, financial institutions, and the provision of affordable health care to millions of Americans. In Chapter 11 , we will explore the politics of regulatory reform more fully.
Government Corporations
These are national, state, or local government organizations that are identical to private corporations in most of their structures and operations except one—they are government-owned. Also, while some (such as the National Railroad Passenger Corporation or Amtrak and local public utilities) seek to make a profit, others (such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC] and the Lower Colorado River Authority of the state of Texas) do not. These are conceived as corporate entities for a number of reasons. First, their legislative charters allow them somewhat greater latitude in day-to-day operations than other agencies enjoy. Government corporations also have the power to acquire, develop, and dispose of real estate and other kinds of property while acting in their own names (rather than in the name of the parent government). Finally, they can bring suit in a court of law and are legally liable to be sued, also in their own name. Each is headed by a board of directors, much as private corporations are, and is engaged in a wide variety of governmental activities. Three of the newest and largest of such entities are Amtrak, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the U.S. Postal Service (with nearly 550,000 employees, almost one-fourth of all civilian federal workers); two of the oldest, both founded in the 1930s, are the FDIC and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
Executive Office of the President (EOP)
The EOP is a collection of administrative bodies that are physically and organizationally housed close to the Oval Office and designed to work for the president. Several of these entities are especially prominent and important: (1) The White House Office consists of the president's key staff aides and staff directors. (2) The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) assists the president in assembling budget requests for the entire executive branch and forwards them to Capitol Hill as the president's annual budget message, coordinates operating and regulatory programs, develops high-quality executive talent, and improves management processes throughout the executive branch. (3) The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is the president's principal research arm for economic policy; it frequently influences the president's economic thinking. (4) Entities such as the National Security Council (NSC), designed originally as forums for generating a broad overview of policy directions, consist of the president, vice president, key cabinet secretaries, and other officials. The formal purpose of these entities is to monitor and assess administration policies. Most of these entities become directly involved in policy making to a greater or lesser degree, according to each president's preferences. As staffs have grown larger, however, actions can be taken without direct presidential supervision, as the Iran-Contra affair during the second Reagan administration (1985–1989) involving the NSC clearly illustrates (for elaboration, see Chapter 6 ). 11
Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
an important entity in the Executive Office of the President that assists the president in assembling executive-branch budget requests, coordinating programs, developing executive talent, and supervising program management processes in national government agencies.
Other Independent Executive Agencies
Finally, there are miscellaneous independent agencies that have no bureaucratic departmental “home” but fit no other category we have discussed. Among these are the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), formerly combined as the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which together oversee the national government's personnel system; the U.S. Mint; the General Services Administration (GSA), the government's office of procurement, property, and supply; the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) discussed in Chapter 5 ; and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Foundations of Organization
The foundations of organization, mentioned earlier, are function, geographic area, clientele, and work process. The most common organizational foundation is according to function, indicating that an agency is concerned with a fairly distinct policy area but not limited to a particular geographic area. Organization according to geography indicates that an agency's work is in a specific region; examples include the TVA, the Pacific Command of the Navy, and the Southern Command of the U.S. Army.
Clientele-based agencies are agencies that appear to address problems of a specific segment of the population, such as the (old) Veterans Administration (VA) or the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the “new” Social Security Administration (SSA), which was separated from the Department of Health and Human Services and became an independent agency on March 31, 1995. The label clientele-based agency may be misleading for two reasons. First, every agency has a clientele of some kind—a group or groups in the general population on whose behalf many of the agency's programs are conducted. For example, farmers are clients of the Department of Agriculture, skilled and semiskilled laborers are associated with the Labor Department, and coal interests are linked to the Bureau of Mines. Similarly, the decision to reestablish a separate SSA in 1995 (as an independent agency as it was before merging with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953) recognized the increasing the political influence of its clientele as well as the importance of domestic spending of about $2.5 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and other human resources in fiscal year (FY) 2011—over 65 percent of all funds appropriated by the federal government. (According to austere 2011 federal budget estimates, total spending for these three programs and their administrative agencies is estimated to decrease slightly to $2.4 trillion in 2012.)
The label also may be misleading because these clienteles may not always be satisfied clienteles. The VA and the BIA are, in fact, excellent illustrations of agencies whose clienteles often have complained about some aspect of agency performance. In 1975, various veterans' groups and individual veterans protested vigorously about the VA's alleged shortcomings in awarding and processing veterans' benefits, to the point that a virtual sit-in took place in the VA director's office. Likewise, the BIA was, for a time, a principal target of the American Indian Movement and others who expressed dissatisfaction with government management of Native American problems on and off the reservation. With both the VA and the BIA, a clientele was the most dissatisfied group—a not uncommon situation in bureaucratic politics. Likewise, the decision to re-create an independent SSA anticipated the intergenerational conflict and continuing controversy over the future of federal Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare, the federally funded health care program for the elderly. 12
Work process agencies engage predominantly in data gathering and analysis for some higher-ranking official or office and rarely if ever participate formally in policy making. Agencies such as the Economic Research Staff of the Department of Agriculture, the Economic Studies Division of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Soils Research Staff of the U.S. Geological Survey fall into this category.
Individual administrators occupying the multitude of positions in the various agencies can be categorized several different ways. For example, most national government administrators are merit employees, which means that they are presumably hired, retained, and promoted because they have the skills and training necessary to perform their jobs. Of the approximately 3.2 million full-time civilian employees in the federal government, about 92 percent work under a merit system of some kind. The remaining 8 percent include unionized employees not subject to merit hiring procedures as well as political appointees, some of whom can be removed by the president. In the latter group, numbering some 3,000 individuals, are the highest-ranking officials of the executive branch, including cabinet secretaries and undersecretaries, regulatory commissioners, and EOP personnel (see Chapter 7 ). Another way of viewing administrative employees is as either specialists or generalists. The term specialist refers to employees at lower and middle levels of the formal hierarchy whose responsibilities center on fairly specific programmatic areas. The term generalist is used to describe those in the higher ranks of an agency whose responsibilities cover a wider cross section of activities within the agency, involving some degree of supervision of various specialists in the ranks below.
The national executive branch, then, is organized primarily into five major types of agencies, with four formal bases of organization (function being the most common) and four broad categories of employees. State and local governments are different, though, and are worth considering briefly for the same reasons that we have examined the national executive branch: the administrative structure has some impact on the way the machinery of government functions and on the content of policies it helps to implement.
State and Local Government Structures
In general, states and larger local governments resemble the national government in composition and organization of their executive-branch agencies. Most states now have numerous cabinet-level departments; states also have a wide variety of regulatory bodies, some government corporations, and miscellaneous agencies. Similarly, most governors have fairly strong executive-office staffs responsive to the governor's leadership (see Chapter 6 ).
There are more than 88,000 governments within the United States and, except for the federal and state governments, all are local governments such as cities, counties, townships, and school or special districts. Individual state and local agencies are smaller and more numerous than their federal government counterparts. Despite the relatively large number of governments, over 90 percent of all public agencies are comprised of fewer than fifty employees. There are also more elected local officials than state and federal ones: 96 percent of all 513,195 elected officials serve on elected boards or commissions in states or local governments ( Table 1-2 ). These elected governments are small governmental units averaging only about six elected representatives per jurisdiction. States and communities also vary in terms of climate, economies, geography, population size, topography, type of government, and urbanization, as well as the individual characteristics of residents. For example, the state of Hawaii has only twenty-one governments (and only one municipal or city government) as compared to the state of Illinois with 6,723 governments. Citizens of Hawaii have just 1.7 governments per 10,000 residents, whereas citizens of North Dakota have almost 243 for the same number of residents. These extreme variations among states and local governments reflect a history of independence from the federal government and a tradition of self-governance and local control.
TABLE 1-2 The Number of Governments and Elected Officials in the United States
Some state agency structures reflect past or present influences of particular interest groups more than those in Washington do. One example was Pennsylvania's powerful Department of Mines and Mineral Industries, indicative of the role played in that state's economy by coal mine owners over the years. Another is the Illinois Department of Aging, created in response to the emergence of a growing constituency with common problems of senior citizenship. These so-called special interests have “their” agencies in the national government, of course, but a pattern found in many states is the creation of somewhat higher-level agencies in response to constituency pressures. Another distinctive feature of some state executive structures is greater legislative control over some individual agencies' budgets and personnel, in comparison to Congress's hold over national government agencies. This varies, however, from state to state.
Larger cities like New York, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles have bureaucratic arrangements not unlike those in state and national governments. There is a great deal of administrative specialization, a directly elected chief executive (mayor) with a highly developed executive-office staff, and similar bases of organization.
There are, however, some differences between local governments and state and national governments. Local party politics frequently play a more prominent role in shaping municipal policy making (notably in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York), and local public-employee unions have a great deal of influence in many cities. Local government activity is more heavily oriented to providing such essential services as water, sewage disposal and sanitation, and police and fire protection than to broader policy concerns, such as education, health care, welfare reform, and mass-transit development.
In smaller communities, as well as in many counties and townships, bureaucratic structures are not very numerous or sophisticated. This can sometimes mean that professional expertise is not as firmly established in local government as it is in most state governments and the national government. This lack of expertise is often reflected in the limited quantity and quality of programs enacted by many local governments, a pattern particularly visible in some rural county governments, many smaller towns and villages, and most special districts. As noted earlier, many local governments concentrate on providing basic urban services, with less emphasis on the sort of operating programs and regulatory activities that characterize state and national administration. The larger the unit of local government, the more likely its bureaucracy is to resemble state and national administrative agencies.
Politics, Policies, and Organizational Structure
This section reviews several traditional conceptions relating to bureaucratic activity and discusses how our political system has affected American bureaucracies in light of these conceptions. This is an introductory treatment only, for our complex political processes cannot be described adequately in a few words; the same is true of the impacts of political complexity on our public administrative institutions. Even this brief discussion, however, will help to set the stage for a fuller exploration of the political values that underlie our governmental processes, the administrative values that have helped to shape the conduct of public administration, and the many facets of intergovernmental relationships (see Chapter 3 ).
At first glance, questions of organizational structure may not appear to carry major political overtones. But formal organizational arrangements do not simply appear, and they are anything but neutral in their consequences. The choice of organizational structure may both reflect and promote some interests over others because a particular structure is the product of decisions reached through the political process by a particular majority coalition, whether directly (as through congressional action) or indirectly (as when the president proposes executive reorganization). Those who organize or reorganize an agency in a certain way obviously have reasons for doing so, one of which is usually promotion of their own policy interests. For example, President George H. W. Bush highlighted his concern for our nation's military veterans and expanded the access of veterans' groups to top policy makers in Washington by creating the Department of Veterans Affairs in March 1989. Similarly, the Clinton administration's decision to separate the SSA from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services highlighted the importance of recognizing the rights of disabled, elderly, and retired persons, and all others who might be eligible for supplemental social-insurance income. In effect, the SSA was protected from future presidents who might seek to change, dismantle, or privatize the agency's basic functions. Despite George W. Bush's concerted lobbying efforts to fulfill his 2004 campaign promise to make fundamental changes in the Social Security system, opposition from bureaucratic interests, among others, contributed to the defeat of several legislative proposals in 2005 to privatize a portion of individual Social Security contributions for younger workers. President Obama has also undertaken major health care reforms that will require significant structural changes.
The Politics of Organizational Structure
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)
federal office created in 2005 by restructuring fifteen intelligence agencies to coordinate national intelligence-gathering and analysis efforts.
Another important dimension of administrative organization is the political setting in which agencies operate; at the same time, structural arrangements can have significant political implications for administrative agencies. Here we will take a closer look at the political importance of structural arrangements, at both the national and local government levels, using as illustrations the establishment of the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) by the first Bush administration, the DHS in 2003, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in 2005, both by the second Bush administration. The generalizations cited below apply with equal force to the executive branches of state and local governments.
Organizational form can signify a number of things. First, a particular organizational structure demonstrates commitment to one set of policy objectives instead of another. It can also foreshadow adoption of a distinct policy direction, either in an individual policy area or in broader policy terms. The first President Bush's action to promote the Veterans Administration (VA) to cabinet status as the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) was taken in opposition to career administrators and even some influential leaders of the president's own party. It contradicted the general strategy of other Republican policies (such as the New Federalism of the 1980s) that were designed to reduce bureaucracy, save expenses, and weaken federal management of government programs. Despite these concerns and intraparty inconsistencies, however, the DVA was organized, largely in response to pressures from veterans' groups.
Second, a particular structure helps to order priorities by promoting some programs over others. President George H. W. Bush was a decorated World War II veteran himself, and elevation of existing veterans' services agencies into the cabinet changed both the symbolism and reality of administrative politics. The relatively higher priority of issues affecting veterans was also highlighted by the creation of a cabinet department to deal with them; such status carries with it increased prestige, not to mention visibility, both of which can be very useful to an agency. Furthermore, that sort of commitment from the chief executive, combined with more prominent organizational status, often leads to increased access to committees and influence in the legislature.
Finally, a particular structure may provide greater access to influence for some interests and less for others. Structure and jurisdiction are at least indirectly related and, although changes in jurisdiction may not necessarily be accompanied by a change in structure, any change in structure will inevitably result in some reallocation of program jurisdiction.
Access and jurisdiction are also related. Stakeholders have meaningful access, at best, only to those administrators responsible for the programs with which these groups are concerned. Changes in jurisdiction, however, will often force affected groups to reestablish lines of access. Such changes could cause difficulties for these groups, especially in persuading new working partners to their points of view. Furthermore, stakeholders normally prefer to have all related programs clustered under one administrative umbrella because that allows them to influence the full range of programs. It is also likely that such an arrangement will be managed by administrators sympathetic to programs for which they are responsible. Scattering the same programs among different agencies and administrators may result in more hostile treatment of both programs and interest groups. Executive reorganizations involving the merger of existing agencies and congressional relationships may also create problems for stakeholders.
The politics surrounding structural rearrangements are often highly controversial, as the second Bush administration discovered while implementing its cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 exposed conflicts and lack of coordination and communication among federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, and fragmentation of information-sharing procedures and capabilities. Creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of the federal government since the Department of Defense was established in the late 1940s, illustrates the dynamics that fostered the very problems the new department is expected to solve ( Table 1-1 ). Combining agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Customs Services into a single “superagency” did not erase historical lines of communication between constituents, officials, and members of Congress that have existed for decades. Although Congress agreed with the reorganization of homeland security functions, no changes were made in the committee structures responsible for authorization and appropriation of funds for the various components of the new agency. 13
After several years of congressional debate, extensive public hearings, and the publication of a critical investigating commission report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was created by Congress in early 2005. 14 Amid similar post-September 11 controversies, the DNI was forged by the merger of fifteen agencies—including various defense intelligence agencies and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—to encourage greater cooperation and coordination among intelligence functions ( Figure 1-4 ). Although the new office now reports directly to the president and controls about 70 percent of the total national nondefense budget for intelligence gathering and analysis, it has yet to define its jurisdictional boundaries. In this case, centralization could negatively impact agency influence and access to congressional authorization and appropriation committees. In addition, some observers note that separating the DNI from the analytical offices of each of the operational agencies may complicate rather than simplify the overall intelligence analysis effort. 15 Despite the additional bureaucracy and centralization of The U.S. Customs Service (Department of the Treasury), Immigration and Naturalization Service (Department of Justice), Federal Emergency Management Agency (General Services Administration), the Transportation Security Administration (Department of Transportation [DOT]), and the U.S. Coast Guard (DOT) were transferred from their former departments (in parentheses) to the reorganized DHS. One of the major functions of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the hiring and training of all of the new federal airport security screeners. In addition, the TSA has many other responsibilities under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001. Security at U.S. ports as well as safety on other forms of commercial travel is also a responsibility of the TSA. The TSA and DHS Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security are charged with ensuring the safety of traveling Americans and coordinating efforts with law enforcement so that intelligence gathered concerning possible threats to transportation safety can be shared and appropriate steps taken to ensure security.
in bureaucratic politics, the area of programmatic responsibility assigned to an agency by the legislature or chief executive; also a term used to describe the territory within the boundaries of a government entity such as “a local jurisdiction.”
Departments are composed of many smaller administrative units with a variety of titles, such as bureau, office, administration, and service. Within DOT, for example, one finds such diverse units as the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is subsumed within the Interior Department; and the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), the Public Health Service (PHS), and (most significant) the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are all part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The fact that bureaus or offices are located within the same departmental structure does not necessarily mean that they work cooperatively on any one venture; in fact, conflict among agencies within the same department is not uncommon (though efforts such as the creation of a Department of Homeland Security have been made to reduce such conflict). Finally, departments and their subunits generally are responsible for carrying out specific operating programs enacted by Congress; they have, and attempt to maintain, fairly specific program jurisdiction and often concrete program objectives. For examples of the various divisions of the DHS, and the approximate percentage of total 2011 budget devoted to each agency or function, see Table 1-1 . The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), for instance, received the largest share (20 percent) of the total DHS budget; the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) received 18 percent; TSA was allocated 14 percent; and FEMA 12 percent.
Independent Regulatory Boards and Commissions
Among such organizations are the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Reserve Board (FRB), National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC). These organizations are a second major type of administrative entity and differ from cabinet-level departments in a number of important ways. First, they have a different function—namely, to oversee and regulate activities of various parts of the private economic sector. Second, their leadership is plural rather than singular; that is, they are headed by a board or commission of several individuals (usually five to nine) instead of a secretary. Third, they are designed to be somewhat independent of other institutions and political forces. Members of these entities are appointed by the president with Senate approval (as are senior department officials) but have more legal protection than do Cabinet members against dismissal by the president; in addition, they normally serve a term of office longer than that of the appointing president. In relation to Congress, these entities are supposedly somewhat freer to do their jobs than are departments and their subunits; in practice, this is questionable, but the design does have some impact. Finally, these entities are designed to regulate private-sector enterprises in a detached and objective manner and are expected to prevent abuses, corruption, and the like. Some controversy has existed, however, over just how detached and objective these organizations have been in relation to those they regulate.
TABLE 1-1 Percent of Total Budget Authority by Organization, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Fiscal Year 2011.
Independent regulatory boards and commissions are not, however, the only government entities having regulatory responsibilities. A phenomenon of considerable importance is the growth of government regulation since the 1960s through a wide variety of other administrative instruments. Examples include the FAA, state departments of transportation, the NTSB, and the FDA. These agencies play important roles in their respective policy areas with regard to setting rules and standards for those in the private sector. The increasing incidence of government regulation has spawned rising political discontent over the scope and content of regulatory activity. Former President Clinton and Vice President Gore ordered a cost-benefit analysis (detailed in Chapters 10 and 11 ) of what were called “important” regulations and recommended the dissolution of those that were deemed “insignificant.” They found that it is very difficult in a large bureaucracy to eliminate the bad rules and make the good ones easier to understand. Sorting out the necessary from the unnecessary is a task—involving significant discretionary authority—heavily influenced by private interests, congressional intent, and procedures governing regulatory agencies, boards, and commissions. The Obama administration has attempted to broaden the scope of regulation to include consumer protection, financial institutions, and the provision of affordable health care to millions of Americans. In Chapter 11 , we will explore the politics of regulatory reform more fully.
Government Corporations
These are national, state, or local government organizations that are identical to private corporations in most of their structures and operations except one—they are government-owned. Also, while some (such as the National Railroad Passenger Corporation or Amtrak and local public utilities) seek to make a profit, others (such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC] and the Lower Colorado River Authority of the state of Texas) do not. These are conceived as corporate entities for a number of reasons. First, their legislative charters allow them somewhat greater latitude in day-to-day operations than other agencies enjoy. Government corporations also have the power to acquire, develop, and dispose of real estate and other kinds of property while acting in their own names (rather than in the name of the parent government). Finally, they can bring suit in a court of law and are legally liable to be sued, also in their own name. Each is headed by a board of directors, much as private corporations are, and is engaged in a wide variety of governmental activities. Three of the newest and largest of such entities are Amtrak, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the U.S. Postal Service (with nearly 550,000 employees, almost one-fourth of all civilian federal workers); two of the oldest, both founded in the 1930s, are the FDIC and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
Executive Office of the President (EOP)
The EOP is a collection of administrative bodies that are physically and organizationally housed close to the Oval Office and designed to work for the president. Several of these entities are especially prominent and important: (1) The White House Office consists of the president's key staff aides and staff directors. (2) The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) assists the president in assembling budget requests for the entire executive branch and forwards them to Capitol Hill as the president's annual budget message, coordinates operating and regulatory programs, develops high-quality executive talent, and improves management processes throughout the executive branch. (3) The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is the president's principal research arm for economic policy; it frequently influences the president's economic thinking. (4) Entities such as the National Security Council (NSC), designed originally as forums for generating a broad overview of policy directions, consist of the president, vice president, key cabinet secretaries, and other officials. The formal purpose of these entities is to monitor and assess administration policies. Most of these entities become directly involved in policy making to a greater or lesser degree, according to each president's preferences. As staffs have grown larger, however, actions can be taken without direct presidential supervision, as the Iran-Contra affair during the second Reagan administration (1985–1989) involving the NSC clearly illustrates (for elaboration, see Chapter 6 ). 11
Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
an important entity in the Executive Office of the President that assists the president in assembling executive-branch budget requests, coordinating programs, developing executive talent, and supervising program management processes in national government agencies.
Other Independent Executive Agencies
Finally, there are miscellaneous independent agencies that have no bureaucratic departmental “home” but fit no other category we have discussed. Among these are the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), formerly combined as the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which together oversee the national government's personnel system; the U.S. Mint; the General Services Administration (GSA), the government's office of procurement, property, and supply; the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) discussed in Chapter 5 ; and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Foundations of Organization
The foundations of organization, mentioned earlier, are function, geographic area, clientele, and work process. The most common organizational foundation is according to function, indicating that an agency is concerned with a fairly distinct policy area but not limited to a particular geographic area. Organization according to geography indicates that an agency's work is in a specific region; examples include the TVA, the Pacific Command of the Navy, and the Southern Command of the U.S. Army.
Clientele-based agencies are agencies that appear to address problems of a specific segment of the population, such as the (old) Veterans Administration (VA) or the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the “new” Social Security Administration (SSA), which was separated from the Department of Health and Human Services and became an independent agency on March 31, 1995. The label clientele-based agency may be misleading for two reasons. First, every agency has a clientele of some kind—a group or groups in the general population on whose behalf many of the agency's programs are conducted. For example, farmers are clients of the Department of Agriculture, skilled and semiskilled laborers are associated with the Labor Department, and coal interests are linked to the Bureau of Mines. Similarly, the decision to reestablish a separate SSA in 1995 (as an independent agency as it was before merging with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953) recognized the increasing the political influence of its clientele as well as the importance of domestic spending of about $2.5 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and other human resources in fiscal year (FY) 2011—over 65 percent of all funds appropriated by the federal government. (According to austere 2011 federal budget estimates, total spending for these three programs and their administrative agencies is estimated to decrease slightly to $2.4 trillion in 2012.)
The label also may be misleading because these clienteles may not always be satisfied clienteles. The VA and the BIA are, in fact, excellent illustrations of agencies whose clienteles often have complained about some aspect of agency performance. In 1975, various veterans' groups and individual veterans protested vigorously about the VA's alleged shortcomings in awarding and processing veterans' benefits, to the point that a virtual sit-in took place in the VA director's office. Likewise, the BIA was, for a time, a principal target of the American Indian Movement and others who expressed dissatisfaction with government management of Native American problems on and off the reservation. With both the VA and the BIA, a clientele was the most dissatisfied group—a not uncommon situation in bureaucratic politics. Likewise, the decision to re-create an independent SSA anticipated the intergenerational conflict and continuing controversy over the future of federal Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare, the federally funded health care program for the elderly. 12
Work process agencies engage predominantly in data gathering and analysis for some higher-ranking official or office and rarely if ever participate formally in policy making. Agencies such as the Economic Research Staff of the Department of Agriculture, the Economic Studies Division of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Soils Research Staff of the U.S. Geological Survey fall into this category.
Individual administrators occupying the multitude of positions in the various agencies can be categorized several different ways. For example, most national government administrators are merit employees, which means that they are presumably hired, retained, and promoted because they have the skills and training necessary to perform their jobs. Of the approximately 3.2 million full-time civilian employees in the federal government, about 92 percent work under a merit system of some kind. The remaining 8 percent include unionized employees not subject to merit hiring procedures as well as political appointees, some of whom can be removed by the president. In the latter group, numbering some 3,000 individuals, are the highest-ranking officials of the executive branch, including cabinet secretaries and undersecretaries, regulatory commissioners, and EOP personnel (see Chapter 7 ). Another way of viewing administrative employees is as either specialists or generalists. The term specialist refers to employees at lower and middle levels of the formal hierarchy whose responsibilities center on fairly specific programmatic areas. The term generalist is used to describe those in the higher ranks of an agency whose responsibilities cover a wider cross section of activities within the agency, involving some degree of supervision of various specialists in the ranks below.
The national executive branch, then, is organized primarily into five major types of agencies, with four formal bases of organization (function being the most common) and four broad categories of employees. State and local governments are different, though, and are worth considering briefly for the same reasons that we have examined the national executive branch: the administrative structure has some impact on the way the machinery of government functions and on the content of policies it helps to implement.
State and Local Government Structures
In general, states and larger local governments resemble the national government in composition and organization of their executive-branch agencies. Most states now have numerous cabinet-level departments; states also have a wide variety of regulatory bodies, some government corporations, and miscellaneous agencies. Similarly, most governors have fairly strong executive-office staffs responsive to the governor's leadership (see Chapter 6 ).
There are more than 88,000 governments within the United States and, except for the federal and state governments, all are local governments such as cities, counties, townships, and school or special districts. Individual state and local agencies are smaller and more numerous than their federal government counterparts. Despite the relatively large number of governments, over 90 percent of all public agencies are comprised of fewer than fifty employees. There are also more elected local officials than state and federal ones: 96 percent of all 513,195 elected officials serve on elected boards or commissions in states or local governments ( Table 1-2 ). These elected governments are small governmental units averaging only about six elected representatives per jurisdiction. States and communities also vary in terms of climate, economies, geography, population size, topography, type of government, and urbanization, as well as the individual characteristics of residents. For example, the state of Hawaii has only twenty-one governments (and only one municipal or city government) as compared to the state of Illinois with 6,723 governments. Citizens of Hawaii have just 1.7 governments per 10,000 residents, whereas citizens of North Dakota have almost 243 for the same number of residents. These extreme variations among states and local governments reflect a history of independence from the federal government and a tradition of self-governance and local control.
TABLE 1-2 The Number of Governments and Elected Officials in the United States
Some state agency structures reflect past or present influences of particular interest groups more than those in Washington do. One example was Pennsylvania's powerful Department of Mines and Mineral Industries, indicative of the role played in that state's economy by coal mine owners over the years. Another is the Illinois Department of Aging, created in response to the emergence of a growing constituency with common problems of senior citizenship. These so-called special interests have “their” agencies in the national government, of course, but a pattern found in many states is the creation of somewhat higher-level agencies in response to constituency pressures. Another distinctive feature of some state executive structures is greater legislative control over some individual agencies' budgets and personnel, in comparison to Congress's hold over national government agencies. This varies, however, from state to state.
Larger cities like New York, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles have bureaucratic arrangements not unlike those in state and national governments. There is a great deal of administrative specialization, a directly elected chief executive (mayor) with a highly developed executive-office staff, and similar bases of organization.
There are, however, some differences between local governments and state and national governments. Local party politics frequently play a more prominent role in shaping municipal policy making (notably in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York), and local public-employee unions have a great deal of influence in many cities. Local government activity is more heavily oriented to providing such essential services as water, sewage disposal and sanitation, and police and fire protection than to broader policy concerns, such as education, health care, welfare reform, and mass-transit development.
In smaller communities, as well as in many counties and townships, bureaucratic structures are not very numerous or sophisticated. This can sometimes mean that professional expertise is not as firmly established in local government as it is in most state governments and the national government. This lack of expertise is often reflected in the limited quantity and quality of programs enacted by many local governments, a pattern particularly visible in some rural county governments, many smaller towns and villages, and most special districts. As noted earlier, many local governments concentrate on providing basic urban services, with less emphasis on the sort of operating programs and regulatory activities that characterize state and national administration. The larger the unit of local government, the more likely its bureaucracy is to resemble state and national administrative agencies.
Politics, Policies, and Organizational Structure
This section reviews several traditional conceptions relating to bureaucratic activity and discusses how our political system has affected American bureaucracies in light of these conceptions. This is an introductory treatment only, for our complex political processes cannot be described adequately in a few words; the same is true of the impacts of political complexity on our public administrative institutions. Even this brief discussion, however, will help to set the stage for a fuller exploration of the political values that underlie our governmental processes, the administrative values that have helped to shape the conduct of public administration, and the many facets of intergovernmental relationships (see Chapter 3 ).
At first glance, questions of organizational structure may not appear to carry major political overtones. But formal organizational arrangements do not simply appear, and they are anything but neutral in their consequences. The choice of organizational structure may both reflect and promote some interests over others because a particular structure is the product of decisions reached through the political process by a particular majority coalition, whether directly (as through congressional action) or indirectly (as when the president proposes executive reorganization). Those who organize or reorganize an agency in a certain way obviously have reasons for doing so, one of which is usually promotion of their own policy interests. For example, President George H. W. Bush highlighted his concern for our nation's military veterans and expanded the access of veterans' groups to top policy makers in Washington by creating the Department of Veterans Affairs in March 1989. Similarly, the Clinton administration's decision to separate the SSA from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services highlighted the importance of recognizing the rights of disabled, elderly, and retired persons, and all others who might be eligible for supplemental social-insurance income. In effect, the SSA was protected from future presidents who might seek to change, dismantle, or privatize the agency's basic functions. Despite George W. Bush's concerted lobbying efforts to fulfill his 2004 campaign promise to make fundamental changes in the Social Security system, opposition from bureaucratic interests, among others, contributed to the defeat of several legislative proposals in 2005 to privatize a portion of individual Social Security contributions for younger workers. President Obama has also undertaken major health care reforms that will require significant structural changes.
The Politics of Organizational Structure
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)
federal office created in 2005 by restructuring fifteen intelligence agencies to coordinate national intelligence-gathering and analysis efforts.
Another important dimension of administrative organization is the political setting in which agencies operate; at the same time, structural arrangements can have significant political implications for administrative agencies. Here we will take a closer look at the political importance of structural arrangements, at both the national and local government levels, using as illustrations the establishment of the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) by the first Bush administration, the DHS in 2003, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in 2005, both by the second Bush administration. The generalizations cited below apply with equal force to the executive branches of state and local governments.
Organizational form can signify a number of things. First, a particular organizational structure demonstrates commitment to one set of policy objectives instead of another. It can also foreshadow adoption of a distinct policy direction, either in an individual policy area or in broader policy terms. The first President Bush's action to promote the Veterans Administration (VA) to cabinet status as the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) was taken in opposition to career administrators and even some influential leaders of the president's own party. It contradicted the general strategy of other Republican policies (such as the New Federalism of the 1980s) that were designed to reduce bureaucracy, save expenses, and weaken federal management of government programs. Despite these concerns and intraparty inconsistencies, however, the DVA was organized, largely in response to pressures from veterans' groups.
Second, a particular structure helps to order priorities by promoting some programs over others. President George H. W. Bush was a decorated World War II veteran himself, and elevation of existing veterans' services agencies into the cabinet changed both the symbolism and reality of administrative politics. The relatively higher priority of issues affecting veterans was also highlighted by the creation of a cabinet department to deal with them; such status carries with it increased prestige, not to mention visibility, both of which can be very useful to an agency. Furthermore, that sort of commitment from the chief executive, combined with more prominent organizational status, often leads to increased access to committees and influence in the legislature.
Finally, a particular structure may provide greater access to influence for some interests and less for others. Structure and jurisdiction are at least indirectly related and, although changes in jurisdiction may not necessarily be accompanied by a change in structure, any change in structure will inevitably result in some reallocation of program jurisdiction.
Access and jurisdiction are also related. Stakeholders have meaningful access, at best, only to those administrators responsible for the programs with which these groups are concerned. Changes in jurisdiction, however, will often force affected groups to reestablish lines of access. Such changes could cause difficulties for these groups, especially in persuading new working partners to their points of view. Furthermore, stakeholders normally prefer to have all related programs clustered under one administrative umbrella because that allows them to influence the full range of programs. It is also likely that such an arrangement will be managed by administrators sympathetic to programs for which they are responsible. Scattering the same programs among different agencies and administrators may result in more hostile treatment of both programs and interest groups. Executive reorganizations involving the merger of existing agencies and congressional relationships may also create problems for stakeholders.
The politics surrounding structural rearrangements are often highly controversial, as the second Bush administration discovered while implementing its cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 exposed conflicts and lack of coordination and communication among federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, and fragmentation of information-sharing procedures and capabilities. Creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of the federal government since the Department of Defense was established in the late 1940s, illustrates the dynamics that fostered the very problems the new department is expected to solve ( Table 1-1 ). Combining agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Customs Services into a single “superagency” did not erase historical lines of communication between constituents, officials, and members of Congress that have existed for decades. Although Congress agreed with the reorganization of homeland security functions, no changes were made in the committee structures responsible for authorization and appropriation of funds for the various components of the new agency. 13
After several years of congressional debate, extensive public hearings, and the publication of a critical investigating commission report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was created by Congress in early 2005. 14 Amid similar post-September 11 controversies, the DNI was forged by the merger of fifteen agencies—including various defense intelligence agencies and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—to encourage greater cooperation and coordination among intelligence functions ( Figure 1-4 ). Although the new office now reports directly to the president and controls about 70 percent of the total national nondefense budget for intelligence gathering and analysis, it has yet to define its jurisdictional boundaries. In this case, centralization could negatively impact agency influence and access to congressional authorization and appropriation committees. In addition, some observers note that separating the DNI from the analytical offices of each of the operational agencies may complicate rather than simplify the overall intelligence analysis effort. 15 Despite the additional bureaucracy and centralization of The U.S. Customs Service (Department of the Treasury), Immigration and Naturalization Service (Department of Justice), Federal Emergency Management Agency (General Services Administration), the Transportation Security Administration (Department of Transportation [DOT]), and the U.S. Coast Guard (DOT) were transferred from their former departments (in parentheses) to the reorganized DHS. One of the major functions of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is the hiring and training of all of the new federal airport security screeners. In addition, the TSA has many other responsibilities under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001. Security at U.S. ports as well as safety on other forms of commercial travel is also a responsibility of the TSA. The TSA and DHS Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security are charged with ensuring the safety of traveling Americans and coordinating efforts with law enforcement so that intelligence gathered concerning possible threats to transportation safety can be shared and appropriate steps taken to ensure security.
in bureaucratic politics, the area of programmatic responsibility assigned to an agency by the legislature or chief executive; also a term used to describe the territory within the boundaries of a government entity such as “a local jurisdiction.”
Departments are composed of many smaller administrative units with a variety of titles, such as bureau, office, administration, and service. Within DOT, for example, one finds such diverse units as the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is subsumed within the Interior Department; and the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), the Public Health Service (PHS), and (most significant) the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are all part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The fact that bureaus or offices are located within the same departmental structure does not necessarily mean that they work cooperatively on any one venture; in fact, conflict among agencies within the same department is not uncommon (though efforts such as the creation of a Department of Homeland Security have been made to reduce such conflict). Finally, departments and their subunits generally are responsible for carrying out specific operating programs enacted by Congress; they have, and attempt to maintain, fairly specific program jurisdiction and often concrete program objectives. For examples of the various divisions of the DHS, and the approximate percentage of total 2011 budget devoted to each agency or function, see Table 1-1 . The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), for instance, received the largest share (20 percent) of the total DHS budget; the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) received 18 percent; TSA was allocated 14 percent; and FEMA 12 percent.
Independent Regulatory Boards and Commissions
Among such organizations are the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Reserve Board (FRB), National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC). These organizations are a second major type of administrative entity and differ from cabinet-level departments in a number of important ways. First, they have a different function—namely, to oversee and regulate activities of various parts of the private economic sector. Second, their leadership is plural rather than singular; that is, they are headed by a board or commission of several individuals (usually five to nine) instead of a secretary. Third, they are designed to be somewhat independent of other institutions and political forces. Members of these entities are appointed by the president with Senate approval (as are senior department officials) but have more legal protection than do Cabinet members against dismissal by the president; in addition, they normally serve a term of office longer than that of the appointing president. In relation to Congress, these entities are supposedly somewhat freer to do their jobs than are departments and their subunits; in practice, this is questionable, but the design does have some impact. Finally, these entities are designed to regulate private-sector enterprises in a detached and objective manner and are expected to prevent abuses, corruption, and the like. Some controversy has existed, however, over just how detached and objective these organizations have been in relation to those they regulate.
TABLE 1-1 Percent of Total Budget Authority by Organization, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Fiscal Year 2011.
Independent regulatory boards and commissions are not, however, the only government entities having regulatory responsibilities. A phenomenon of considerable importance is the growth of government regulation since the 1960s through a wide variety of other administrative instruments. Examples include the FAA, state departments of transportation, the NTSB, and the FDA. These agencies play important roles in their respective policy areas with regard to setting rules and standards for those in the private sector. The increasing incidence of government regulation has spawned rising political discontent over the scope and content of regulatory activity. Former President Clinton and Vice President Gore ordered a cost-benefit analysis (detailed in Chapters 10 and 11 ) of what were called “important” regulations and recommended the dissolution of those that were deemed “insignificant.” They found that it is very difficult in a large bureaucracy to eliminate the bad rules and make the good ones easier to understand. Sorting out the necessary from the unnecessary is a task—involving significant discretionary authority—heavily influenced by private interests, congressional intent, and procedures governing regulatory agencies, boards, and commissions. The Obama administration has attempted to broaden the scope of regulation to include consumer protection, financial institutions, and the provision of affordable health care to millions of Americans. In Chapter 11 , we will explore the politics of regulatory reform more fully.
Government Corporations
These are national, state, or local government organizations that are identical to private corporations in most of their structures and operations except one—they are government-owned. Also, while some (such as the National Railroad Passenger Corporation or Amtrak and local public utilities) seek to make a profit, others (such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC] and the Lower Colorado River Authority of the state of Texas) do not. These are conceived as corporate entities for a number of reasons. First, their legislative charters allow them somewhat greater latitude in day-to-day operations than other agencies enjoy. Government corporations also have the power to acquire, develop, and dispose of real estate and other kinds of property while acting in their own names (rather than in the name of the parent government). Finally, they can bring suit in a court of law and are legally liable to be sued, also in their own name. Each is headed by a board of directors, much as private corporations are, and is engaged in a wide variety of governmental activities. Three of the newest and largest of such entities are Amtrak, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the U.S. Postal Service (with nearly 550,000 employees, almost one-fourth of all civilian federal workers); two of the oldest, both founded in the 1930s, are the FDIC and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
Executive Office of the President (EOP)
The EOP is a collection of administrative bodies that are physically and organizationally housed close to the Oval Office and designed to work for the president. Several of these entities are especially prominent and important: (1) The White House Office consists of the president's key staff aides and staff directors. (2) The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) assists the president in assembling budget requests for the entire executive branch and forwards them to Capitol Hill as the president's annual budget message, coordinates operating and regulatory programs, develops high-quality executive talent, and improves management processes throughout the executive branch. (3) The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is the president's principal research arm for economic policy; it frequently influences the president's economic thinking. (4) Entities such as the National Security Council (NSC), designed originally as forums for generating a broad overview of policy directions, consist of the president, vice president, key cabinet secretaries, and other officials. The formal purpose of these entities is to monitor and assess administration policies. Most of these entities become directly involved in policy making to a greater or lesser degree, according to each president's preferences. As staffs have grown larger, however, actions can be taken without direct presidential supervision, as the Iran-Contra affair during the second Reagan administration (1985–1989) involving the NSC clearly illustrates (for elaboration, see Chapter 6 ). 11
Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
an important entity in the Executive Office of the President that assists the president in assembling executive-branch budget requests, coordinating programs, developing executive talent, and supervising program management processes in national government agencies.
Other Independent Executive Agencies
Finally, there are miscellaneous independent agencies that have no bureaucratic departmental “home” but fit no other category we have discussed. Among these are the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), formerly combined as the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which together oversee the national government's personnel system; the U.S. Mint; the General Services Administration (GSA), the government's office of procurement, property, and supply; the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) discussed in Chapter 5 ; and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Foundations of Organization
The foundations of organization, mentioned earlier, are function, geographic area, clientele, and work process. The most common organizational foundation is according to function, indicating that an agency is concerned with a fairly distinct policy area but not limited to a particular geographic area. Organization according to geography indicates that an agency's work is in a specific region; examples include the TVA, the Pacific Command of the Navy, and the Southern Command of the U.S. Army.
Clientele-based agencies are agencies that appear to address problems of a specific segment of the population, such as the (old) Veterans Administration (VA) or the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the “new” Social Security Administration (SSA), which was separated from the Department of Health and Human Services and became an independent agency on March 31, 1995. The label clientele-based agency may be misleading for two reasons. First, every agency has a clientele of some kind—a group or groups in the general population on whose behalf many of the agency's programs are conducted. For example, farmers are clients of the Department of Agriculture, skilled and semiskilled laborers are associated with the Labor Department, and coal interests are linked to the Bureau of Mines. Similarly, the decision to reestablish a separate SSA in 1995 (as an independent agency as it was before merging with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953) recognized the increasing the political influence of its clientele as well as the importance of domestic spending of about $2.5 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and other human resources in fiscal year (FY) 2011—over 65 percent of all funds appropriated by the federal government. (According to austere 2011 federal budget estimates, total spending for these three programs and their administrative agencies is estimated to decrease slightly to $2.4 trillion in 2012.)
The label also may be misleading because these clienteles may not always be satisfied clienteles. The VA and the BIA are, in fact, excellent illustrations of agencies whose clienteles often have complained about some aspect of agency performance. In 1975, various veterans' groups and individual veterans protested vigorously about the VA's alleged shortcomings in awarding and processing veterans' benefits, to the point that a virtual sit-in took place in the VA director's office. Likewise, the BIA was, for a time, a principal target of the American Indian Movement and others who expressed dissatisfaction with government management of Native American problems on and off the reservation. With both the VA and the BIA, a clientele was the most dissatisfied group—a not uncommon situation in bureaucratic politics. Likewise, the decision to re-create an independent SSA anticipated the intergenerational conflict and continuing controversy over the future of federal Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare, the federally funded health care program for the elderly. 12
Work process agencies engage predominantly in data gathering and analysis for some higher-ranking official or office and rarely if ever participate formally in policy making. Agencies such as the Economic Research Staff of the Department of Agriculture, the Economic Studies Division of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Soils Research Staff of the U.S. Geological Survey fall into this category.
Individual administrators occupying the multitude of positions in the various agencies can be categorized several different ways. For example, most national government administrators are merit employees, which means that they are presumably hired, retained, and promoted because they have the skills and training necessary to perform their jobs. Of the approximately 3.2 million full-time civilian employees in the federal government, about 92 percent work under a merit system of some kind. The remaining 8 percent include unionized employees not subject to merit hiring procedures as well as political appointees, some of whom can be removed by the president. In the latter group, numbering some 3,000 individuals, are the highest-ranking officials of the executive branch, including cabinet secretaries and undersecretaries, regulatory commissioners, and EOP personnel (see Chapter 7 ). Another way of viewing administrative employees is as either specialists or generalists. The term specialist refers to employees at lower and middle levels of the formal hierarchy whose responsibilities center on fairly specific programmatic areas. The term generalist is used to describe those in the higher ranks of an agency whose responsibilities cover a wider cross section of activities within the agency, involving some degree of supervision of various specialists in the ranks below.
The national executive branch, then, is organized primarily into five major types of agencies, with four formal bases of organization (function being the most common) and four broad categories of employees. State and local governments are different, though, and are worth considering briefly for the same reasons that we have examined the national executive branch: the administrative structure has some impact on the way the machinery of government functions and on the content of policies it helps to implement.
State and Local Government Structures
In general, states and larger local governments resemble the national government in composition and organization of their executive-branch agencies. Most states now have numerous cabinet-level departments; states also have a wide variety of regulatory bodies, some government corporations, and miscellaneous agencies. Similarly, most governors have fairly strong executive-office staffs responsive to the governor's leadership (see Chapter 6 ).
There are more than 88,000 governments within the United States and, except for the federal and state governments, all are local governments such as cities, counties, townships, and school or special districts. Individual state and local agencies are smaller and more numerous than their federal government counterparts. Despite the relatively large number of governments, over 90 percent of all public agencies are comprised of fewer than fifty employees. There are also more elected local officials than state and federal ones: 96 percent of all 513,195 elected officials serve on elected boards or commissions in states or local governments ( Table 1-2 ). These elected governments are small governmental units averaging only about six elected representatives per jurisdiction. States and communities also vary in terms of climate, economies, geography, population size, topography, type of government, and urbanization, as well as the individual characteristics of residents. For example, the state of Hawaii has only twenty-one governments (and only one municipal or city government) as compared to the state of Illinois with 6,723 governments. Citizens of Hawaii have just 1.7 governments per 10,000 residents, whereas citizens of North Dakota have almost 243 for the same number of residents. These extreme variations among states and local governments reflect a history of independence from the federal government and a tradition of self-governance and local control.
TABLE 1-2 The Number of Governments and Elected Officials in the United States
Some state agency structures reflect past or present influences of particular interest groups more than those in Washington do. One example was Pennsylvania's powerful Department of Mines and Mineral Industries, indicative of the role played in that state's economy by coal mine owners over the years. Another is the Illinois Department of Aging, created in response to the emergence of a growing constituency with common problems of senior citizenship. These so-called special interests have “their” agencies in the national government, of course, but a pattern found in many states is the creation of somewhat higher-level agencies in response to constituency pressures. Another distinctive feature of some state executive structures is greater legislative control over some individual agencies' budgets and personnel, in comparison to Congress's hold over national government agencies. This varies, however, from state to state.
Larger cities like New York, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles have bureaucratic arrangements not unlike those in state and national governments. There is a great deal of administrative specialization, a directly elected chief executive (mayor) with a highly developed executive-office staff, and similar bases of organization.
There are, however, some differences between local governments and state and national governments. Local party politics frequently play a more prominent role in shaping municipal policy making (notably in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York), and local public-employee unions have a great deal of influence in many cities. Local government activity is more heavily oriented to providing such essential services as water, sewage disposal and sanitation, and police and fire protection than to broader policy concerns, such as education, health care, welfare reform, and mass-transit development.
In smaller communities, as well as in many counties and townships, bureaucratic structures are not very numerous or sophisticated. This can sometimes mean that professional expertise is not as firmly established in local government as it is in most state governments and the national government. This lack of expertise is often reflected in the limited quantity and quality of programs enacted by many local governments, a pattern particularly visible in some rural county governments, many smaller towns and villages, and most special districts. As noted earlier, many local governments concentrate on providing basic urban services, with less emphasis on the sort of operating programs and regulatory activities that characterize state and national administration. The larger the unit of local government, the more likely its bureaucracy is to resemble state and national administrative agencies.
Politics, Policies, and Organizational Structure
This section reviews several traditional conceptions relating to bureaucratic activity and discusses how our political system has affected American bureaucracies in light of these conceptions. This is an introductory treatment only, for our complex political processes cannot be described adequately in a few words; the same is true of the impacts of political complexity on our public administrative institutions. Even this brief discussion, however, will help to set the stage for a fuller exploration of the political values that underlie our governmental processes, the administrative values that have helped to shape the conduct of public administration, and the many facets of intergovernmental relationships (see Chapter 3 ).
At first glance, questions of organizational structure may not appear to carry major political overtones. But formal organizational arrangements do not simply appear, and they are anything but neutral in their consequences. The choice of organizational structure may both reflect and promote some interests over others because a particular structure is the product of decisions reached through the political process by a particular majority coalition, whether directly (as through congressional action) or indirectly (as when the president proposes executive reorganization). Those who organize or reorganize an agency in a certain way obviously have reasons for doing so, one of which is usually promotion of their own policy interests. For example, President George H. W. Bush highlighted his concern for our nation's military veterans and expanded the access of veterans' groups to top policy makers in Washington by creating the Department of Veterans Affairs in March 1989. Similarly, the Clinton administration's decision to separate the SSA from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services highlighted the importance of recognizing the rights of disabled, elderly, and retired persons, and all others who might be eligible for supplemental social-insurance income. In effect, the SSA was protected from future presidents who might seek to change, dismantle, or privatize the agency's basic functions. Despite George W. Bush's concerted lobbying efforts to fulfill his 2004 campaign promise to make fundamental changes in the Social Security system, opposition from bureaucratic interests, among others, contributed to the defeat of several legislative proposals in 2005 to privatize a portion of individual Social Security contributions for younger workers. President Obama has also undertaken major health care reforms that will require significant structural changes.
The Politics of Organizational Structure
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI)
federal office created in 2005 by restructuring fifteen intelligence agencies to coordinate national intelligence-gathering and analysis efforts.
Another important dimension of administrative organization is the political setting in which agencies operate; at the same time, structural arrangements can have significant political implications for administrative agencies. Here we will take a closer look at the political importance of structural arrangements, at both the national and local government levels, using as illustrations the establishment of the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) by the first Bush administration, the DHS in 2003, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in 2005, both by the second Bush administration. The generalizations cited below apply with equal force to the executive branches of state and local governments.
Organizational form can signify a number of things. First, a particular organizational structure demonstrates commitment to one set of policy objectives instead of another. It can also foreshadow adoption of a distinct policy direction, either in an individual policy area or in broader policy terms. The first President Bush's action to promote the Veterans Administration (VA) to cabinet status as the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) was taken in opposition to career administrators and even some influential leaders of the president's own party. It contradicted the general strategy of other Republican policies (such as the New Federalism of the 1980s) that were designed to reduce bureaucracy, save expenses, and weaken federal management of government programs. Despite these concerns and intraparty inconsistencies, however, the DVA was organized, largely in response to pressures from veterans' groups.
Second, a particular structure helps to order priorities by promoting some programs over others. President George H. W. Bush was a decorated World War II veteran himself, and elevation of existing veterans' services agencies into the cabinet changed both the symbolism and reality of administrative politics. The relatively higher priority of issues affecting veterans was also highlighted by the creation of a cabinet department to deal with them; such status carries with it increased prestige, not to mention visibility, both of which can be very useful to an agency. Furthermore, that sort of commitment from the chief executive, combined with more prominent organizational status, often leads to increased access to committees and influence in the legislature.
Finally, a particular structure may provide greater access to influence for some interests and less for others. Structure and jurisdiction are at least indirectly related and, although changes in jurisdiction may not necessarily be accompanied by a change in structure, any change in structure will inevitably result in some reallocation of program jurisdiction.
Access and jurisdiction are also related. Stakeholders have meaningful access, at best, only to those administrators responsible for the programs with which these groups are concerned. Changes in jurisdiction, however, will often force affected groups to reestablish lines of access. Such changes could cause difficulties for these groups, especially in persuading new working partners to their points of view. Furthermore, stakeholders normally prefer to have all related programs clustered under one administrative umbrella because that allows them to influence the full range of programs. It is also likely that such an arrangement will be managed by administrators sympathetic to programs for which they are responsible. Scattering the same programs among different agencies and administrators may result in more hostile treatment of both programs and interest groups. Executive reorganizations involving the merger of existing agencies and congressional relationships may also create problems for stakeholders.
The politics surrounding structural rearrangements are often highly controversial, as the second Bush administration discovered while implementing its cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 exposed conflicts and lack of coordination and communication among federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, and fragmentation of information-sharing procedures and capabilities. Creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of the federal government since the Department of Defense was established in the late 1940s, illustrates the dynamics that fostered the very problems the new department is expected to solve ( Table 1-1 ). Combining agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Customs Services into a single “superagency” did not erase historical lines of communication between constituents, officials, and members of Congress that have existed for decades. Although Congress agreed with the reorganization of homeland security functions, no changes were made in the committee structures responsible for authorization and appropriation of funds for the various components of the new agency. 13
After several years of congressional debate, extensive public hearings, and the publication of a critical investigating commission report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) was created by Congress in early 2005. 14 Amid similar post-September 11 controversies, the DNI was forged by the merger of fifteen agencies—including various defense intelligence agencies and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—to encourage greater cooperation and coordination among intelligence functions ( Figure 1-4 ). Although the new office now reports directly to the president and controls about 70 percent of the total national nondefense budget for intelligence gathering and analysis, it has yet to define its jurisdictional boundaries. In this case, centralization could negatively impact agency influence and access to congressional authorization and appropriation committees. In addition, some observers note that separating the DNI from the analytical offices of each of the operational agencies may complicate rather than simplify the overall intelligence analysis effort. 15 Despite the additional bureaucracy and centralization of management authority in Washington, the redrawn jurisdictional boundaries are likely to reflect the same conflicts and interests expressed in past arrangements.
When state and local governments reorganize, downsize, or privatize programs and policies, they are also subject to shifting coalitions and political struggles over power and administrative jurisdiction. This is clearly illustrated by the periodic effort in cities and towns across the country to redefine their local government structures. This controversy has its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when growing concentrations of European immigrants appeared in America's larger cities, as well as some smaller ones. Their arrival was accompanied by more—and more powerful—political party organizations and their “bosses.”
Efforts to reform American municipal government, according to the rhetoric of the time, were designed to bring about “economy and efficiency” in government, “to take the politics out of local government,” and to promote “good government in the interests of the whole community.” Municipal reform, then as now, usually involved one or more of the following structural arrangements: (1) the method of selecting the chief executive, that is, whether to have a popularly elected mayor or a professional city manager chosen by, and responsible to, the city council; (2) the extent of the chief executive's powers—this usually meant whether the office of the mayor was formally strong or weak; (3) whether municipal elections were to have candidates selected by political parties or on a nonpartisan basis; and (4) whether members of the city council were to be elected from specific geographic areas of the city, that is, by districts or wards, or selected at large.
Political rhetoric aside, decisions about these fundamental arrangements carry with them major implications for the distribution of political power. For example, citywide minorities have little chance of winning representation in at-large council elections but a better chance in district or ward elections (provided ward boundaries were drawn up to reflect, rather than fragment, their population concentrations). Similarly, there are numerous instances in which a chief executive elected under the strong-mayor form was almost certain to be more politically sympathetic to ethnic or minority concerns than one chosen under a weak-mayor or city-manager form. It seems clear that group preferences for or against structural reform were not arrived at by chance but arose out of perceived group self-interest. This perception occurs because ethnic voters constitute the political majority in many cities that employ the strong-mayor form. Attempts by mayors in cities or counties without the strong-mayor form of government to reconstitute their governmental systems are likely to be opposed by elected local boards and commissions that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
In sum, there are clear winners and losers in this facet of politics as in all others. Organizational structures, jurisdiction, and access in different settings reflect changing alliances and the relative power of competing political forces, race and ethnic conflicts, and values.
HOW WOULD YOU DECIDE?
The West Wing
The West Wing, an award-winning television series that aired on NBC from 1999 to 2006, took a close look at the organizational structure of American bureaucracy and the politics involved in running the United States of America. The series followed fictional President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, and his staff as they negotiated legislative and political issues throughout a presidential administration. Viewers see the Bartlet administration confront domestic terrorism; midterm, primary, and general elections; and legislative battle controversies. As the series progressed, deeper issues were confronted and addressed in connection with events occurring in American life, such as the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Tying the show's topics to current American events demonstrated and conveyed the difficulties that arise in getting administrators and politicians to work together toward a common goal. The show aimed to present viewers with a “real” view of politics and bureaucracy and to create a positive view of public service.
A particular structure helps to order priorities by promoting some programs over others, as shown throughout The West Wing and in actual presidential administrations. Shifting coalitions and political struggles over power and administrative jurisdiction lead to major implications for the distribution of political power.
How would you determine the best organizational structures for an administration and thus for a nation?
Source: http://www.nbc.com/The_West_Wing/ , accessed April 25, 2011.
The Dynamics of Policy Making in the United States
a governing principle, following from separation of powers, that creates overlapping and interlocking functions among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. These include the president's power to veto an act of Congress (and Congress's power to override a presidential veto by a two-thirds majority), the Senate's power to confirm or reject presidential appointments to executive and judicial positions, and the power of the courts to determine the constitutionality of the actions of other branches.
parliamentary form of government
a form of government practiced in most democratic nations, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan, in which the chief executive and top-level ministers are themselves members of the legislature.
Governmental power and authority in America are, by design, highly fragmented and scattered, for the Framers of the Constitution feared nothing as much as excessive concentrations of power. Therefore, they did all they could to divide power among the different branches of the national government, and they gave each branch various means of checking the power of the other two. This horizontal division of power is called checks and balances . Such a division of power within national, state, and (to a lesser extent) local governments places bureaucracy in the United States in a very different position from the one it occupies in many other countries which have adopted parliamentary systems.
There is little question in parliamentary forms of government about how, by whom, and through what channels authority is exercised. In parliamentary governments, the chief executive and top-level ministers are themselves members of the legislature. Parliamentary government is practiced in most democratic nations, and the chief executive (prime minister or premier) is usually the leader of the majority party in the legislature (parliament). In this situation, bureaucratic responsiveness to the chief executive and to the legislature are one and the same thing. In the United States, however, such questions take on added importance because, in our system, there are no similarly convenient answers.
The making of public policy in the United States is characterized by a number of major features. For one thing, the process lacks a centralized mechanism that comprehensively directs traffic. Rather, many centers of power are scattered throughout the executive and legislative branches. This lack of centralization produces a great deal of slack in the decision-making system. That is, in the absence of tight legislative or executive control, there are many opportunities for lower-ranking executives to affect implementation of a law. This phenomenon of administrative discretion is widespread, arising not only from structural separation of powers but also from conflicts that characterize executive-legislative relations and from statutory language that is often broad or even vague.
It follows that there are many power vacuums throughout the decision-making process. This is the basis for some, but not all, of the conflict between the president and Congress and between many governors and their legislatures. The existence of a power vacuum also allows those involved in the decision-making process to compete for relatively small amounts of power, thereby increasing their influence a little at a time. Among the most active contenders for these small quantities of power are interest groups and bureaucratic agencies, both of which seek to dominate policy areas of greatest concern to them.
where power to govern is splintered, there will inevitably be attempts by some to exercise that power that is not clearly defined and is, therefore, “up for grabs.”
It is not only formal governmental power that is fragmented and scattered in American politics. So, too, is the ability to influence policy making in specific subject areas. The policy-making process is broken into many parts, and responsibility for each component is determined by a combination of factors. In such a setting, it is not uncommon for public administrators to become significant players in the political game, to assume an advocacy stance, and to take initiatives that influence the long-term development of policies, especially in specific programs under their jurisdictions.
Thus, bureaucracy in American government differs from traditional notions of bureaucracy in important ways: it functions in a system in which power is far from centralized; bureaucracy has a great deal of discretionary power in making day-to-day decisions and in dealing with broader policy questions; and accountability is enforced through multiple channels as a result of the fragmentation of higher political authority.
How does all this affect the behavior of public administrators and the growth of bureaucratic institutions? It is impossible to answer that question entirely in a few words, but two general observations suggest the nature of the political environment. Bureaucracies often have independent momentum with which political leaders must contend if they are to influence bureaucratic activity—hardly the conditions suggested by traditional conceptions of bureaucracy. Top executives are not always able to command the civilian bureaucracy to act. Quite the contrary, senior appointed officials are viewed as part-timers, whose influence on the “permanent” bureaucracy is limited. One advantage of this situation, however, is that public bureaucracies can more easily develop continuity in their operations because career employees are directed more by strong “institutional memory” than by the influence of any one appointed senior official (see Chapters 6 and 7 ). Second, bureaucratic activity focuses predominantly on the respective areas of agency jurisdiction; a bureaucracy will usually contest any significant change in the policy area for which it is responsible. Both of these phenomena indicate the non-neutral stance of American public bureaucracy. This is one of the most important differences between bureaucratic practice and any ideal model of bureaucracy against which its acceptance by the American public might be measured.
Traditional Conceptions of Bureaucracy
a central feature of bureaucracy whereby it carries out directives of other institutions of government (such as a chief executive or a legislature) in a politically neutral way, without acting as a political force in its own right; a traditional notion concerning bureaucratic behavior in Western governments; also called political neutrality.
the goals, purposes, and objectives of a legislative body, given concrete form in its enactments (though actual intent may change over time); bureaucracies are assumed to follow legislative intent in implementing laws.
the process by which a legislative body supervises or oversees the work of the bureaucracy in order to ensure its conformity with legislative intent.
Bureaucracy has traditionally been conceived of in terms of implementing directives of other government institutions as a servant of political forces external to it but not as a political force in its own right. This notion of bureaucratic neutrality is central to an understanding of the way executive-branch bureaucracies have been designed to function in Western governments for over a century. A number of companion assumptions have also been evident in administrative practice.
Bureaucratic behavior is assumed to follow the intent of the legislature in the form of legislative enactments and guidelines for implementation. With legislative intent assumed as a principal guiding force, the bureaucracy's responsibility to the legislature is clearly established: it relies on the legislature for substantive policy direction and for financial and political support. The legislature, in turn, looks to the bureaucracy for faithful and competent administration of the laws.
There is a legitimate function of legislative oversight , or supervision, of bureaucratic behavior that logically complements legislative intent. In other words, the legislature is expected to supervise the work of the bureaucracy. Present in both assumptions is the expectation that the bureaucracy is distinctly subordinate to the will and initiative of other parts of the government.
Bureaucratic behavior is assumed to be subject to direction by the chief executive of the government. The apparent contradiction between chief-executive direction and legislative direction of the bureaucracy stems from the fact that these traditional assumptions were derived from parliamentary forms of government, in which the chief executive and top-level ministers are themselves members of the legislature. There is, however, a real contradiction between chief-executive and legislative control of the bureaucracy in a system such as ours. In the United States, the chief executive and top-level executives are independent of the legislature. In fact, they are almost always prohibited from serving in the legislature at the same time that they hold executive office.
Finally, it was traditionally assumed that the bureaucracy would be a neutral, professional, competent structure staffed by specialists in both general administrative processes and their respective specific policy areas. The notion of a competent bureaucracy responding in a politically neutral manner to the initiatives of executives and legislators external to it seems to conform to the image of administration held by many Americans and has had a powerful influence on administrative design and practice in this country.
Explaining the Growth of Bureaucracy
The reasons for the growth of public administrative functions are not readily apparent. A number of possibilities exist, each of which is worth examining for the influence it has had on the expansion of public administrative agencies.
One explanation commonly cited is that, beginning in the 1800s and continuing today, technological complexity gradually exceeded the capacities of legislative bodies and of political generalists to cope successfully. This view assumes that professional specialization in a host of fields, in effect, invaded the public service just as it assumed far greater importance in society at large. Thus, as both the nation's problems and methods of addressing them became more complex, specialized bureaucracies became more necessary in the process of discharging government's responsibilities. To some extent, technological complexity has had an important effect on bureaucracy, but whether it alone triggered bureaucratic growth is not certain. On the contrary, technological innovations such as the widespread implementation of electronic government (e-gov) strategies are designed to increase access to information about government and decrease citizen dependence on bureaucracy. The rapid dissemination of new types of online social networks has provided a framework for the broader application of ICTs in government agencies.
takes the information technology concept further by integrating disparate information sources into one-stop web “portals” for improving access to information about government; for example, http://www.usa.gov .
a phenomenon whereby patterns of regularized relationships develop and are maintained in the political process between individual government agencies and particular economic groupings; for example, departments of agriculture, labor, and commerce, working with farm groups, labor groups, and business organizations, respectively.
According to a second view, public pressures helped create a diversified and responsive bureaucracy, primarily because economic and social interests (stakeholders) became increasingly diverse throughout our society and government began to recognize those interests. Political scientist James Q. Wilson has referred to the phenomenon of clientelism , a term that describes the relationships between individual government agencies and particular economic groupings, a pattern that first appeared at about the time of the American Civil War. Wilson cites another political scientist, Richard L. Schott, who noted that “whereas earlier departments had been formed around specialized governmental functions (foreign affairs, war, finance, and the like), the new departments of this period—Agriculture, Labor, and Commerce—were devoted to the interests and aspirations of particular economic groups.” 16 That trend intensified in the twentieth century to such a degree that it is now entirely appropriate to speak of bureaucratic clienteles or constituencies in the same sense as legislative constituencies. This view, then, suggests that bureaucracies have been created or disestablished in response to popular demand for government action or inaction in specific policy fields.
A third explanation, which has its roots in the disciplines of economics and international relations, maintains that governmental responses to crisis situations, such as economic depressions or military conflicts, cause both revenues and expenditures of government to move sharply upward. More important, after the crisis has passed, the levels do not return to their pre-crisis status, and new ideas of what is acceptable emerge, resulting in new “routine” levels of government activity. As we shall see in Chapter 8 on government budgeting, national government expenditure levels underwent precisely this sort of shift after World War II and also after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, with political acceptance of the change generally high in both cases. This explanation indirectly emphasizes society's increasing readiness to turn to government for managing responses to major (and, perhaps, not so major) problems. The George W. Bush administration's homeland security and intelligence reorganizations were undertaken to prevent further acts of terrorism and respond to one of the greatest challenges facing public administrators since World War II. The estimated $500 billion to $1 trillion expended on strengthening these functions resulted in the successful operation to capture and kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011. This is a clear example of a response to crisis circumstances prompting bureaucratic and budgetary growth. One final explanation, which also dates back to the late 1800s, overlaps all the previous ones. As the private economy became both more national in scope and more industrial in nature compared to the period before 1850, there developed a need for greater regulation by the national government of private economic activities. Many of those regulative actions spawned new ones that, combined with the other forces at work (particularly crisis-related actions), led to the steady growth of public administrative entities.
All four of these explanations appear to have some merit; together, they paint a clearer picture of how government bureaucracy has reached its present size and scope. Considering “how we got here” may be useful in light of contemporary efforts to deregulate, downsize, privatize, or impose curbs or restraints on administrative agencies. Such explanations may also contribute to our knowledge and appreciation of government agencies and actions at times when civil rights, domestic security, health care coverage, housing values, personal liberties, and retirement savings are threatened.
Social Change and Public Administration
The social setting of public administration, like its structural and organizational arrangements, has both direct and indirect impacts, and changes in that setting, like others, carry with them potentially far-reaching implications. Several social-demographic changes during the past sixty years have been of particular importance in shaping contemporary public administration.
shifts in the population and economies of various regions that impact the delivery of public services.
The most obvious changes are population growth and shifts in the demographic makeup of the population. We have become a nation of nearly 309 million inhabitants, from less than one-third that many a century ago and just less than half that number (151 million) in 1950. 17 This striking growth in numbers has been paralleled by increases in demands for public services. More often than not, these demands have been directed at administrative personnel, such as police officers, firefighters, teachers and other educators, sanitation workers, and health care workers. Intensifying this increased demand for service is a second development: the continuing concentration of people in urban areas. The greatest population growth occurred in suburban rings around larger cities, mainly in the Southeast, Northwest, and Southwest.
Perhaps more important have been major shifts in both population and economic activity from the Northeast/Midwest (Snow Belt) to the South/West (Sun Belt). During the 1970s, population growth increased faster outside the Snow Belt as states in this region lost nearly 1 million manufacturing jobs. In the 1980s, more than 90 percent of the nation's population growth occurred outside the Snow Belt. Such changes continued during the 1990s and entailed serious social, economic, policy, and administrative implications for regions on both ends of the migration streams. Even within the Sun Belt, growth has been concentrated in particular areas. In Florida, for example, the coastal population doubled between 1964 and 1984. Today, 12 million people live in that state's Atlantic and Gulf Coast counties. Similarly, the population of the seventeen coastal counties of Texas increased by 64 percent in the period 1960–1994 and now numbers 6 million people. Today, a total of nearly 50 million Americans live in counties adjacent to coastal areas. This demographic reality has major implications for large numbers of government programs, including emergency management, flood insurance, beach replenishment, and coastal zoning. Noncoastal states such as Arizona and Nevada have experienced similar increases in general population. The 2010 census, however, confirmed that the Lost Decade resulted in the slowest population growth and the smallest internal population movement in the United States since the Great Depression in 1940. 18
Several other important demographic changes also should be mentioned. First, according to the 2010 Census, more than 50 percent of the total population growth in the U.S. in the period 2000–2010 was due to the increase in the Hispanic population. That population group increased by 15.2 million, out of a total increase of 27.3 million. Secondly, about 30 percent of the U.S. population age five or older speaks a foreign language at home, and over 50 percent of those individuals speak Spanish as their first language. Third, the overall minority population grew in every region of the nation, but most significantly in the South and West. In the South, minority populations increased by 34 percent, and in the West, by 29 percent. In the Northeast and Midwest, the corresponding figures were 21 percent and 24 percent, respectively. 19 These changes, and others like them, pose new and complex problems for those who administer government programs in education, economic development, housing, and other social-service areas.
rapidly emerging patterns of change (related in part to the knowledge explosion) in communication, medical, and transportation technologies, among others, with significant implications both for the societal challenges confronting government and for the means and resources increasingly available to government for conducting public affairs.
a global social phenomenon of the past forty years, particularly in Western industrial nations, creating new technologies and vast new areas of research and education; examples include biogenetic engineering, space exploration, mass communications, nuclear technology, mass production, and energy research.
Globalization of the international economy has also permitted mass production and the distribution of durable goods on a larger scale than ever before. Improvements in technology, transportation, and telecommunications now allow literally billions of people to participate in a “networked,” that is, less centralized and hierarchical, world economy. Consequently, a number of new concerns have emerged in the field of public management, concerns that have affected managers in both the public and private sectors. For example, it is increasingly apparent that equipment budgets and employee skills within all types of organizations must keep pace with developments in ICTs. All service organizations are coping with technological change brought about by the new global economy. Adopting new technologies and adapting to these changes have become increasingly important to public administration. We have experienced a revolution in electronic communications in terms of instantaneously linking widely separated parts of the world via the Internet and satellites. An important outgrowth in this area within the public sector is the emergence of electronic government, to improve access to information and facilitate communication among government agencies and businesses, citizens, and interested consumers. The knowledge revolution is another dimension of technological change and is giving rise to both the education industry and the expansion of privately and government-sponsored scientific research. Government regulation of, and participation in, increasingly complex technologies requires more and more sophisticated and specialized bureaucracies. This drastic alteration in technical capacity and responsibilities has had a permanent effect on the nature and course of American politics and public administration. 20
The need for increased specialization is evident throughout much of both public and private administration. Of course, specialization is a core value in traditional conceptions of public bureaucracy; thus, movement toward greater specialization represents the extension of an existing feature rather than an entirely new one. It has been a very important consequence for public administration that specialists both inside and outside of government have been able to be in closer working contact with one another as part of the policy-making process. Technology has allowed for the creation of electronic communication networks such as blogs that make it easier for computer users to communicate with others on the Internet and to exchange data in the blogosphere . This reinforces the dual patterns of more informed decision making that results from the use of various knowledge resources that can be brought to bear, and of less centrally directed decision making. Patterns of decentralization have been identified as a significant offshoot of the knowledge explosion that has become so much a part of American life. 21
is that portion of the World Wide Web consisting of weblogs or blogs and their interconnections. Community of amateur and professional journalists commenting on a variety of subjects.
The desire for specialization is a major reason for fragmenting and compartmentalizing decision-making responsibility within a bureaucracy. Specialization gives a staff or organization considerable discretionary authority within its jurisdiction. To the extent that personnel systems are based on job-related competence that includes increasingly specialized knowledge, these tendencies toward specialization are likely to be reinforced.
Political decisions to address new problems, or to identify as problems certain conditions already present in society, have almost always enlarged the responsibilities of administrative bodies. This suggests that many of today's challenges, such as climate change, environmental pollution, energy use and conservation, population growth and stability, health care reform, and mass transit, have actually been with us for some time. In all of these cases, changes in societal values preceded identification of the problems. Even though certain situations may not as yet have been widely regarded as areas requiring public action, there is still a need for debate over the scope and nature of particular governmental actions to address them. 22 Administrative entities empowered to deal with these problems are thus drawn into controversies surrounding the nature of the problems themselves as well as the methods used to resolve them.
In sum, the combined effects on bureaucracy of population growth and geographic redistribution, vast changes in our knowledge and technological capabilities, specialization, and the rise of new, complex environmental and social problems have been profound and probably irreversible. Many of these changes are global in nature and impact governance in many different countries (as detailed in Chapter 12 ). Clearly, change in American society has led to new, unforeseen, and complex pressures on our machinery of government at all levels. Public administration has a history of conflict with its parent discipline (political science), and growing controversy exists over just where public administration belongs intellectually and institutionally. It is within this volatile setting that we take up our study of public administration.
Public and Private Administration: Similarities and Differences
Many similarities exist between administrative activities in the public and private sectors. In fact, many elements of public administration have their roots in the private sector. There are those who assume that whatever differences exist are relatively minor and that what works effectively in one setting will also work in the other; thus, for example, the recurring themes that we should make government more businesslike, provide public services equal to the best in business, and bring sound management methods from business into government. But the notion that there are few if any important differences between public and private administration is undergoing intense scrutiny. There is no consensus about the nature of “publicness” in organizations. Scholars are divided over the importance of an organization's public or private status. 23 Along with other factors, this has led to increasing proposals to rely more on nonprofit, faith-based, or “third-sector” organizations to deliver government services. Although some parallels do exist, there are also critical differences among the public, private and non-profit sectors.
First, the similarities. In both settings, managers and those to whom they are accountable have an interest in running programs and other activities that are properly designed, appropriately directed to meeting their intended goals, efficient in expenditure of organizational resources, and effective in their results. Public and private managers are both concerned with meeting their staffing needs, motivating subordinates, obtaining financing, and otherwise conducting their operations so as to promote the survival and maximum impact of their programs. All this involves some “politics,” both internal and external to the organization. There are agreements to be reached and maintained, elements of persuasion and coercion to be weighed, and gains and losses to be realized. The president of the Ford Motor Company and the secretary of the Treasury—as well as Ford's chief research engineer and the administrator at the IRS—have to be concerned with many of these same managerial issues, which must be carefully planned for and acted on to promote their organization's interest.
On the other hand, important elements of the managerial environment differ for public, non-profit and private managers. 24 One fundamental difference is that, in the private sector, products or services are furnished to individuals based on their own needs or wants in exchange for a direct (usually monetary) payment—a quid pro quo transaction. In the public sector, however, the goal of the manager historically has been to operate programs or provide services on a collective basis (rather than directly to individuals), supported in the great majority of cases by tax revenues, not direct payments (such as user charges or fees) for services rendered. Another key difference is that private organizations define their markets and set their own broad goals, whereas public organizations and managers are obligated to pursue goals set for them by their legislatures. Public managers have relatively little freedom to alter basic organizational goals. Thus, whereas private managers can use an internal measure to evaluate their organization's performance, public managers are subject ultimately to evaluation by outside forces, and it is those outside forces, not open markets, that have the critical last word in judging how well a public organization fulfills its responsibilities. Public managers, moreover, have been evaluated in somewhat nebulous and ill-defined terms. Until recently, for example, many managers have had more incentive to focus on satisfying interested clienteles and on holding and expanding political support than on substantive performance by itself. Meaningful, objective performance measures were largely lacking in the public sector until the mid-1970s, even where managers had sought to use them. New emphases on efficiency, productivity, and accountability for results have produced fresh concern for such measures (see Chapter 10 )—another sign of increasing similarity between public and private organizations.
Other differences also exist. For one thing, many public organizations have held a virtual monopoly on providing certain essential public services and, consequently, have been able to survive without necessarily providing the highest-quality performance of their functions. Often, these functions are shared with non-profit agencies such as the Red Cross and United Way. Another difference is that achieving results in the public sector must compete for administrators' attention with political and procedural concerns. Values such as participation and public accountability make it necessary for public managers to divide their attention between the results they seek and how to obtain those results. It is difficult to achieve maximum economy and efficiency while keeping a wary eye on possible political repercussions—and many public managers must do just that.
In contrast to the narrowly focused profit-oriented concern shared by most of private-sector management, there are often conflicting incentives among citizens, elected representatives, and administrative supervisors and leaders. If a consensus is lacking on what is to be done and why (not to mention how, as noted earlier), an organization will not function with the same smoothness it would if incentives were agreed on. Just as economic measures of performance have no counterpart in the public sector, general economic incentives have no parallel either.
Furthermore, most public organizations suffer from diffuse responsibility, often resulting in absence of accountability for decisions made. Separation of powers among branches of government is one factor in this, but fragmented executive-branch authority in most large governments (including those at the local level) is another. In contrast, centralized executive responsibility is a key feature of many profit-oriented organizations. Also, unlike private corporations, public organizations entrust a fair amount of decision-making responsibility to citizen groups, courts, and various types of boards or commissions. Thus, an absolutely clear chain of command may not be possible because of numerous opportunities for outside pressures to influence the power hierarchies.
There are still other important differences. Public-sector managers frequently must operate within structures designed by other groups, work with people whose careers are in many respects outside management's control, and accomplish their goals in less time than is usually allowed to corporate managers. Unlike many private managers, public managers must operate in a goldfish bowl of publicity in which they are subject to scrutiny and criticism from the press, others outside the agency, and the general public. As for the media spotlight, public managers must cope with critical comments from outside, regardless of how well others understand agency purposes, empathize with operating difficulties, or consider political constraints on the manager. Conversely, the skilled public manager may be able to turn the media, as well as critical stakeholders, to the agency's side, which can make it easier to recruit new staff, acquire more operating funds, or perhaps prevent potential critics from gaining credibility. At times, private-sector managers may have to face the same types of public criticism or have similar opportunities to generate good press. But, for the most part, their activities are significantly less exposed to public view until the final product or service has been delivered and evaluated.
In comparing the changing roles of public, private, and nonprofit sectors, two other dimensions merit consideration. In practice, these sectors are becoming increasingly interdependent: examples of this are the multibillion-dollar government bailout of failed savings and loan institutions in the early 1990s and more recent federal efforts to deal with financial and housing crises triggered by the so-called sub-prime mortgage meltdown since 2007 (see Chapter 9 ). There is also a growing tendency for governments, especially on the local and federal levels, to enter into contractual arrangements with private firms and non-profit firms for delivery of certain services, such as corrections, homeland security, garbage collection, military security, social services and fire protection. For many, the distinction among the three sectors is becoming less important as functions continue to overlap. There has been a considerable blurring of what many once believed were well-defined boundaries among the three sectors. Nonetheless, a growing body of scholarly opinion holds that public organizations, and the roles of those who occupy key decision-making positions within them, are distinctive in important respects and that we need to develop a broader conceptual understanding of their design, function, and behavior.
Thus, although many administrative activities are common to both public and private sectors, major differences also are evident. As a result, there are obvious limits to how much the public sector can borrow advantageously from the private sector to improve the management of public policies. As we shall see, however, those limits are breaking down as governments everywhere are being asked to do more with less (and, increasingly, to do less with less). At the same time, options are expanding as public administrators are able to choose from a much wider range of strategies to address public problems. This has led to greater interest in, and experimentation with, privatization , as well as partnerships and direct delivery of services through faith-based and nonprofit agencies. Even these emerging realities, however, do not change the fact that there are significant differences between public and private management. 25
a practice in which governments either join with, or yield responsibility outright to, private-sector enterprises to provide services previously managed and financed by public entities; a pattern especially evident in local government service provision, though with growing appeal at other levels of government.
Public Administration as a Field of Study
The principal focus of public administration as a field of academic study has changed often since its emergence in the late 1800s. Changing and overlapping conceptions of the subject sometimes reflected and sometimes preceded evolution in administrative practice in the real world of government, and cross-fertilization of ideas between practitioners and academics was prominent throughout the twentieth century. Because so many public administrators were trained in formal academic programs, thus increasing the impact that academic disciplines have had on government administrative practices, it is useful to briefly review major emphases that have characterized and helped shape the academic field. 26
In its earliest period, from roughly 1887 to 1933, public administration was viewed as distinct and separate from politics, more akin to business and business methods than to anything political. In his classic essay, The Study of Administration, Woodrow Wilson wrote that administration “is removed from the hurry and strife of politics. … Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices.” 27 The concept of a politics-administration dichotomy was widely accepted during this period, based not only on the writings of Wilson but also on the first textbook in the field, published by Frank Goodnow in 1900 and significantly entitled Politics and Administration. Administrative discretion was also an important, though often overlooked, element in the thinking and writing of administrative reformers of a century ago. In his classic essay, Woodrow Wilson argued that administrators should be granted “large powers and unhampered discretion”—both “administrative energy and administrative discretion” 28 —as essential elements of their functioning in accordance with the notion of “political” neutrality. His expectation was that, given the opportunity, administrators would exercise competent professional judgment as they carried out their assigned duties. This would serve the public interest and, in turn, the interests of elected officials of either political party (who could then take the credit for effective governance). In sum, Wilson saw discretion as necessary for administrative effectiveness as well as ensuring political neutrality.
politics-administration dichotomy
originally proposed by Woodrow Wilson in the 1880s, it divides politics and policy making from policy implementation and public administration.
The bureaucracy was to administer, in an impartial and nonpolitical fashion, the programs created by the legislative branch, subject only to judicial interpretation. The dichotomy between politics and administration was reiterated in Leonard D. White's Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, published in 1926. White summarized the conventional wisdom of administrative theory: politics and administration were separate; management could be studied scientifically to discover the best methods of operation; public administration was capable of becoming a value-free science; and politically neutral administration should be focused exclusively on attainment of economy and efficiency in government.
acronym standing for the professional watchwords of administration: Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, COordinating, Reporting, and Budgeting.
The next phase in the development of the discipline was the movement toward discovering fundamental “principles” of administration. This offshoot of the scientific approach to administration was based on the belief that there existed certain permanent principles of administration that, if they could only be discovered and applied, could transform the performance of administrative tasks. Publication in 1927 of F. W. Willoughby's Principles of Public Administration marked the beginning of a decade in which identifying and correctly applying these principles was the predominant concern of many, both inside and outside of academic circles. Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick's Papers on the Science of Administration, published in 1937, defined seven principles that have become professional watchwords: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting (collectively known by the acronym POSDCORB ). Gulick and Urwick reemphasized the importance of these administrative principles, declared their applicability to almost any human organization, regardless of what the organization was or why it existed, and stressed the fundamental desirability of efficiency as the underlying goal for administrative “science.” 29
Even as Gulick and Urwick wrote these words, however, the dominant themes of public administration were changing. The willingness of most of those in public administration to “embrace, without basic skepticism, the Wilsonian dichotomy” 30 between politics and administration was no longer as widely shared as it had been. The New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, accompanied by a vastly expanded governmental role and the creation of scores of new administrative agencies in Washington, significantly changed the social and political contexts of public administration and sparked a crisis in the field. There were three major developments in the period 1933–1945: (1) a “drastic expansion in the public conception of the obligations and responsibilities of government in social and economic affairs”; (2) the emergence of an “enduring emphasis upon presidential leadership”; and (3) a change in the nature of the federal system, with a shift to “the national scene [of] the responsibility for most of the important policy decisions” in the economy and society at large. 31 According to political scientist Alan Altshuler, Roosevelt had demonstrated “that patronage might be of great value in aiding a vigorous President to push through programs of social and economic reform.” 32 Emphasis on nonpartisan neutrality could have obstructed presidential leadership in achieving social reforms supported by many academics. Blurring the politics-administration dichotomy caused considerable turmoil in the study of public administration as the discipline was cast loose from its original intellectual moorings without a clear alternative direction.
In the 1940s, with World War II commanding an even greater commitment in terms of government activity, the turmoil increased. Academics who worked for national government agencies during the war effort took back to their postwar campuses a considerably altered perspective on what was important to teach about administration, especially in relation to the political process and public administration's explicit role in making public policy. 33 During this same period (less than a decade after Gulick and Urwick had published their Papers), the principles of administration were coming under increasing fire. Critics claimed that the principles were logically inconsistent and potentially contradictory and that they gave no clues concerning how to choose the one most appropriate for particular situations. For example, one principle held that, for purposes of control, workers should be grouped according to function, work process, clientele, or geography. There was nothing to suggest standards for the use of one instead of another or to suggest whether these were mutually exclusive categories. 34 Critiques of this sort came from many scholars in the field but, in 1946 and 1947, few scholars had greater impact than Herbert Simon. In “The Proverbs of Administration,” 35 Simon likened the principles to contradictory proverbs or paired opposites. For example, Simon pointed out that, whereas “look before you leap” is a useful proverb, so also is “he who hesitates is lost.” Both are memorable, often applicable, and mutually exclusive, without any hint of how to choose between them. Simon argued that the principles underlying these proverbs were much the same; that is, they were interesting but of little practical value in defining administrative processes. His book Administrative Behavior (1947) developed this line of argument further and contributed significantly to the weakening of the principles approach.
No comparable set of values replaced the POSDCORB principles, but different concerns began to emerge. Through the 1940s and into the 1950s, public administration found its relationship to political science to be one of growing uneasiness. Political science itself was undergoing significant changes in the post-World War II period. Most of these changes were in the direction of developing more sophisticated, empirical (including statistical) methods of researching political phenomena but were always based on the assumption that objectivity in research methodology was of the highest importance.
The problem for public administration in this “behavioral” era was that many functions and processes of administration do not lend themselves to the same sorts of quantitative research as do, for example, legislative voting patterns, election data, and public-opinion surveys. Altshuler points out that administrative decision making is frequently informal and that many decisions are made in partial or total secrecy. He also states that the exact values of administrators and the alternatives they consider are difficult to identify and analyze and that the traditional emphasis on efficiency contrasts sharply with the core concerns of modern political science. 36 Consequently, public administration became, in Altshuler's words, a “rather peripheral subfield of political science,” with many questioning its relevance to the larger discipline. In addition, he questioned whether this direction, as valuable as it was for furthering our understanding of human behavior in an increasingly organized society, resulted in research findings that have political relevance, that is, relevance to the research directions of contemporary political science. 37
Another related development has been the growth of research into administrative change and organizational behavior—research that seeks to examine all sorts of organizations, not only public entities. This movement began with the assumption that the social psychology of organizations made less important the question of precisely what kind of organization was to be studied and sought to integrate research from not only social psychology but also business administration, information science, sociology, and statistics. This field, currently known as organizational change and development, represents an attempt to synthesize much of what is known about organized group behavior within the boundaries of formal organizations. Organizational change concentrates on the characteristics within a group or team that promote or slow change in response to, or in anticipation of, changes in demands from the external environment, particularly with regard to needs and desires for the services produced by the organization. 38 In contrast, “organizational development” focuses on analysis of organizational problems and formulation of possible solutions. 39 This approach aims at increasing the capacity of an organization to identify, analyze, and solve internal problems as a regular function within its ongoing routines, using social-psychological approaches (see Chapter 4 ). It conceives of organizations as entities that do not follow a single structure or format from top to bottom, but rather depend on the skill set of particular units within the organization, which are shaped structurally, socially, and technologically in the most appropriate manner. Thus, in large and complex modern organizations, there is likely to be considerable diversity in the arrangements of different units designed to accomplish specific tasks.
Equally important to the context of public administration is social change in, among other things, the makeup of the population, the health of the economy, social relationships, and where people choose to live. Social change is important because emerging social arrangements and patterns of behavior are inevitably accompanied by new problems with which government policy makers must contend. It is also important because, as society changes, so do our values, expectations, and priorities.
Many departments and schools of public administration have attempted to respond to such changes by declaring their intellectual and institutional independence from political science and business administration, moving instead toward the establishment of autonomous departments, programs, or schools. Public administration as an academic field of study, then, is far from a settled discipline. 40 Boundaries between it and other fields such as political science are blurred, and there are many loose ends in terms of what to study and how the study of bureaucracy relates to changes in society.
POINT/COUNTERPOINT
THE ISSUE It is assumed that most of those working in a bureaucracy are professionals in their specialties and that their occupational loyalties rest with their organization rather than with a political party or other external affiliation. Because much of public management in American governments occurs within bureaucratic structures, however, there is a tendency for political perspectives to factor into decisions at times.
Should administrators, who are ideally supposed to remain politically neutral, have political involvement?
|
Arguments for Political Involvement · • Public administers work for, and with, government officials and should thus have some level of political involvement to ensure that the collective bureaucracy is working together as smoothly as possible as opposed to working in opposition to other bureaucracies, to the legislative branch, and to the chief executive. · • Once elected, politicians must inspire and lead government officials to achieve their own policy goals and respond to crises. Getting high-level administrators politically involved will help address policy matters sooner rather than later. |
Arguments against Political Involvement · • The actions and decisions of public administrators touch the lives of virtually every American and need to remain politically neutral so that the most practical option is chosen, as opposed to following the platform of any particular political party. · • With increasing political uncertainty and strife in the United States over the past few decades, it is important that administrators remain politically neutral and focused solely on the organization of their specialty, doing what they know best. |
About This Book
Four essential and recurring themes appear in the pages that follow: (1) increasing the internal efficiency and economy of using public resources, (2) improving the performance or results of public programs—especially through the application of information technology, electronic government, and performance management systems—in the real world of public management, (3) maintaining the ethics and accountability of public administrators within the context of the larger political system, and (4) more effectively anticipating, planning for, and securing the resources necessary to respond to ever greater complexity in our nation and around the world. An effort is made to treat these issues separately, but it is inevitable that they overlap, both in our treatment of them and in the working environments of public administration.
The discussion of public bureaucracy and management can and does go on at three different (but interrelated) levels of analysis, that is, with a focus on distinct dimensions of the administrative process. One is the role and function of government bureaucracy in society at large—what differences large, complex, and influential agencies make in a nation founded on diffuse notions of popular rule (note the implicit importance of the accountability theme). A second dimension or level of analysis is the management of performance in public organizations, broadly defined as issues and challenges confronting the individual public manager. A third topic is the role of the individual—the contribution, in whatever form, of a person working as a public administrator and the challenges, opportunities, and problems associated with that role. All these are ultimately interrelated, and explaining why that is so is a major purpose of this book.
Summary
Public administration is an influential force in American government and society. Most of us are familiar with bureaucracy, and many of our most pressing current political issues are related to administrative agencies and actions. Public administration is the set of processes, organizations, and individuals associated with implementing laws and other rules enacted by legislatures, executives, and courts. Administrative agencies are involved in the formulation of many of these rules, as well as their application. Public administration is simultaneously an academic field of study and an active field of training. Public administration and its politics involve interactions both internal and external to the formal agency structure. Public administration is also characterized by a distinctly managerial component, focusing on the internal dynamics of public organizations. Public managers must possess certain skills, including an understanding of computers, data analysis, technology, management systems, personnel, and budgeting. A successful public manager must direct both short- and long-term activities and is responsible for defining and bringing about action. Most managers operate within a bureaucratic and political environment that shapes both formal structure and operational policies of their organizations.
Public administration in the national government is characterized by several different types of agencies and ways of categorizing administrative employees; each of these may affect what agencies do and how they do it. The principal agencies are cabinet-level departments, independent regulatory boards and commissions, government corporations, divisions of the Executive Office of the President, and other miscellaneous agencies. These are most commonly organized according to function but can also be organized according to geographic area, clientele served, or work process. Administrative personnel can be classified according to whether they were hired through merit procedures or political appointment and whether they are specialists or generalists.
In larger states and local governments, essentials of organization are the same as those at the national levels. But the influence of local political parties and employee unions and the nature of government activity serve to differentiate local governments from the national government. Smaller local governments usually have less extensive bureaucratic development and less professional expertise than the national government.
Organizational structure is politically significant in a number of respects as it demonstrates commitment, symbolic or substantive, to particular policy objectives; it can signal adoption of specific policy directions; it serves to order political priorities by emphasizing some programs over others; and it provides different degrees of access to decision makers. The politics of organization is also significant in settings other than executive-branch arrangements. Contemporary public administration is shaped by the larger political system of which it is a part, by past and present political and administrative values, and by technology and social change.
The fragmented nature of policy making forces administrators to function in a political environment where there is no central policy coordinator with total control; administrators possess considerable discretion; not all decision-making power or authority is clearly allocated. In such a setting, public administrators are often politically active and take policy initiatives that are not neutral, thus departing from traditional views about bureaucratic roles and functions. Furthermore, bureaucratic activity is organized around jurisdiction over particular policy areas; bureaucracies seek to prevent changes in jurisdiction that might harm their interests or those of their supporters.
Several explanations have been advanced for the rise of government bureaucracy, including technological complexity, public pressures in an increasingly diverse society, and government responses to global, social, and economic crises. In addition to adapting to changing trends in political and economic thought, public administration has also had to adapt to rapid social and technological change. Especially during the beginning of the twenty-first century, public administration must deal with rapid population growth and urbanization, increased specialization, the threat of terrorism, and the possible consequences of complex technological advances. Many similarities, and a number of more significant differences, exist between public and private management. Two of the most important differences are that public managers must pursue broad goals set by others and evaluated by outside forces; neither is true of private managers. In addition, public managers generally cannot design their own organization's structures or control the careers of many subordinates. They generally have far less time than private managers to accomplish their goals and must operate under considerable public scrutiny. Both public and private managers are expected to be similarly competent, effective, and efficient in producing results. There is growing overlap of the two sectors. As an academic field of study, public administration has been shaped by several major and partially overlapping schools of thought.
Discussion Questions
1.
How has public support of government bureaucracy changed in recent years? In the past, what has accounted for public support of bureaucracy? What actions can be taken to restore trust and confidence in bureaucracy?
2.
How is the American structure of government and public administration different from that of other nations with a parliamentary form of government? Why is it different?
3.
How can organizational structure be politically significant? Discuss and cite recent examples. What are public administration's intellectual links to economics? To political science? To sociology? To psychology? To business administration?
4.
Discuss the changing roles of public, private, and nonprofit agencies in addressing public problems. What difficulties might a public manager face in trying to implement management techniques borrowed from the private sector?
5.
How have technological changes affected government in general and public administration in particular? Discuss the effects of electronic-government (e-gov) on bureaucracies. Be sure to describe changing public expectations as well as the size and structure of bureaucracies in your discussion.
6.
What elements of social change have contributed to the expansion of administrative responsibilities in American government? Discuss specific impacts of social change on the scope and activities of administrative agencies.
7.
A fundamental assumption of administrative reformers in the late 1800s and early 1900s was that politics could have only adverse effects on administration. How valid is that belief? Why? How, and to what extent, do current administrative structures and practices reflect that assumption?
8.
Discuss the contributions to the academic field of public administration made by the following individuals: (a) Woodrow Wilson, (b) Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick, (c) Herbert Simon, and (d) Alan Altshuler.
9.
During the early 2000s, state and local governments faced severe fiscal constraints. How has this trend affected the field of public administration? If this trend continues, how will it affect the field of public administration? If growth declines, what are the implications for public employment?
10.
In recent years, how has the role of the bureaucracy become more apparent in the daily lives of Americans? Is there anything in your own personal or career experience that shows a similar expression of public sentiment? Can you think of areas or agencies in which the public has shown a positive attitude toward government and public administration? Discuss.
Key Terms and Concepts
bureaucracy , 6
entrepreneurial government , 10
stakeholders , 11
public management , 12
reverse pyramid , 12
information communication technology (ICT) , 12
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) , 13
jurisdiction , 16
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) , 19
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) , 24
checks and balances , 28
parliamentary form of government , 28
power vacuum , 29
legislative intent , 30
electronic government (e-gov) , 31
clientelism , 31
social-demographic change , 33
technological change , 34
knowledge revolution , 34
blogosphere , 35
privatization , 39
politics-administration dichotomy , 39
POSDCORB , 40
Suggested Readings
Goodsell, Charles T. The Case for Bureaucracy: A Public Administration Polemic. 4th ed. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2004.
Gore, Albert S. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. New York: Rodale, 2006.
Greene, Jeffery. Cities and Privatization: Prospects for the New Century. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2002.
King, Cheryl Simrell, and Camilla Stivers, eds. Government Is Us: Public Administration in an Anti-Government Era. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1998.
Mosher, Frederick C., ed. American Public Administration: Past, Present, Future. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1975.
Nye, Joseph S., Philip D. Zelikow, and David C. King, eds. Why People Don't Trust Government. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Ostrom, Vincent, and Barbara Allen. The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration. 3rd ed. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 2007.
Ott, Steven J. The Nature of the Nonprofit Sector. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001.
Perry, James L., ed. Handbook of Public Administration. Rev. ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.
Savas, E. S. Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships. 2nd ed. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1999.
Stillman, Richard J., II. Public Administration: Concepts and Cases. 9th ed. Belmont, Calif.: Cengage, 2010.
Tolchin, Susan J. The Angry American: How Voter Rage Is Changing the Nation. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998.
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Wamsley, Gary, et al. Refounding Democratic Public Administration. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996.
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Wilson, James Q. Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. New York: Basic Books, 1989.
CHAPTER 2 Public Administration, Democracy, and Bureaucratic Power
The exercise of discretionary power, the making of value choices, is a characteristic and increasing function of administrators and bureaucrats; they are thus importantly engaged in politics.
Wallace S. Sayre,
“Premises of Public Administration:
Past and Emerging,” 1958.
The decisions of public administrators do not take place in a vacuum. They are powerfully influenced by broader economic, social, and governmental processes—the constitutional allocations of political power, the exercise of discretionary authority by those inside and outside of government, and the overall roles assigned to elected officials, prosecutors, judges, and appointed administrators in governing the nation. In turn, the governmental system (like all other human institutions) is continuously being reshaped by society's values and beliefs (both past and present) about what should be done and how it should be done. These beliefs are defined by the social setting of government, including society's basic values, the extent of popular agreement on them, how directly they relate to the conduct of government, and how government interprets and reflects them. The values of other institutions in society (such as business, courts, military, political parties, schools, religious groups, and the mass media) also shape government and public administration. Conflicting values create demands and expectations that may need to be resolved through government action. For example, the public demands a commitment to fiscal austerity, public safety, national security, and quality education, as well as honest and ethical conduct from elected and nonelected administrators; government is expected to conduct its affairs in a “businesslike” manner, with a high degree of economy, efficiency, and measurable results (see Chapter 10 ). In addition to the discussion of how the social environment and basic values shape administration, we deal with three principal themes in this chapter. First, we will examine foundations of bureaucratic power, especially how expertise in a particular field is used to build, retain, and mobilize support for administrative agencies and programs. Second, we will look at subsystem politics and the emergence of issue networks, terms that refer to the ways in which bureaucrats enter directly into alliances with others inside and outside of government in pursuit of shared programmatic and political objectives. Lastly, we will consider the challenge of establishing the accountability of nonelected government officials (that is, most bureaucrats), identify several limitations on bureaucratic accountability, and suggest how those limitations can be overcome.
Public administration has been sharply affected by changes in values concerning the role of government, in administrative concepts (including renewed concerns about privatization and the use of nongovernmental organizations for government activities) and, in general, social values and public demands. On the one hand, modern bureaucracy is the result of past evolution in theory and practice. Traditionally, institutional change tends to be cumulative: As patterns of behavior come and go, they leave behind carryover effects, which then mingle with, and become indistinguishable from, the patterns that replace them. So it is with contemporary administrative policies and machinery, in which much of what we do today reflects lingering influences of the past. On the other hand, social values and established institutional patterns are undergoing rapid, unpredictable, and turbulent change. Today, many basic values are changing, such as those relating to career choices, marriage and family life, gender roles, freedom of expression, respect for authority, job security, “entitlements,” energy consumption, material possessions, the environment, and human rights. For traditional institutions (including bureaucracy) to respond to such social upheaval is a large order, and much recent criticism of bureaucracy focuses on its apparent failure to do so.
Out of all this has come a renewed interest in democratic values as they pertain to public trust, responsiveness, and popular control of government institutions. With the expansion of government bureaucracies have come clearer distinctions among political values, such as equality, fairness, representation, participation, patriotism, and accountability; social values, such as concern for others, civic duty, individual achievement, and morality; and administrative values, such as political neutrality, secrecy, economy, efficiency, rationality, rule of law, and expertise ( Table 2-1 ). Some of America's traditional values—democracy, equality, freedom of speech and religious expression, and the belief that America has a special moral responsibility to promote these values internationally—have remained constant throughout decades of social change. Other values, such as duty to one's country, social conformity, respectability, accepted norms of sexual morality, and the work ethic, have declined in importance for many people. Values gaining in importance during this same era include respect for diversity, pluralism, greater acceptance of individual differences, wider choices in personal living arrangements, more extended circles of friends, respect for the environment, emphasis on quality of work life, use of social networking, putting family ahead of career and personal ambition, assuming individual responsibility for health care and retirement, and protecting the rights of women and children. As greater numbers of interests espouse different and often conflicting values, it becomes less and less likely that all groups in society as a whole will share a common set of value preferences. As always, when different values conflict, it is more difficult to compromise and reach consensus. 1 In the next section, we examine those value conflicts as they pertain to public administration and then deal more extensively with specific problems in this area.
TABLE 2-1 Political Versus Administrative Values
|
Political Values |
Administrative Values |
|
Accountability |
Efficiency |
|
Responsiveness |
Effectiveness |
|
Representation |
Representativeness |
|
Participation |
Rationality |
|
Democracy |
Professionalism |
|
Citizenship |
Discretion |
|
Source: © 2013 Cengage Learning. |
a fundamental form of political arrangement founded on the concepts of popular sovereignty and limited government.
an economic system in which the means of production are owned by private citizens.
government by the ultimate consent of the governed, which implies some degree of popular participation in voting and other political actions, although this does not necessarily mean mass or universal political involvement.
refers to devices built into the Constitution that effectively limit the power of government over individual citizens.
Political and Administrative Values
Our discussion of political and administrative values has three purposes: (1) to understand the fundamental beliefs underlying American government and public bureaucracy, (2) to recognize the impact of values on public administration, and (3) to see the ways in which these values conflict conceptually—and how that conflict affects the conduct of politics and administration.
As used here, the term political values refers to basic beliefs and assumptions not only about politics and the political system but also about appropriate government relationships to private activity, especially economic activity. Links to economic activity fall under the heading of political values and are relevant to a discussion of public administration because of increasing governmental responsibility in regulating business and industry.
In general, the United States is regarded politically as a liberal democracy and economically as a capitalist system . 2 Moreover, the two concepts of popular sovereignty and limited government are central to the notion of liberal democracy. Popular sovereignty implies some degree of participation in voting and other civic actions. Although this does not necessarily mean mass or universal political involvement, America has, in fact, expanded voting rights over the years. The specific vehicle for popular rule has been representative democratic government. Initially, Americans emphasized legislative representation , which is stressed by the Constitution. Concern for political representation and demographic representativeness in administrative organizations and processes, which grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s, has diminished in more recent years. These subtle changes in meaning have cumulatively made it more difficult to determine whether democratic or administrative values are being maintained. Conceptual uncertainty about values also makes it more difficult to deal with accusations that we are not living up to our own standards of democratic government. For example, defining representativeness in a particular way might, in effect, include one group while excluding another from decision making, and those excluded might well dispute the existence of representativeness. Public discontent with affirmative action , immigration policies, government spending priorities, and preferential hiring has prompted groups in many states to challenge these policies by placing them on the ballot to decide their future through public initiative and referenda. In recent decades, as the public grew dissatisfied with the degree of popular control over bureaucracy, greater representativeness in bureaucracy was seized on as one remedy that had considerable appeal. Political scientist Herbert Kaufman suggested over four decades ago that “the quest for representativeness … centers primarily on administrative agencies.” 3
a principle of legislative selection based on the number of inhabitants or amount of territory in a legislative district; adequate, fair, and equal representation has become a major objective of many who feel they were denied it in the past and now seek greater influence, particularly in administrative decision making.
groups that have been relatively powerless should be represented in government positions in proportion to their numbers in the population.
in the context of public personnel administration, a policy or program designed to bring into public service greater numbers of citizens who were largely excluded from public employment in previous years; also, the use of goals and timetables for hiring and promoting women, blacks, and other minorities as part of an equal employment opportunity program.
The second central concept, limited government, reflects the predominant view of those who framed the Constitution that government could pose a basic threat to individual liberties. In their experience with the British government, these men had endured the suppression of their personal liberties, and they wanted to prevent that from happening again. Therefore, they incorporated into the Constitution four devices that effectively limit government: (1) a system of checks and balances in which the exercise of even a fundamental power by one branch requires the involvement of a second branch; (2) separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government; (3) federalism, a division of powers between government levels in which certain powers are allotted to the national government whereas others are retained by the states (which are to some degree independent of control by the national government); and (4) judicial review, the process by which courts can invalidate, on constitutional grounds, the laws and actions of other government entities. In addition to this fragmentation of government powers, the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) established broad areas of protection for individual liberties and personal privacy against encroachment by official government actions.
The courts took on a more active role until recent years, under Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. 4 In the words of one observer: “ Judicial review has passed from matters of procedure to matters of both procedure and substance. … Courts have not merely sat in judgment on administrative action but on inaction as well; they have required agencies to do things the agencies themselves had declined to do.” 5 Other examples of judicial activism include appointing expert witnesses, dismissing jurors for poor conduct, suggesting areas of inquiry during civil cases, ordering payment of fees for research, and transferring prisoners held in overcrowded city jails to state prisons. Whether such activism on the part of the courts is desirable from all standpoints has been questioned as it runs counter to other political and social values. With the appointment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts in 2005, President George W. Bush fulfilled one of his campaign promises to restore limited government by justices who interpret the Constitution more narrowly and practice judicial restraint, rather that judicial activism. 6
the constitutional power of the courts to review the actions of executive agencies, legislatures, or decisions of lower courts to determine whether judges, legislators, or administrators acted appropriately.
a philosophical belief in the worth and dignity of the individual, particularly as part of a political order; holds that government and politics should regard the well-being and aspirations of individuals as more important than those of government.
a social and political concept stressing the appropriateness of group organization, and diversity of groups and their activities, as a means of protecting broad group interests in society; assumes that groups are good and that bargaining and competition among them will benefit the public interest.
Two related concepts widely reflected in American society are individualism and pluralism . Our emphasis on the individual is evident in the complex of protections for civil rights and liberties, but individualism also implies the right to participate meaningfully in the political process. Pluralism stresses group organization as a means of securing protection for broad interests in society. Furthermore, it assumes that groups of citizens have the right to organize to advance their interests, that groups with differing interests will compete and bargain with one another, and that the resulting compromises will benefit the community and the nation as a whole. The rights of all citizens to “organize to advance their interests” links the Bill of Rights, individualism, and pluralism, suggesting that individual freedom includes the unrestricted right to be active in organized interest groups.
Directly related to individualism and pluralism is the capitalist notion of political and economic competition, which exists primarily among groups but is also found among individuals. Limited government suggests that economic competition, if regulated at all, will be loosely influenced by government; in theory, market competition itself will establish boundaries of acceptable behavior among the competitors and will allocate the fruits of success. Geared to private profit and general economic growth, these economic doctrines fit very comfortably with capitalist theories. They emphasize maximum freedom for private entrepreneurs (individuals) and minimal government involvement in the decisions and operations of the private economic sector. Two assumptions link capitalism to political values of limited government, individualism, and pluralism: (1) the individual is assumed to be both self-sufficient and capable of being self-governing (thus minimizing the need for government), and (2) the individual is thought to be better off both politically and economically if government intervention is restricted.
During the twentieth century, government's relationship to the economy changed dramatically, and what was once minimal involvement increased. Have limited government and capitalism, then, been lost? Some argue that they have. Others suggest that government programs for economic development, supplemental social insurance and income maintenance, are neither radical nor brand-new ideas, and that governments have a social responsibility within the broader framework of capitalism to ensure economic well-being and social justice, as well as to “provide for the common defense” and to “ensure domestic tranquility.”
Our values generally emphasize how things are accomplished more than what is accomplished, stressing the importance of means, not ends. The end does not justify the means. Rather, procedures are valued for their own sake, and fair procedure lends legitimacy to what is done; hence our commitment to due process of law , although there is an inevitable gap in all societies between the ideal and operational reality. Our ideology does not attempt to define specifically what is good or correct public policy. We leave it to the political process to formulate policy while we concentrate on ensuring that the process is characterized by some degree of public access to decision making and decision makers, a certain amount of equity in the distribution of political and economic benefits, and a great deal of market competition among diverse interests. The amount of access, equity, or competition that exists is itself a matter requiring resolution. These values serve as standards against which political reality is measured; only rarely do realities match the rhetoric or thinking. But that does not alter the importance of these political values or their influence on what we may try to accomplish through the implementation of public policy.
emphasizes procedural guarantees provided by the judicial system to protect individuals from unfair or unconstitutional actions by private organizations and government agencies.
Representative Democracy
A major political value in America has been representative democracy , and increasing emphasis has been placed on democratizing political processes. What that entails has not always been clear, however. Some elements of democracy are universally supported (or nearly so), whereas others are the subject of nearly continuous controversy. Most agree, for example, that majority rule and minority rights are fundamental. The former enables the political system to make and implement binding decisions through popular control; the latter permits those not in the majority the freedom to voice their political views and otherwise to be politically active. Directly related to these principles are the constitutional guarantees of a “free marketplace of political ideas”—that is, the freedom to speak, write, and publish political concepts and commentaries, including those out of favor with officials and the majority of citizens. (Numerous studies of public opinion suggest, however, that many Americans are inconsistent in their willingness to allow free expression of unpopular ideas.) Most would also agree that democracy requires widespread involvement in the election of public officials by means of voting and active participation in political campaigns.
representatives are nominated and elected from individual districts. They comprise a legislature that makes binding decisions for its society.
One element emphasized in the last half-century as essential to democratic government is direct participation in making and administering important decisions by those affected most directly by them. 7 Initially, there was considerable resistance to this idea (both in the abstract and in practice) in light of the extensive reallocation of political resources and power that would be required. Nevertheless, calls for participatory democracy in general and participative management in particular have met with increasingly positive responses. Where it has been implemented, direct participation has had the effect of increasing the number of decision makers—such as citizens giving testimony at public hearings, participating in online town meetings, and emerging forms of voluntarism—at the same time that it altered decision-making mechanisms (and very often the content of some decisions). Whether representative democracy requires widespread direct participation is open to debate, but merely raising the question has had an impact on our thinking about democracy and on the ways some government decisions are made.
a political and philosophical belief in direct involvement by affected citizens in the processes of governmental decision making; believed by some to be essential to the existence of democratic government. Related term: citizen participation.
Another idea about democratic government, closely related to direct participation, was an expanded definition of what constitutes “representativeness” in our major institutions. Numerous groups in the population—women, gays, lesbians, African-Americans, and Latinos in particular—had been regularly excluded from decision making in government, business, industry, the legal system, religious hierarchies, labor organizations, and political parties. It was argued that these institutions had not been sufficiently responsive to the needs, interests, and preferences of such groups. This systematic exclusion from power needed to be corrected, and increased direct representation of these groups in key decision-making positions was advocated as the most appropriate remedy. Not surprisingly, considerable tension has been generated since this policy entered the political arena. Although many governments at all levels have moved steadily to increase representativeness (or diversity) in the workforce, many citizens remain uneasy about full enforcement for a variety of reasons. Compliance was often grudging at best and was accompanied only intermittently by changes in the attitudes and values in question. Furthermore, with the aid of a number of Supreme Court appointments by the Reagan and both Bush administrations (1981–1993; 2001–2009) and several subsequent lower-court decisions, some parts of the policy have been successfully reversed. (The continuing controversy over affirmative action as a public policy is discussed in Chapter 7 .)
Furthermore, divisive issues involving economic competition and regulation, compensation, collective bargaining, and popular representativeness have recently tended to center (though not exclusively) on the roles of administrative entities. One crucial debate since President Barack Obama's election has focused on the manner, scope, specificity, and implications of government (mainly administrative) regulation of the economy. There are still other links between representative political values and public administration. One is the diversity of interest groups, which increases the potential for alliances with those in positions of influence in the government. Renewed concern for democratic values and political accountability leads to new questions about administrative discretion, ethics, and effective control of bureaucracies.
Public administration in America has been profoundly affected by the evolution of, and recent upheavals in, political values. It has been shaped in part by actions and concepts that limit government (separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and judicial review) while also having an effect on those decisions and devices. In particular, government bureaucracies have both contributed to, and benefited from, what some have called the “tilt” toward the executive branch of government (and away from Congress) during much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If public administration had been shaped solely by changing political values and the interplay of political forces, it would have been altered considerably from its earliest forms and practices. Administrative values, however, have also figured prominently in its evolution, and it is on these values that we now focus our discussion.
Administrative Values, Pluralism, and Political Accountability
American public administration is grounded in certain fundamental assumptions that have dominated administrative thinking for more than a century. It has been freely assumed that politics and administration are separate and distinct. Since the reforms of the late nineteenth century, it has been commonly assumed that partisan politics should not intrude on public management processes. 8 Political determinations of broad policy directions and administrative management of public programs were thought of as different processes controlled by different hands. From the founding of the Republic to the early twentieth century, public administrators viewed their role as subordinate and responsive to prevailing majorities in legislatures and to chief executives' proposals and directives. Their duty was not to initiate but to act on the initiatives of others. Administration was to be not only politically neutral but also passive. This conception of bureaucracy is not unlike that of a finely tuned machine that is activated only when someone else pushes the button. These ideas have persisted even though political control of administration was considered entirely appropriate and even consistent with bureaucratic neutrality. It was also assumed, in the early twentieth century, that administrative processes and functions (based on Industrial Age business practices) could be studied scientifically and that such an examination would yield various principles to guide administrative conduct. The purpose of developing a “science of administration” was to increase economy and efficiency in government and to use these principles as measures of administrative performance. Companion values have included an emphasis on merit (instead of political-loyalty tests) as the primary basis for hiring, faith in the work ethic and in statistical evaluations of work performance, and a belief that a basic social consensus (other than the profit motive) underlies public administrative processes.
These values first emerged around 1900, in the era of government reform that followed a period of some seventy-five years in which politics and administration were deeply intertwined. Government administrative jobs had been crudely bartered in exchange for favors and support, and the guiding principle in public personnel administration had been “to the victor belong the spoils of victory.” The reform effort was based on the belief that all kinds of politics could have only adverse effects on administration and that, therefore, a separation of politics and administration was absolutely necessary.
Heavily politicized administration had indeed been wasteful, corrupt, and inefficient, and there had been undeniably negative effects on the quality and effectiveness of government action. Attempts to separate politics and administration, pursue economy and efficiency, and discover enduring principles of administration were not merely passing fancies. They dominated virtually all the major approaches to administration from the turn of the century until after World War II, and remain present in large segments of the general population even today. Some reformers and others who seek to bring better management practices into government still cling to the doctrines of economy and efficiency almost as a matter of faith.
There are, however, some problems created by administrative values that stress separation of politics and administration while at the same time emphasizing efficiency in government operations. First, these approaches are not all consistent with the political values articulated by the Constitution. Those who drafted that document did not seek to establish an extensive bureaucratic structure, nor (as far as we can tell) did they foresee the development of one:
They placed their faith in periodic elections, legislatures, and an elected chief executive rather than in a bureaucracy, however pure and efficient. There is nothing to suggest that they believed sound administration could compensate for bad political decisions. Redressing grievances and bad political decisions [was] the function of the political process, rather than of administrative machinery. 9
Thus, the separation between politics and administration probably would have been seen by the Constitution's authors as either undesirable (because government through the political process was central to the constitutional scheme) or impractical. (It is also likely, however, that they would have objected equally to the blatant politicizing of administration that occurred during the mid-1800s.) They would have been suspicious of developments that insulated important decision makers, such as administrators, from effective control by, and accountability to, the voters or the voters' elected representatives. Yet the administrative values that we have discussed here seem to create precisely that sort of insulation.
Second, it has become clear, on the basis of a substantial body of research since World War II, that public administration is not merely well-oiled machinery for implementing decisions made by other government institutions. Public agencies and administrators have both the authority and the power to make a host of decisions, both large and small, that have real impacts on public policy. Instituted a century ago in response to unmistakable partisan excesses, protections against undue manipulation have given rise to the possibility of administrative excesses. Because control over policy making (in all but the smallest governments) is indirect, it is therefore more difficult for elected leaders and their immediate subordinates to exercise.
Third, there is some tension (if not outright conflict) between the major emphases of the Constitution and those of administrative values. The Framers sought to prevent unchecked exercise of power by any institution of government or by government as a whole and also desired a political system that would freely resort to the political process for making decisions and solving problems and that, when necessary, would be able to act. 10 Changes in particular values have intensified existing pressures on administrative institutions, especially in recent years.
a normative model of administrative activity characterized by dispersion of power and suspicion of any concentration of power, by exercise of power on the part of politicians, interest groups, and citizens, by political bargaining and accommodation, and by an emphasis on individuals' and political actors' own determination of interest as the basis for policy making; the principal alternative to the administrative efficiency model.
The underlying values of administration, on the other hand, clearly point toward efficiency, not merely as a desirable feature of government operation but as a key standard for evaluating government performance. 11 Reformers who first sought to increase efficiency in government associated most forms of politics with inefficiency (in many instances, rightly so) and consequently were largely “antipolitics.” Their values strongly favored political neutrality as a key feature of both the composition and operation of public administrative agencies and, thus, also as a major remedy for inefficiency. (It should be noted, however, that these reform efforts had political effects. In particular, they narrowed channels of access to government employment for those who could not meet criteria of merit, and built public organizations around a predominantly white, middle-class ethic.)
a normative model of administrative activity characterized by concentration of power (especially in the hands of chief executives), centralization of governmental policy making, exercise of power by experts and professional bureaucrats, separation of politics and administration, and emphasis on technical or scientific rationality (arrived at by detached expert analysis); the principal alternative to the pluralist democracy model.
Political scientist Douglas Yates explored more fully the conflicts between these two sets of parallel yet distinctive values. Yates treats them, with somewhat more precision, as normative models of pluralist democracy and administrative efficiency . The “Point/Counterpoint” feature challenges you to take a further look at the merits of the administrative efficiency and pluralist models for managing public agencies.
POINT/COUNTERPOINT
THE ISSUE Attempts to separate politics and administration dominated all major approaches to public administration until the mid-twentieth century and continue to play an active role in political debates today. The following are some of Douglas Yates's summaries of pluralist democracy and administrative efficiency. 12
Which model is the most appropriate for managing a modern public agency: pluralist democracy or administrative efficiency?
|
Arguments for Pluralist Democracy · • Power is dispersed and divided; governmental policy making is decentralized. · • There is suspicion of executive power (or any concentration of power). · • Power is given to politicians, interest groups, and citizens. · • Political bargaining and accommodation are considered to be at the heart of the democratic process. · • Emphasis is placed on individuals' and political actors' own determination of interest. |
Arguments for Administrative Efficiency · • Power is concentrated; governmental policy making is centralized. · • Great emphasis is placed on centralizing power in the hands of the chief executive (for the sake of accountability). · • Power is given to experts and professional bureaucrats. · • There is a strong urge to keep politics out of administration. · • Emphasis is placed on technical or scientific rationality. |
Both sets of values continue to influence American government and inconsistencies between them have been difficult to reconcile. The result, a structurally fragmented government operating on broadly democratic principles, makes some inefficiency more likely than overall efficiency. On the other hand, efforts to maintain efficiency of operations while holding administrators accountable have met with considerable success. Attempts to reconcile these values merit our continued attention. 13 Conflicts inherent in the application of these explanatory models contribute daily to the operational decisions of public managers (see The Public Manager: An Overview). These models also reveal the complexity of dealing with public issues and reflect citizen expectations (and frustrations) often associated with democratic governance.
THE PUBLIC MANAGER: AN OVERVIEW
Several major points should be made about the public manager's job:
· 1.The public manager inhabits an intensely political environment. Political processes do not abruptly stop at the door of a bureaucracy; the manager's job and environment are essentially political, requiring a primary emphasis on the task of managing political and administrative conflict.
· 2.The public manager's job also contains a variety of political dimensions, including building support with the chief executive, dealing with related departments and interest groups, bargaining with the legislature, managing and coordinating a fragmented structure of bureaucratic subunits, and (in the national government) trying to oversee and coordinate policy subsystems extending to the operations of state and city governments.
· 3.The manager's primary role is to deal with competing organizational pressures and to manage political conflict. In some cases, the manager will employ strategies of conflict resolution. At other times, the task will be to convert the negative, adversary features of conflict into something more positive, namely, cooperation, compromise, and coalition building among both political and administrative actors. (This process of conversion is often what we have in mind when we speak of leadership.)
· 4.In managing this political conflict, the manager faces many of the same issues that worry an advocate of pluralist democracy and, in a general way, would-be controllers of the bureaucracy. He or she has to worry about the fragmentation of bureaucratic activity, especially where it leads to strongly segmented bureaucratic structures and insulated concentrations of power. No less than the ordinary citizen, the public manager needs to “open up” the bureaucracy in order to achieve any real penetration into its operations. Finally, the public manager along with the pluralist democrat, must worry about the balance of power among different groups: whether desirable levels of competition and bargaining exist, whether certain interests overwhelm other groups in the policy-making process, whether citizens' complaints and demands are heard and registered. In sum, the public manager far from being the clerk of a narrow efficiency, faces the problems of both pluralist democracy and administrative efficiency.
Source: Adapted and reprinted by permission of the publisher from Bureaucratic Democracy: The Search for Democracy and Efficiency in American Government, by Douglas Yates, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1982 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Popular control of government has always been a matter of considerable importance in American politics. The Founders emphasized the legislative and, to a lesser extent, executive branches of government—which, in principle, could be held directly accountable to voters through periodic elections. This mechanism did not assume a large bureaucracy or broad-scale participation in anything other than the electoral process. This relatively simple, clear-cut arrangement for accountability and popular control has become responsive to other kinds of political pressure. Thus, it is not surprising that there are still concerns about public access to government and influence over what government does, especially in the Internet era where public agencies possess the capacity to collect and restrict access to information as a matter of official secrecy.
a political principle according to which agencies or organizations, such as those in government, are subject to some form of external control, causing them to give a general account of, and for, their actions; an essential concept in democratic public administration.
Democratic governance requires at least the presence, in a political system, of popular sovereignty, substantial electoral equality among citizens, consultation between government and citizens over proposed major courses of action, and majority rule. Increasingly, equality of opportunity is also regarded as a prerequisite for a political system to be truly democratic. In the 1700s, political participation referred to voting and holding public office and was limited by such qualifications as property ownership, wealth, education, social status, race, and gender. Beginning in the 1830s, eligibility for participation was broadened, so that today, virtually every citizen eighteen years of age or older can vote and otherwise become involved in politics. Lately, participation has taken on another, more controversial dimension—mandatory inclusion of various population groups in governmental decision making.
Debates over the meaning and scope of participation are nothing new and may indeed be inevitable in a democracy. Although participation is a key element of “democratic morality,” a number of questions about it still exist. 14 One concerns who should participate, with near-universal participation recommended by the true believer in democracy (the pure “democrat”). Another question centers on the scope of participation—at what stages of policy making and in what ways participation is to occur. Another dilemma for the aspiring democrat is whether opportunities to participate should be afforded equally to those with high stakes in government decisions and those with little interest in specific policies. Such issues complicate the structuring of channels of participation, but a commitment to making participation possible must exist before the issues can be addressed. These questions have taken on increased significance with the widespread use of information communication technologies (ICTs) in political campaigns and administrative processes.
Accountability once meant holding officials generally responsible for their actions through direct elective mechanisms, as in the case of legislators, or through indirect machinery such as independent regulatory boards and commissions in which elected officials held others to account on behalf of the public. Now, however, the meaning and means of accountability are less clear. The issue of to whom officials are actually accountable is a complex one, making it difficult to determine whether they can, in fact, be made to answer to the general public for what they do, or do not do. Complicating matters still further have been the isolated, but highly publicized, instances of serious abuses of power by major U.S. corporations and federal regulatory agencies. What responsibility, if any, do government mortgage underwriting and regulatory agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), or the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have to protect the assets and retirement savings of the employees and shareholders of these publicly operated and regulated corporations? Recent examples of the abuses of power have fueled the debate about public- and private-sector accountability and official misconduct by corporate executives and high-level politicians, as well as by state and local officials. 15
Disagreement with specific policies notwithstanding, the larger concern is for maintaining democratic norms and practices in a complex governmental system within a diverse and rapidly changing society. Today, many fear that democratic values, however defined, are endangered by government actions that take place without popular control and consent. Governmental institutions are clearly under pressure “from the people”—left, right, and center—to stay within the public's political reach. (Witness the intense support for the Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot populist movements during the 1992 and 1996 elections, Ralph Nader's Green Party influence on the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and the so-called Tea Party candidates during the 2010 elections.) Difficulties in maintaining democracy, however, are hardly new. Assuming that democracy implies fairly equitable access to decision makers, widespread opportunity to exert influence in the political process, and clear public preferences about public policy, the realities of American democracy have fallen short of this ideal for some time.
If policy mandates are vague, the process of defining the “public interest” is even more so. One can argue (as Ralph Nader did in his failed presidential campaigns during 2000 and 2004) that the public is the ultimate “owner” of governmental institutions and that institutions should serve the owner's interest—the public interest—but defining and gaining agreement on what that is as a practical matter is not easy. In a pluralist democratic society, various contesting forces claim to be acting in and for the public interest, and each may have a legitimate claim to some part of larger societal values. Also, it is not clear whether the public interest is some generalized view of societal good or the sum total of all private interests, which are themselves inconsistent with one another.
Democracy and Public Administration
Democracy requires mechanisms for both participation and accountability, ensured by an independent judiciary, uncensored media, and free elections. Public administration, however, poses troublesome problems for any such system. It does not accord with the notion of elected public officials because most bureaucrats are not elected, and professional values usually emphasized expertise, limited access, knowledge, and secrecy over accountability, participation, transparency, and democratic control. Growing societal complexity and increasing administrative responsibilities require more specialized bureaucratic professionals, as well as new and varied forms of indirect public administrative activity (contracts, grants, e-loans, performance partnerships, tax expenditures, and regulation). At the same time, disadvantaged groups and others have turned to government bureaucracy more frequently for various kinds of aid—ironically, often while voicing grievances against many of the same agencies—and to demand a greater role in making policies that affect them. Often, the result has been a collision between the need for professionalism and technical competence, and insistent demands for citizen participation in more aspects of policy making. 16 Bureaucratic accountability in such a system has to be achieved largely, if not entirely, through indirect popular influence via the legislature and chief executive. When technical expertise is required, it is very difficult, though not impossible, to reconcile accountability and participation in the policy-making process. It is always difficult to achieve both popular control and administrative discretion at the same time.
The concerns that have come to center on bureaucracy include, besides issues of accountability and participation, the question of representativeness. In addition, the general disposition of bureaucrats and bureaucracies to operate behind a veil of secrecy has triggered efforts to open their activities to public scrutiny. Two such efforts are state and national FOI laws and the so-called sunshine laws requiring that public business be conducted in open forums.
acts passed by Congress and by some states and localities requiring that various legislative proceedings (especially those of committees and subcommittees) and various administrative proceedings be held in public rather than behind closed doors; one device for increasing openness and accountability.
provisions in laws that government agencies and programs have a specific termination date.
Freedom of Information and Sunshine Laws
Holding government officials accountable for their actions and that of others is crucial to democratic governance, even more so when substantial responsibility is entrusted to nonelected (administrative) personnel. This rationale underlies the need for openness in government operations, public scrutiny, and freedom of information (FOI) and sunshine laws , all of which increase the public's ability to inquire successfully into the activities of bureaucracy and other branches of government. The glare of publicity has long been known as one means of enforcing accountability, by making possible a better-informed citizenry that can then act more intelligently and purposefully. Sunset laws add another dimension to accountability. By requiring positive legislative action to renew agency mandates, there is a virtual guarantee that some examination of agency performance will take place. Routine reviews and near-universal renewals of agency authorizations will not serve the purposes of sunset legislation. Only careful, thorough, and demanding examinations will do.
The use of sunset laws, in particular, as an instrument of accountability is part of legislative efforts to hold executives accountable. Once again, the public seems to be looking to its legislative representatives to bring about greater popular control over executive-branch agencies. In both state and national government, increasing numbers of legislators are responding positively to public pressures and, in some cases, to lead public opinion as well as follow it. Further, legislative entities [such as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and U.S. Government Accountability Office (U.S. GAO)] that analyze budget requests, conduct general oversight activities, and issue critical reports, have been granted increasing authority to discipline administrative agencies. Agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and state bureaus of the budget (“mini-OMBs”) are increasingly active in seeking to hold operating bureaucracies more accountable. These, too, have acquired more authority to carry out that function.
The importance of the relationship between access to information and government accountability was recognized five decades ago. Congress, in the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, attempted to open up the bureaucracy by encouraging distribution of information to the public on a need-to-know basis. The burden rested with the inquiring citizen to demonstrate that information was needed from the bureaucracy; the presumption was that information could be secured unless a strong case was made to the contrary. As long as popular trust of bureaucracy remained high and no major interests felt harmed or threatened, that arrangement was satisfactory. Bureaucratic secrecy went largely unchallenged and little information filtered out of government when agency personnel decided to restrict it.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
passed by Congress and some state legislatures establishing procedures through which private citizens may gain access to a wide variety of records and files from government agencies; a principal instrument for breaking down bureaucratic secrecy in American public administration.
By the mid-1960s, the situation had changed. Increasing government activity bred rising citizen concern about administrative decision making, which, in turn, sparked calls for greater access to hard-to-get information. Congress responded, after some delay and without strong presidential leadership, by passing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966, based on the principle that the “timely provision of information to the American people, upon their own petition, is a requisite and proper duty of government.” 17 The law presumed a right to know, with some limitations on information to be made available (most relating to national security). The effect of this statute was to increase the potential for citizen access to a wide variety of government records and files. This statute is increasingly recognized as a means of exposing mismanagement. 18
The FOIA records of recent administrations have been somewhat mixed. 19 Proponents of greater access to government information have seen some of these developments as very positive; other developments are viewed less favorably; and there have been frustrating instances of invasion of privacy that are cause for concern. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton was praised for pledging openness in government and, in October 1993, fulfilled that pledge by reversing a twelve-year policy of withholding government information from the press. Attorney General Janet Reno issued new FOIA regulations that, among other things, established a presumption of openness in the executive branch and directed that the Justice Department no longer defend other executive-branch agencies challenged under provisions of the FOIA. The OMB created a new policy under which executive-branch agencies must make government information, in electronic form, accessible to scholars and librarians, among others. And in mid-1993, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Landano (508 U.S. 165) that FBI records are not automatically confidential, especially if a criminal defendant seeks access to relevant records as part of an effort to establish his or her innocence.
The George W. Bush administration attempted to suspend full implementation of the FOIA in the interests of national security, and limited access to sensitive information about the activities of the armed forces and domestic intelligence agencies in the war on terrorism. Not surprisingly, requests for information dramatically increased, creating a huge backlog of unprocessed FOIA applications. Federal agencies receive over 2 million FOIA requests each year. FOIA allows agencies broad discretion in the release of information. If the agency declares that releasing the data would threaten national security, the information will remain a secret. Documents can be released completely, denied completely, or released partially. Other issues have emerged that further complicate full release of information. First, access to electronic data is thought by most observers, including many members of Congress, to be protected under the FOIA, but many troubling questions remain to be answered (some with privacy implications). 20 Second, there is growing unease that contracting out government services diminishes public access to information about those services, because FOIA provisions do not automatically extend to private-sector entities (see Chapter 10 ). Nearly forty states have also passed FOIA statutes, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Free and open exchange of information is crucial for both accountability and access. Clearly, freedom of information continues to have substantial importance, in the eyes of both government officials and those who, for myriad reasons, wish to monitor what government does. In addition, unnecessary secrecy inhibits organizational communication and policy implementation. Former Vice President Al Gore argues that withholding such information from the American people may also damage democratic values:
The historic misjudgments that led to the tragedy of America's invasion of Iraq were all easily avoidable. The [Bush] Administration's arrogant control of information and the massive deception perpetuated on the American people in order to gain approval for a dishonest policy led to the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States. But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to the misallocation of military and economic and political resources. Nor is it limited even to the loss of blood and treasure. Whenever a chief executive spends prodigious amounts of energy in an effort to convince the American people of a falsehood, he damages the fabric of democracy [emphasis added] and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self-government. 21
Sunshine laws, which have been passed at all levels of government and apply mainly to legislative proceedings, have also been enacted for administrative agencies. Regulatory agencies at the national level operate “in the sunshine,” although they are required to do so by judicial rather than legislative action. In all fifty states, open-meeting laws are on the books and records of most public hearings applying to state legislative committees, state executive branches and independent agencies, and local governments. The greatest potential beneficiaries are organized groups of citizens who seek to monitor and influence the decisions of administrative agencies. City councils, county commissions, and local school boards have been at the center of controversies over open meetings at least as often as state or national entities. Government behavior can be changed only gradually, if experience with these devices is any guide.
website founded in 2006 with access to several million leaked diplomatic and military documents. Wikileaks has released thousands of leaked documents about the war in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. In 2010, this set off a firestorm of protests from the Obama administration that such sensitive records may jeopardize the lives of U.S. and coalition soldiers serving in the region.
Bureau of Consumer Protection (BCP)
federal super-agency created in 2011 to protect consumers and buyers from unfair, deceptive and fraudulent business practices.
There is also growing concern that government and bureaucracy are not doing enough to protect individual privacy and to ensure that government records concerning affairs of private citizens are fair and accurate. This is a particularly sensitive issue in view of electronic information capabilities. Prior to the widespread availability of ICTs, information might have been available to government, but it was costly and time-consuming to have it on hand or to organize it. Computers, however, make retrieval and cross-referencing of information not only possible but quick and convenient. A principal concern is the extent and diversity of personal information that is now stored on computers of public and private organizations—Social Security data, credit ratings and transactions, driver's license information, medical records, military and State Department communiques, income figures, and so on. The website WikiLeaks , founded in 2006, claims to have access to several million leaked diplomatic and military documents. In July 2010, Wikileaks released a compilation of more than 76,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. This set off a firestorm of protests from the Obama administration that such sensitive records may jeopardize the lives of U.S. and coalition soldiers serving in the region.
Both national and state governments have acted to better safeguard an individual's right to privacy and fair treatment. Legislation at the national level includes the Freedom of Information Act, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Fair Credit Billing Act. Congress has established the Privacy Protection Study Commission to look into intrusions on individual privacy by agencies outside the national executive branch. The Obama administration created the Bureau of Consumer Protection (BCP) to protect buyers from unfair, deceptive and fraudulent business practices. Over half a dozen states have enacted privacy laws, and an even larger number have adopted their own versions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. There has been considerable government activity in this area, but concern persists that Big Brother still may have too much access to personal records. Indeed, there are growing fears that “hackers” in both the public and private sectors may be capable of invading our privacy and stealing our identities to a far greater extent than ever before. (Note, again, the potential links to freedom of information and national security policy regarding access to electronic data.) 22
HOW WOULD YOU DECIDE?
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a documentary film that follows Daniel Ellsberg, a former U.S. military analyst, and explores events leading to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed top-secret military history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
The Vietnam Study Task Force was founded in 1967, for the purpose of writing a history of the Vietnam War Analysts used files from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to create the final product, keeping the study secret from political leaders in Washington. Classified as “Top Secret,” the study was never meant to be shared publicly.
Daniel Ellsberg knew the analysts involved in conducting the study and had access to the files. Ellsberg opposed the Vietnam War and attempted to disclose the study's contents to President Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger among other federal government agents, but was turned away until approaching the New York Times in 1971.
The Pentagon Papers revealed that the United States had escalated and expanded the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia and Laos, raiding North Vietnam, conducting Marine Corps attacks—none of which had been reported to the American public. The Papers further revealed that each administration from Truman to Johnson had purposefully neglected to share its full intentions behind actions in Vietnam, compromising the U.S. account of the war, as well as eroding the public support for the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg was eventually charged for his actions as the source of the leak, but all charges were dropped. Ellsberg continued his career as a political analyst.
There is a growing perception that government should do more to protect individual privacy and ensure that individual records and files are fair and accurate. What basic issues are involved in this debate, and how might such privacy guarantees be instituted? Compare the Pentagon Papers with current incidents of the release of classified information such as the WikiLeaks case. How are they similar? Do they differ?
Source: http://www.mostdangerousman.org/ accessed March 13, 2011.
Dimensions of Democratic Administration
The following section examines in greater depth selected areas in public administration that pose particular challenges for the maintenance of democratic norms and practices. We will consider each of the following: (1) citizen participation, (2) bureaucratic representativeness, (3) bureaucratic responsiveness, and (4) administrative effectiveness as a possible threat to personal freedom.
Citizen Participation
The ideology of citizen participation has firm roots among our political values, especially participatory democracy. The push for greater citizen participation in government decision making was reborn in the 1960s out of related movements for civil rights and decentralization of urban government structures. It originated in demands by minorities for a larger voice in determining policies and programs directly affecting them. The urban poor, at least during the 1960s, concentrated on organizing themselves and confronting those in power with demands for change. Their participation was formally incorporated in both the planning and implementation of federal Model Cities and community-action programs.
Forms and practices of citizen participation are numerous, ranging from advising agencies to attending hearings to actual decision making. In addition to making statements at meetings held by administrative agencies, individuals may take part in budget and other legislative hearings, and in initiatives and referenda; serve on advisory committees; participate in focus groups and respond to citizen surveys; and, in some cases, sit on governing boards of operating activities funded by government entities. Also, in the delivery of human services, individuals act as coproducers of the services by their involvement in program operations (this refers to services such as unemployment compensation, job assistance, garbage collection, and education). 23 The same kind of active role is an essential ingredient in the more contemporary attempts to provide improved customer service and empower local communities to act in their own interests. Viewing citizens as coproducers is a different but highly relevant conception of participation that has expanded with the wider use of electronic communications in government. Strategies for citizen participation are directed generally toward reducing citizen alienation from government. Although some of these purposes may be mutually incompatible, this form of grassroots involvement can also be used to hold public officials accountable. 24
Ideological differences about the extent of citizen participation and debates over its place in governing are related conceptually to the continuing debate in American politics over centralization and decentralization of administrative authority (see Chapters 3 and 4 ). Particularly as practiced in the federal system, citizen participation represents an application of the decentralist principle, which assumes value and purpose in delegating decision-making authority to affected persons and groups. Decentralization as a mode of operation clearly permits wider participation; it gives greater assurance that the existing spectrum of opinion will receive a hearing; and it lends more legitimacy to both the process and the outcomes of decision making. Because federalism itself was designed as a bulwark against intrusive centralization, the concept of decentralization obviously has a place in operations under a federal system. Citizen participation, fostered by many national programs, has been a key mechanism used to promote decentralization of operating responsibility.
The concept of participation has been applied in different ways to varying problems. Community control focused on neighborhood management of schools and delivery of other essential urban services. Neighborhood and citizen-action organizations sprang up for the purpose of “preserving neighborhood character” and sometimes redevelopment of physical structures in the neighborhood. For example, there have been concerted efforts to prevent construction of interstate highway projects that would cut through, or perhaps level, parts of established urban neighborhoods; cattle ranchers in western states joined forces with Native Americans and antinuclear groups to oppose uranium mining by energy conglomerates; citizen groups protested toxic-waste disposal; and residential associations have tried to attract (or repel) commercial enterprises such as Home Depot and Wal-Mart. 25
legal requirements that groups affected by political decisions must be represented on decision-making boards and commissions.
Citizen participation also has been incorporated into formal mechanisms for decision making. At the national level, for example, public participation in regulatory proceedings has been increasing, although with considerable variation in regulators' responses and opportunities provided to citizen groups, such as consumer protection and environmental organizations. Agencies and commissions undoubtedly have legal discretionary authority to decide just how much public participation (if any) to permit and, particularly, whether and how to finance participation by those with limited resources. Nonetheless, there has been considerable frustration on the part of so-called public interest groups (PIGs) , which have been slow to gain access to regulatory proceedings. And, at the local level, participation is now more regularized, especially in building code and zoning enforcement, environmental protection, and planning and design of urban communities.
organized lobbying groups that represent primary noneconomic interests in influencing public policy. Examples are Common Cause and Greenpeace.
Some other dimensions of citizen participation are worth noting. First, the matter of who is to participate and to what extent is not only a problem of democratic ideals; it has potentially important implications in a strictly operating sense. In antipoverty programs of the mid- and late 1960s, “maximum feasible participation of the poor” was called for, but there was bitter debate over who constituted “the poor,” and how they were to be selected and incorporated into program operations. Furthermore, in almost all studies of citizen participation, it has been found that
groups of individuals active in such programs (1) represent organized interests likely to have been previously active in agency affairs, (2) include a large component of spokesmen for other government agencies, (3) represent a rather limited range of potential publics affected by programs, and (4) tend toward the well-educated, affluent middle- to upper-class individuals. Viewed in terms of the ideological program goals, programs seldom appear to … produce a great socioeconomic diversity among participating interests. 26
a process in organizational relations whereby one group or organization acquires the ability to influence activities of another, usually for a considerable period of time.
Second, there is a distinct possibility that officially sponsored citizen participation will tend to be co-optation and tokenism rather than true representation. On more than one occasion, what began as a good-faith effort to build greater participation into a decision-making process ended up as more show than substance, symbolic politics at its worst, with the newer groups occupying a place of greater visibility but little increased power. In developing relationships between some urban community-action groups and municipal administrations (for example, “city hall”), leaders occasionally have succeeded in co-opting a group's leadership by agreeing to some of their demands and giving them greater political visibility in exchange for moderating other demands. Compromises such as these have occurred in communities like Chicago that have well-entrenched local political organizations, where community-action groups choose to settle for “half a loaf” rather than risk forfeiting all chance to have some impact on the way decisions are made and resources allocated. In addition, co-optation can work both ways, in that a government agency might be co-opted by stronger nongovernmental, private-sector, groups. Either way, co-optation involves surrender by a weaker entity to a stronger one of some power to shape the course of the weaker entity's long-term activities.
Third, decentralizing and localizing control over governmental programs may not guarantee either increased participation at the local level or more democratic operations. Indeed, there is always a chance that local government may be less democratic than in a larger and more diverse political system. The dangers of domination by a small minority of elite local citizens are very real, regardless of official mandates or unofficial expectations. It also has been observed that citizen participation can become a “bureaucratic ideology” to be used “against the elected officers of representative government.” 27 All such observations clearly imply a hazard inherent in citizen participation: the potential for citizen interests to become primarily self-serving rather than representative of broader interests in the community or society.
A fourth concern is that agency personnel, in their enthusiasm for satisfying immediate citizen-action demands, may initiate responses that prove to be shortsighted when judged by more rigorous criteria over time. Compounding this potential difficulty is a tendency for citizen groups to scorn cost-benefit analysis as an instrument of evaluation of their own proposals. Cost-benefit analysis is not always an appropriate evaluative tool, but it can often strengthen one's case, particularly under conditions of fiscal stress, or at least increase a group's credibility in a political dialogue.
Fifth, if citizen participation is designed to help keep bureaucracy accountable to the general public, it has had a mixed record of success. Citizen groups seem to have the greatest impact when they have the political power to make bureaucrats listen and when group values most nearly match those of the bureaucracy.
Sixth, citizen participation and its impact will be affected by the degree to which contacts with those in government are characterized by confrontation as opposed to negotiation, by a sense of “us against them” as opposed to a perceived community of interests. Tension in a political system is not uncommon, but a democratic system virtually requires that tension not be constant. Barring fundamental shifts in the locus of power in a particular decision-making system, continuous confrontation will soon reach a point of diminishing returns for those seeking access and influence.
Finally, a widely accepted concept affecting participation is citizen input, about which a cautionary note is in order. Many of us seem to assume that we should seek “greater input” into the mechanisms of decision making. (The term is borrowed from computer science, where input makes a major difference in results.) However, the concept of input involves an implicit acknowledgment that somebody else is running the machine. In other words, those who seek input are admitting to a subordinate position in decision making. How to get action with too many voices “in action” is a real dilemma for decision makers. There are other possibilities—coproduction, empowerment , partnership, and full control, for example—for which input is an inappropriate concept. To think only in terms of input, in short, serves to limit the variety of ways that participation can occur and to confirm the power of those already holding it.
approach to citizen participation or management that stresses extended customer satisfaction, examines relationships among existing management processes, seeks to improve internal agency communications, and responds to valid customer demands; in exchange for the authority to make decisions at the point of customer contact, all “empowered” employees must be thoroughly trained, and the results must be carefully monitored.
Citizen participation, in sum, has dramatically modified decision making in a host of policy areas and has taken its place as a major feature of democratic administration. However, nothing is automatic about the manner in which participation and representation are practiced. Although those in positions of power have often yielded only grudgingly to citizen groups, it is unlikely that the gains that have been made will be rolled back.
Bureaucratic Representativeness
There are, first of all, several approaches to representation. 28 Should constituents' opinions and preferences be conveyed to government officials and reflected faithfully in legislative voting, or should a representative exercise independent judgment and individual conscience in making decisions? The former, which has been labeled the “delegate role,” maximizes the public's impact on decision making but does not take advantage of the representative's potentially superior knowledge of details and of subtleties in making choices. The latter, labeled the “trustee role,” emphasizes the representative's capabilities and the public's trust that their interests will be faithfully served (thus the label “trustee”). In both instances, we are depending on our representatives to somehow serve the public interest. Unfortunately, it is rarely clear how elected officials make their decisions and to whose voices they listen when they do act as delegates. Thus, in its most basic dimension, there is ambiguity concerning representation.
That ambiguity is complicated considerably when the focus shifts to the administrative context. Because bureaucracies in American politics are acknowledged to have a representative function, it follows that answers to the same sorts of questions must be found. But, historically, bureaucratic agencies have served narrow clienteles with specialized interests (see Chapter 1 ). An agency's representation of those interests—and its accountability to them—can be quite complete without its serving the larger political system. How, then, can these administrative patterns be reconciled with democratic values that emphasize broad popular representation? Central to the argument is the following proposition: “The attainment of the democratic ideal in the world of administration depends much less on majority votes than on the inclusiveness of the representation of interests in the interaction process among decision makers.” 29 The process can be called “democratic” only to the extent that interaction is broadly inclusive at two levels of decision making: first, at the level of political superstructure, where basic decisions on rules for society and roles for actors in the administrative state are made, and second, at the level of program specialization to which much of the decision making of the administrative state has been committed. Interaction should include several types of leaders from diverse segments of the community who, in their participation and the influence of nonleaders upon them, represent the many and varied interests within society.
Thus, the degree to which representation is inclusive of existing interests in the society is, in this view, a key test for how democratic administrative processes will be. Underlying this is another concern: the extent of effective access afforded to those not already a part of the interaction process, consistent with the norm of inclusiveness. Both access and regularized interactions are crucial to democratization of administration, especially regarding the opportunity for newer or weaker groups to gain a hearing for their interests and grievances.
Another essential difficulty in representation concerns the delegation of authority. In a fundamental sense, we delegate our authority to Congress and to state and local legislatures to make our laws, knowing as we do that representation of our every view is imperfect. Legislatures, in turn, have delegated vast amounts of authority to bureaucracies (and to chief executives), further removing decision-making power from the source of authority—that is, the people. When authority is delegated, it must be either very precisely defined and limited, which tends to be impractical and defeats the purpose of delegating, or else discretionary, with those who exercise it largely deciding how it should be used.
and fraudulent business practices. Over half a dozen states have enacted privacy laws, and an even larger number have adopted their own versions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. There has been considerable government activity in this area, but concern persists that Big Brother still may have too much access to personal records. Indeed, there are growing fears that “hackers” in both the public and private sectors may be capable of invading our privacy and stealing our identities to a far greater extent than ever before. (Note, again, the potential links to freedom of information and national security policy regarding access to electronic data.) 22
HOW WOULD YOU DECIDE?
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a documentary film that follows Daniel Ellsberg, a former U.S. military analyst, and explores events leading to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed top-secret military history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
The Vietnam Study Task Force was founded in 1967, for the purpose of writing a history of the Vietnam War Analysts used files from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to create the final product, keeping the study secret from political leaders in Washington. Classified as “Top Secret,” the study was never meant to be shared publicly.
Daniel Ellsberg knew the analysts involved in conducting the study and had access to the files. Ellsberg opposed the Vietnam War and attempted to disclose the study's contents to President Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger among other federal government agents, but was turned away until approaching the New York Times in 1971.
The Pentagon Papers revealed that the United States had escalated and expanded the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia and Laos, raiding North Vietnam, conducting Marine Corps attacks—none of which had been reported to the American public. The Papers further revealed that each administration from Truman to Johnson had purposefully neglected to share its full intentions behind actions in Vietnam, compromising the U.S. account of the war, as well as eroding the public support for the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg was eventually charged for his actions as the source of the leak, but all charges were dropped. Ellsberg continued his career as a political analyst.
There is a growing perception that government should do more to protect individual privacy and ensure that individual records and files are fair and accurate. What basic issues are involved in this debate, and how might such privacy guarantees be instituted? Compare the Pentagon Papers with current incidents of the release of classified information such as the WikiLeaks case. How are they similar? Do they differ?
Source: http://www.mostdangerousman.org/ accessed March 13, 2011.
Dimensions of Democratic Administration
The following section examines in greater depth selected areas in public administration that pose particular challenges for the maintenance of democratic norms and practices. We will consider each of the following: (1) citizen participation, (2) bureaucratic representativeness, (3) bureaucratic responsiveness, and (4) administrative effectiveness as a possible threat to personal freedom.
Citizen Participation
The ideology of citizen participation has firm roots among our political values, especially participatory democracy. The push for greater citizen participation in government decision making was reborn in the 1960s out of related movements for civil rights and decentralization of urban government structures. It originated in demands by minorities for a larger voice in determining policies and programs directly affecting them. The urban poor, at least during the 1960s, concentrated on organizing themselves and confronting those in power with demands for change. Their participation was formally incorporated in both the planning and implementation of federal Model Cities and community-action programs.
Forms and practices of citizen participation are numerous, ranging from advising agencies to attending hearings to actual decision making. In addition to making statements at meetings held by administrative agencies, individuals may take part in budget and other legislative hearings, and in initiatives and referenda; serve on advisory committees; participate in focus groups and respond to citizen surveys; and, in some cases, sit on governing boards of operating activities funded by government entities. Also, in the delivery of human services, individuals act as coproducers of the services by their involvement in program operations (this refers to services such as unemployment compensation, job assistance, garbage collection, and education). 23 The same kind of active role is an essential ingredient in the more contemporary attempts to provide improved customer service and empower local communities to act in their own interests. Viewing citizens as coproducers is a different but highly relevant conception of participation that has expanded with the wider use of electronic communications in government. Strategies for citizen participation are directed generally toward reducing citizen alienation from government. Although some of these purposes may be mutually incompatible, this form of grassroots involvement can also be used to hold public officials accountable. 24
Ideological differences about the extent of citizen participation and debates over its place in governing are related conceptually to the continuing debate in American politics over centralization and decentralization of administrative authority (see Chapters 3 and 4 ). Particularly as practiced in the federal system, citizen participation represents an application of the decentralist principle, which assumes value and purpose in delegating decision-making authority to affected persons and groups. Decentralization as a mode of operation clearly permits wider participation; it gives greater assurance that the existing spectrum of opinion will receive a hearing; and it lends more legitimacy to both the process and the outcomes of decision making. Because federalism itself was designed as a bulwark against intrusive centralization, the concept of decentralization obviously has a place in operations under a federal system. Citizen participation, fostered by many national programs, has been a key mechanism used to promote decentralization of operating responsibility.
The concept of participation has been applied in different ways to varying problems. Community control focused on neighborhood management of schools and delivery of other essential urban services. Neighborhood and citizen-action organizations sprang up for the purpose of “preserving neighborhood character” and sometimes redevelopment of physical structures in the neighborhood. For example, there have been concerted efforts to prevent construction of interstate highway projects that would cut through, or perhaps level, parts of established urban neighborhoods; cattle ranchers in western states joined forces with Native Americans and antinuclear groups to oppose uranium mining by energy conglomerates; citizen groups protested toxic-waste disposal; and residential associations have tried to attract (or repel) commercial enterprises such as Home Depot and Wal-Mart. 25
legal requirements that groups affected by political decisions must be represented on decision-making boards and commissions.
Citizen participation also has been incorporated into formal mechanisms for decision making. At the national level, for example, public participation in regulatory proceedings has been increasing, although with considerable variation in regulators' responses and opportunities provided to citizen groups, such as consumer protection and environmental organizations. Agencies and commissions undoubtedly have legal discretionary authority to decide just how much public participation (if any) to permit and, particularly, whether and how to finance participation by those with limited resources. Nonetheless, there has been considerable frustration on the part of so-called public interest groups (PIGs) , which have been slow to gain access to regulatory proceedings. And, at the local level, participation is now more regularized, especially in building code and zoning enforcement, environmental protection, and planning and design of urban communities.
organized lobbying groups that represent primary noneconomic interests in influencing public policy. Examples are Common Cause and Greenpeace.
Some other dimensions of citizen participation are worth noting. First, the matter of who is to participate and to what extent is not only a problem of democratic ideals; it has potentially important implications in a strictly operating sense. In antipoverty programs of the mid- and late 1960s, “maximum feasible participation of the poor” was called for, but there was bitter debate over who constituted “the poor,” and how they were to be selected and incorporated into program operations. Furthermore, in almost all studies of citizen participation, it has been found that
groups of individuals active in such programs (1) represent organized interests likely to have been previously active in agency affairs, (2) include a large component of spokesmen for other government agencies, (3) represent a rather limited range of potential publics affected by programs, and (4) tend toward the well-educated, affluent middle- to upper-class individuals. Viewed in terms of the ideological program goals, programs seldom appear to … produce a great socioeconomic diversity among participating interests. 26
a process in organizational relations whereby one group or organization acquires the ability to influence activities of another, usually for a considerable period of time.
Second, there is a distinct possibility that officially sponsored citizen participation will tend to be co-optation and tokenism rather than true representation. On more than one occasion, what began as a good-faith effort to build greater participation into a decision-making process ended up as more show than substance, symbolic politics at its worst, with the newer groups occupying a place of greater visibility but little increased power. In developing relationships between some urban community-action groups and municipal administrations (for example, “city hall”), leaders occasionally have succeeded in co-opting a group's leadership by agreeing to some of their demands and giving them greater political visibility in exchange for moderating other demands. Compromises such as these have occurred in communities like Chicago that have well-entrenched local political organizations, where community-action groups choose to settle for “half a loaf” rather than risk forfeiting all chance to have some impact on the way decisions are made and resources allocated. In addition, co-optation can work both ways, in that a government agency might be co-opted by stronger nongovernmental, private-sector, groups. Either way, co-optation involves surrender by a weaker entity to a stronger one of some power to shape the course of the weaker entity's long-term activities.
Third, decentralizing and localizing control over governmental programs may not guarantee either increased participation at the local level or more democratic operations. Indeed, there is always a chance that local government may be less democratic than in a larger and more diverse political system. The dangers of domination by a small minority of elite local citizens are very real, regardless of official mandates or unofficial expectations. It also has been observed that citizen participation can become a “bureaucratic ideology” to be used “against the elected officers of representative government.” 27 All such observations clearly imply a hazard inherent in citizen participation: the potential for citizen interests to become primarily self-serving rather than representative of broader interests in the community or society.
A fourth concern is that agency personnel, in their enthusiasm for satisfying immediate citizen-action demands, may initiate responses that prove to be shortsighted when judged by more rigorous criteria over time. Compounding this potential difficulty is a tendency for citizen groups to scorn cost-benefit analysis as an instrument of evaluation of their own proposals. Cost-benefit analysis is not always an appropriate evaluative tool, but it can often strengthen one's case, particularly under conditions of fiscal stress, or at least increase a group's credibility in a political dialogue.
Fifth, if citizen participation is designed to help keep bureaucracy accountable to the general public, it has had a mixed record of success. Citizen groups seem to have the greatest impact when they have the political power to make bureaucrats listen and when group values most nearly match those of the bureaucracy.
Sixth, citizen participation and its impact will be affected by the degree to which contacts with those in government are characterized by confrontation as opposed to negotiation, by a sense of “us against them” as opposed to a perceived community of interests. Tension in a political system is not uncommon, but a democratic system virtually requires that tension not be constant. Barring fundamental shifts in the locus of power in a particular decision-making system, continuous confrontation will soon reach a point of diminishing returns for those seeking access and influence.
Finally, a widely accepted concept affecting participation is citizen input, about which a cautionary note is in order. Many of us seem to assume that we should seek “greater input” into the mechanisms of decision making. (The term is borrowed from computer science, where input makes a major difference in results.) However, the concept of input involves an implicit acknowledgment that somebody else is running the machine. In other words, those who seek input are admitting to a subordinate position in decision making. How to get action with too many voices “in action” is a real dilemma for decision makers. There are other possibilities—coproduction, empowerment , partnership, and full control, for example—for which input is an inappropriate concept. To think only in terms of input, in short, serves to limit the variety of ways that participation can occur and to confirm the power of those already holding it.
approach to citizen participation or management that stresses extended customer satisfaction, examines relationships among existing management processes, seeks to improve internal agency communications, and responds to valid customer demands; in exchange for the authority to make decisions at the point of customer contact, all “empowered” employees must be thoroughly trained, and the results must be carefully monitored.
Citizen participation, in sum, has dramatically modified decision making in a host of policy areas and has taken its place as a major feature of democratic administration. However, nothing is automatic about the manner in which participation and representation are practiced. Although those in positions of power have often yielded only grudgingly to citizen groups, it is unlikely that the gains that have been made will be rolled back.
Bureaucratic Representativeness
There are, first of all, several approaches to representation. 28 Should constituents' opinions and preferences be conveyed to government officials and reflected faithfully in legislative voting, or should a representative exercise independent judgment and individual conscience in making decisions? The former, which has been labeled the “delegate role,” maximizes the public's impact on decision making but does not take advantage of the representative's potentially superior knowledge of details and of subtleties in making choices. The latter, labeled the “trustee role,” emphasizes the representative's capabilities and the public's trust that their interests will be faithfully served (thus the label “trustee”). In both instances, we are depending on our representatives to somehow serve the public interest. Unfortunately, it is rarely clear how elected officials make their decisions and to whose voices they listen when they do act as delegates. Thus, in its most basic dimension, there is ambiguity concerning representation.
That ambiguity is complicated considerably when the focus shifts to the administrative context. Because bureaucracies in American politics are acknowledged to have a representative function, it follows that answers to the same sorts of questions must be found. But, historically, bureaucratic agencies have served narrow clienteles with specialized interests (see Chapter 1 ). An agency's representation of those interests—and its accountability to them—can be quite complete without its serving the larger political system. How, then, can these administrative patterns be reconciled with democratic values that emphasize broad popular representation? Central to the argument is the following proposition: “The attainment of the democratic ideal in the world of administration depends much less on majority votes than on the inclusiveness of the representation of interests in the interaction process among decision makers.” 29 The process can be called “democratic” only to the extent that interaction is broadly inclusive at two levels of decision making: first, at the level of political superstructure, where basic decisions on rules for society and roles for actors in the administrative state are made, and second, at the level of program specialization to which much of the decision making of the administrative state has been committed. Interaction should include several types of leaders from diverse segments of the community who, in their participation and the influence of nonleaders upon them, represent the many and varied interests within society.
Thus, the degree to which representation is inclusive of existing interests in the society is, in this view, a key test for how democratic administrative processes will be. Underlying this is another concern: the extent of effective access afforded to those not already a part of the interaction process, consistent with the norm of inclusiveness. Both access and regularized interactions are crucial to democratization of administration, especially regarding the opportunity for newer or weaker groups to gain a hearing for their interests and grievances.
Another essential difficulty in representation concerns the delegation of authority. In a fundamental sense, we delegate our authority to Congress and to state and local legislatures to make our laws, knowing as we do that representation of our every view is imperfect. Legislatures, in turn, have delegated vast amounts of authority to bureaucracies (and to chief executives), further removing decision-making power from the source of authority—that is, the people. When authority is delegated, it must be either very precisely defined and limited, which tends to be impractical and defeats the purpose of delegating, or else discretionary, with those who exercise it largely deciding how it should be used.
and fraudulent business practices. Over half a dozen states have enacted privacy laws, and an even larger number have adopted their own versions of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. There has been considerable government activity in this area, but concern persists that Big Brother still may have too much access to personal records. Indeed, there are growing fears that “hackers” in both the public and private sectors may be capable of invading our privacy and stealing our identities to a far greater extent than ever before. (Note, again, the potential links to freedom of information and national security policy regarding access to electronic data.) 22
HOW WOULD YOU DECIDE?
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a documentary film that follows Daniel Ellsberg, a former U.S. military analyst, and explores events leading to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed top-secret military history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
The Vietnam Study Task Force was founded in 1967, for the purpose of writing a history of the Vietnam War Analysts used files from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to create the final product, keeping the study secret from political leaders in Washington. Classified as “Top Secret,” the study was never meant to be shared publicly.
Daniel Ellsberg knew the analysts involved in conducting the study and had access to the files. Ellsberg opposed the Vietnam War and attempted to disclose the study's contents to President Nixon's National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger among other federal government agents, but was turned away until approaching the New York Times in 1971.
The Pentagon Papers revealed that the United States had escalated and expanded the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia and Laos, raiding North Vietnam, conducting Marine Corps attacks—none of which had been reported to the American public. The Papers further revealed that each administration from Truman to Johnson had purposefully neglected to share its full intentions behind actions in Vietnam, compromising the U.S. account of the war, as well as eroding the public support for the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg was eventually charged for his actions as the source of the leak, but all charges were dropped. Ellsberg continued his career as a political analyst.
There is a growing perception that government should do more to protect individual privacy and ensure that individual records and files are fair and accurate. What basic issues are involved in this debate, and how might such privacy guarantees be instituted? Compare the Pentagon Papers with current incidents of the release of classified information such as the WikiLeaks case. How are they similar? Do they differ?
Source: http://www.mostdangerousman.org/ accessed March 13, 2011.
Dimensions of Democratic Administration
The following section examines in greater depth selected areas in public administration that pose particular challenges for the maintenance of democratic norms and practices. We will consider each of the following: (1) citizen participation, (2) bureaucratic representativeness, (3) bureaucratic responsiveness, and (4) administrative effectiveness as a possible threat to personal freedom.
Citizen Participation
The ideology of citizen participation has firm roots among our political values, especially participatory democracy. The push for greater citizen participation in government decision making was reborn in the 1960s out of related movements for civil rights and decentralization of urban government structures. It originated in demands by minorities for a larger voice in determining policies and programs directly affecting them. The urban poor, at least during the 1960s, concentrated on organizing themselves and confronting those in power with demands for change. Their participation was formally incorporated in both the planning and implementation of federal Model Cities and community-action programs.
Forms and practices of citizen participation are numerous, ranging from advising agencies to attending hearings to actual decision making. In addition to making statements at meetings held by administrative agencies, individuals may take part in budget and other legislative hearings, and in initiatives and referenda; serve on advisory committees; participate in focus groups and respond to citizen surveys; and, in some cases, sit on governing boards of operating activities funded by government entities. Also, in the delivery of human services, individuals act as coproducers of the services by their involvement in program operations (this refers to services such as unemployment compensation, job assistance, garbage collection, and education). 23 The same kind of active role is an essential ingredient in the more contemporary attempts to provide improved customer service and empower local communities to act in their own interests. Viewing citizens as coproducers is a different but highly relevant conception of participation that has expanded with the wider use of electronic communications in government. Strategies for citizen participation are directed generally toward reducing citizen alienation from government. Although some of these purposes may be mutually incompatible, this form of grassroots involvement can also be used to hold public officials accountable. 24
Ideological differences about the extent of citizen participation and debates over its place in governing are related conceptually to the continuing debate in American politics over centralization and decentralization of administrative authority (see Chapters 3 and 4 ). Particularly as practiced in the federal system, citizen participation represents an application of the decentralist principle, which assumes value and purpose in delegating decision-making authority to affected persons and groups. Decentralization as a mode of operation clearly permits wider participation; it gives greater assurance that the existing spectrum of opinion will receive a hearing; and it lends more legitimacy to both the process and the outcomes of decision making. Because federalism itself was designed as a bulwark against intrusive centralization, the concept of decentralization obviously has a place in operations under a federal system. Citizen participation, fostered by many national programs, has been a key mechanism used to promote decentralization of operating responsibility.
The concept of participation has been applied in different ways to varying problems. Community control focused on neighborhood management of schools and delivery of other essential urban services. Neighborhood and citizen-action organizations sprang up for the purpose of “preserving neighborhood character” and sometimes redevelopment of physical structures in the neighborhood. For example, there have been concerted efforts to prevent construction of interstate highway projects that would cut through, or perhaps level, parts of established urban neighborhoods; cattle ranchers in western states joined forces with Native Americans and antinuclear groups to oppose uranium mining by energy conglomerates; citizen groups protested toxic-waste disposal; and residential associations have tried to attract (or repel) commercial enterprises such as Home Depot and Wal-Mart. 25
legal requirements that groups affected by political decisions must be represented on decision-making boards and commissions.
Citizen participation also has been incorporated into formal mechanisms for decision making. At the national level, for example, public participation in regulatory proceedings has been increasing, although with considerable variation in regulators' responses and opportunities provided to citizen groups, such as consumer protection and environmental organizations. Agencies and commissions undoubtedly have legal discretionary authority to decide just how much public participation (if any) to permit and, particularly, whether and how to finance participation by those with limited resources. Nonetheless, there has been considerable frustration on the part of so-called public interest groups (PIGs) , which have been slow to gain access to regulatory proceedings. And, at the local level, participation is now more regularized, especially in building code and zoning enforcement, environmental protection, and planning and design of urban communities.
organized lobbying groups that represent primary noneconomic interests in influencing public policy. Examples are Common Cause and Greenpeace.
Some other dimensions of citizen participation are worth noting. First, the matter of who is to participate and to what extent is not only a problem of democratic ideals; it has potentially important implications in a strictly operating sense. In antipoverty programs of the mid- and late 1960s, “maximum feasible participation of the poor” was called for, but there was bitter debate over who constituted “the poor,” and how they were to be selected and incorporated into program operations. Furthermore, in almost all studies of citizen participation, it has been found that
groups of individuals active in such programs (1) represent organized interests likely to have been previously active in agency affairs, (2) include a large component of spokesmen for other government agencies, (3) represent a rather limited range of potential publics affected by programs, and (4) tend toward the well-educated, affluent middle- to upper-class individuals. Viewed in terms of the ideological program goals, programs seldom appear to … produce a great socioeconomic diversity among participating interests. 26
a process in organizational relations whereby one group or organization acquires the ability to influence activities of another, usually for a considerable period of time.
Second, there is a distinct possibility that officially sponsored citizen participation will tend to be co-optation and tokenism rather than true representation. On more than one occasion, what began as a good-faith effort to build greater participation into a decision-making process ended up as more show than substance, symbolic politics at its worst, with the newer groups occupying a place of greater visibility but little increased power. In developing relationships between some urban community-action groups and municipal administrations (for example, “city hall”), leaders occasionally have succeeded in co-opting a group's leadership by agreeing to some of their demands and giving them greater political visibility in exchange for moderating other demands. Compromises such as these have occurred in communities like Chicago that have well-entrenched local political organizations, where community-action groups choose to settle for “half a loaf” rather than risk forfeiting all chance to have some impact on the way decisions are made and resources allocated. In addition, co-optation can work both ways, in that a government agency might be co-opted by stronger nongovernmental, private-sector, groups. Either way, co-optation involves surrender by a weaker entity to a stronger one of some power to shape the course of the weaker entity's long-term activities.
Third, decentralizing and localizing control over governmental programs may not guarantee either increased participation at the local level or more democratic operations. Indeed, there is always a chance that local government may be less democratic than in a larger and more diverse political system. The dangers of domination by a small minority of elite local citizens are very real, regardless of official mandates or unofficial expectations. It also has been observed that citizen participation can become a “bureaucratic ideology” to be used “against the elected officers of representative government.” 27 All such observations clearly imply a hazard inherent in citizen participation: the potential for citizen interests to become primarily self-serving rather than representative of broader interests in the community or society.
A fourth concern is that agency personnel, in their enthusiasm for satisfying immediate citizen-action demands, may initiate responses that prove to be shortsighted when judged by more rigorous criteria over time. Compounding this potential difficulty is a tendency for citizen groups to scorn cost-benefit analysis as an instrument of evaluation of their own proposals. Cost-benefit analysis is not always an appropriate evaluative tool, but it can often strengthen one's case, particularly under conditions of fiscal stress, or at least increase a group's credibility in a political dialogue.
Fifth, if citizen participation is designed to help keep bureaucracy accountable to the general public, it has had a mixed record of success. Citizen groups seem to have the greatest impact when they have the political power to make bureaucrats listen and when group values most nearly match those of the bureaucracy.
Sixth, citizen participation and its impact will be affected by the degree to which contacts with those in government are characterized by confrontation as opposed to negotiation, by a sense of “us against them” as opposed to a perceived community of interests. Tension in a political system is not uncommon, but a democratic system virtually requires that tension not be constant. Barring fundamental shifts in the locus of power in a particular decision-making system, continuous confrontation will soon reach a point of diminishing returns for those seeking access and influence.
Finally, a widely accepted concept affecting participation is citizen input, about which a cautionary note is in order. Many of us seem to assume that we should seek “greater input” into the mechanisms of decision making. (The term is borrowed from computer science, where input makes a major difference in results.) However, the concept of input involves an implicit acknowledgment that somebody else is running the machine. In other words, those who seek input are admitting to a subordinate position in decision making. How to get action with too many voices “in action” is a real dilemma for decision makers. There are other possibilities—coproduction, empowerment , partnership, and full control, for example—for which input is an inappropriate concept. To think only in terms of input, in short, serves to limit the variety of ways that participation can occur and to confirm the power of those already holding it.
approach to citizen participation or management that stresses extended customer satisfaction, examines relationships among existing management processes, seeks to improve internal agency communications, and responds to valid customer demands; in exchange for the authority to make decisions at the point of customer contact, all “empowered” employees must be thoroughly trained, and the results must be carefully monitored.
Citizen participation, in sum, has dramatically modified decision making in a host of policy areas and has taken its place as a major feature of democratic administration. However, nothing is automatic about the manner in which participation and representation are practiced. Although those in positions of power have often yielded only grudgingly to citizen groups, it is unlikely that the gains that have been made will be rolled back.
Bureaucratic Representativeness
There are, first of all, several approaches to representation. 28 Should constituents' opinions and preferences be conveyed to government officials and reflected faithfully in legislative voting, or should a representative exercise independent judgment and individual conscience in making decisions? The former, which has been labeled the “delegate role,” maximizes the public's impact on decision making but does not take advantage of the representative's potentially superior knowledge of details and of subtleties in making choices. The latter, labeled the “trustee role,” emphasizes the representative's capabilities and the public's trust that their interests will be faithfully served (thus the label “trustee”). In both instances, we are depending on our representatives to somehow serve the public interest. Unfortunately, it is rarely clear how elected officials make their decisions and to whose voices they listen when they do act as delegates. Thus, in its most basic dimension, there is ambiguity concerning representation.
That ambiguity is complicated considerably when the focus shifts to the administrative context. Because bureaucracies in American politics are acknowledged to have a representative function, it follows that answers to the same sorts of questions must be found. But, historically, bureaucratic agencies have served narrow clienteles with specialized interests (see Chapter 1 ). An agency's representation of those interests—and its accountability to them—can be quite complete without its serving the larger political system. How, then, can these administrative patterns be reconciled with democratic values that emphasize broad popular representation? Central to the argument is the following proposition: “The attainment of the democratic ideal in the world of administration depends much less on majority votes than on the inclusiveness of the representation of interests in the interaction process among decision makers.” 29 The process can be called “democratic” only to the extent that interaction is broadly inclusive at two levels of decision making: first, at the level of political superstructure, where basic decisions on rules for society and roles for actors in the administrative state are made, and second, at the level of program specialization to which much of the decision making of the administrative state has been committed. Interaction should include several types of leaders from diverse segments of the community who, in their participation and the influence of nonleaders upon them, represent the many and varied interests within society.
Thus, the degree to which representation is inclusive of existing interests in the society is, in this view, a key test for how democratic administrative processes will be. Underlying this is another concern: the extent of effective access afforded to those not already a part of the interaction process, consistent with the norm of inclusiveness. Both access and regularized interactions are crucial to democratization of administration, especially regarding the opportunity for newer or weaker groups to gain a hearing for their interests and grievances.
Another essential difficulty in representation concerns the delegation of authority. In a fundamental sense, we delegate our authority to Congress and to state and local legislatures to make our laws, knowing as we do that representation of our every view is imperfect. Legislatures, in turn, have delegated vast amounts of authority to bureaucracies (and to chief executives), further removing decision-making power from the source of authority—that is, the people. When authority is delegated, it must be either very precisely defined and limited, which tends to be impractical and defeats the purpose of delegating, or else discretionary, with those who exercise it largely deciding how it should be used.
Once discretionary authority enters the picture, which it clearly does in nearly all forms of administrative decision making, the representational quality of decisions may be diminished. This is especially true where expertise, technical competence, and rationality are highly prized values, as they are in much of our bureaucratic structure. We come back, then, to a dilemma that troubles much of democratic administration: the conflict between professionalism and participation/representation. In recent years, “the people” have grown to resent “somebody else” making a judgment about what is best for them. Most of the time, that “somebody” is a professional operating within a bureaucracy. Thus, discretionary authority exercised by bureaucratic “trustees” increases the chance that the general public's feelings will not be as well represented as they might be under conditions of reduced (professional) discretion.
Another aspect of discretion should be noted. If, as one observer has pointed out, “good administration consists of making [bureaucracy] predictably and reliably responsive” to the wishes of the public, then large areas of discretionary authority clearly get in the way of predictability. 30 The only way to make bureaucracy more predictable, given our past history of delegating authority, is to reduce dramatically the discretion technical experts in the bureaucracy are permitted to exercise. This would require a fundamental reassessment of the kind of bureaucracy—and expertise—we want.
Finally, bureaucratic representation is inhibited by longtime practices insulating administrative personnel from direct political pressures. Conceptually, politics and representation of the public's feelings are virtually synonymous, and to hamper political interchange is to place limits on popular representation. 31 Whether the U.S. civil service is, in fact, representative of the population at large is a debatable—and debated—issue.
Several studies suggest that national government civil servants are imperfectly representative of the public at large in demographic (and perhaps political) terms, as senior civil servants certainly are. Yet, given the professional nature of their work, we might expect that to be the case—at least concerning income, education, and certain issue positions. Considering the changes already in motion regarding recruitment, promotion, pay freezes, and the like, it is not surprising that we are seeing less demographic representativeness. Although career civil servants are likely to be affected by the presence of a presidential administration that has “a substantial degree of coherence in its overall program goals and its personnel system, and [that] appears for the moment to have strong political momentum,” the views of career employees still do not “exactly mirror those of the presidential administration.” 32 Strong partisan ideologies dominated executive-bureaucratic relationships during the second Bush administration (2001–2009).
those who subscribe to the philosophical-ideological basis for the George W. Bush administration's policy decisions favoring preemptive military action, privatization, lower taxes, and cutbacks in domestic social programs.
The issue of representativeness obviously has many sides to it. Women, gays, and ethnic minorities, in particular, have taken the virtually unanimous position that greater representativeness is needed to enhance general understanding within the civil service of problems confronting women, homosexuals, and minority groups. Furthermore, theirs is a call for advocacy of their cause as a central activity of female and minority administrators. In general, the effort to increase representativeness based on gender and race is founded on the belief—perhaps quite valid—that government would otherwise ignore their concerns in program design and management. Other groups such as evangelical Fundamentalist Christians, Neo-Conservatives , and the so-called Tea Party have taken similarly strong stances in favor of including more of their ideology, representatives, and interests in national politics.
Bureaucratic Responsiveness
Responsiveness of public officials to popular sentiments depends on the presence of several factors in the governmental process. It depends fundamentally on the people's assumptions about what is and what should be in the conduct of government and public-policy making. It is not only a matter of what we establish very loosely as our governmental and societal objectives (and those objectives will conflict), it is also what we take for granted in our expectations about governmental activity.
Second, responsiveness requires meaningful access to the right decision makers and a legitimate opportunity to be heard. Access is a key step in the policy process and, without it, responsiveness cannot be ensured. A key issue regarding access, is—and will continue to be—whether it should be granted or denied by virtue of an individual's (or group's) payment of a “retainer” in the form of a pre-election campaign contribution. Citizen inputs are likely to have a limited effect in attaining bureaucratic responsiveness because of restrictions on citizens' expertise, time, and access to decision makers.
Third, government and its agencies have to be able to respond to potential emergencies, and ongoing policy and program demands, in new ways to meet new threats. Politically, financially, and administratively, agencies must be equipped to deliver services or otherwise satisfy public demands placed on them. These demands have escalated following September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, and the Deepwater Horizon British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with the need for comprehensive planning to minimize the impact of natural and man-made disasters and prevent the actions of known domestic and international terrorist groups. In addition, agencies must introduce fundamental changes in the police power of government that may compromise strict interpretation of civil liberties.
There are two major constraints on responsiveness. The first concerns public expectations. Ideally, public expectations should be realistic, reasonable, and manageable. Admittedly, anyone in government can hide behind excuses of unrealistic, unreasonable, or unmanageable public desires to avoid tackling hard problems that may, by objective standards, need attention. But the point here is that there may actually be conditions that, for legitimate reasons, are difficult to deal with—for example, crime, environmental pollution, offshore oil spills, poverty, or nuclear-waste disposal. If people assume that a problem can be solved and it is not solved, the government may be accused (not entirely fairly) of being unresponsive to public wants. Despite our skepticism, inability to act can be an operating reality for a government agency—perhaps as a result of lack of jurisdiction, limited funds, managerial ineffectiveness, political opposition, or merely difficulties in “making the ordinary happen” (see Chapter 9 ).
The second constraint on responsiveness is that government agencies cannot—or, at least, do not—respond equally to all societal interests. Inevitably, some groups view government as unresponsive because it does not respond to them. And they are often correct in that assessment. The main point, however, is that government is not simply responsive; it is responsive to specific sets of interests and preferences that exist in society at large. Especially in the context of limited resources (fiscal and otherwise), government cannot respond to each and every interest or need, and it is rarely able to satisfy fully those interests to which it does respond.
Administrative Effectiveness and Personal Liberty
It is increasingly possible that, as government machinery strengthens, it acquires additional potential for diluting individual liberties. This does not necessarily occur as the by-product of deliberate decision in the highest councils of government. It can result simply from overzealous implementation of perceived mandates by an individual agency or bureaucrat. It is an even greater possibility when strong public sentiment supports an agency such as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in doing a job that inherently threatens individual liberties. Examples are potential actions by the border patrol, immigration, law enforcement, transportation and national security agencies. In their zeal for securing our borders, preventing further acts of terrorism, and “fighting crime,” there is danger that agencies like the FBI, state law enforcement agencies, or local police may infringe on Bill of Rights protections. This is a serious concern of many people, involving such issues as domestic surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies, search and seizure procedures, wiretapping, profiling ethnic and racial groups, and balancing the priorities of national security versus individual privacy. Civil libertarians are concerned about the USA PATRIOT Act , which loosens the procedures and rules of evidence for surveillance, investigation, spying, and jailing of terrorist suspects. President Bush signed the act into law on October 26, 2001, just five weeks after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It is a large, complex, and hastily drafted law that was passed by Congress over the objections of civil liberties groups on both ends of the political spectrum. The act gives the executive branch extensive powers and a wider range of tools to limit freedoms of speech, privacy, and due process. The essential point is that, as the machinery of government grows stronger—whether or not it is supported by popular majorities—the potential for infringement of all sorts on individual rights grows apace. 33 This causes operating problems for those in public administration but, because of the basic values at issue, all of society is ultimately involved. Nonetheless, Congress reauthorized the Act in 2011 amid renewed concerns for homeland security.
Once discretionary authority enters the picture, which it clearly does in nearly all forms of administrative decision making, the representational quality of decisions may be diminished. This is especially true where expertise, technical competence, and rationality are highly prized values, as they are in much of our bureaucratic structure. We come back, then, to a dilemma that troubles much of democratic administration: the conflict between professionalism and participation/representation. In recent years, “the people” have grown to resent “somebody else” making a judgment about what is best for them. Most of the time, that “somebody” is a professional operating within a bureaucracy. Thus, discretionary authority exercised by bureaucratic “trustees” increases the chance that the general public's feelings will not be as well represented as they might be under conditions of reduced (professional) discretion.
Another aspect of discretion should be noted. If, as one observer has pointed out, “good administration consists of making [bureaucracy] predictably and reliably responsive” to the wishes of the public, then large areas of discretionary authority clearly get in the way of predictability. 30 The only way to make bureaucracy more predictable, given our past history of delegating authority, is to reduce dramatically the discretion technical experts in the bureaucracy are permitted to exercise. This would require a fundamental reassessment of the kind of bureaucracy—and expertise—we want.
Finally, bureaucratic representation is inhibited by longtime practices insulating administrative personnel from direct political pressures. Conceptually, politics and representation of the public's feelings are virtually synonymous, and to hamper political interchange is to place limits on popular representation. 31 Whether the U.S. civil service is, in fact, representative of the population at large is a debatable—and debated—issue.
Several studies suggest that national government civil servants are imperfectly representative of the public at large in demographic (and perhaps political) terms, as senior civil servants certainly are. Yet, given the professional nature of their work, we might expect that to be the case—at least concerning income, education, and certain issue positions. Considering the changes already in motion regarding recruitment, promotion, pay freezes, and the like, it is not surprising that we are seeing less demographic representativeness. Although career civil servants are likely to be affected by the presence of a presidential administration that has “a substantial degree of coherence in its overall program goals and its personnel system, and [that] appears for the moment to have strong political momentum,” the views of career employees still do not “exactly mirror those of the presidential administration.” 32 Strong partisan ideologies dominated executive-bureaucratic relationships during the second Bush administration (2001–2009).
those who subscribe to the philosophical-ideological basis for the George W. Bush administration's policy decisions favoring preemptive military action, privatization, lower taxes, and cutbacks in domestic social programs.
The issue of representativeness obviously has many sides to it. Women, gays, and ethnic minorities, in particular, have taken the virtually unanimous position that greater representativeness is needed to enhance general understanding within the civil service of problems confronting women, homosexuals, and minority groups. Furthermore, theirs is a call for advocacy of their cause as a central activity of female and minority administrators. In general, the effort to increase representativeness based on gender and race is founded on the belief—perhaps quite valid—that government would otherwise ignore their concerns in program design and management. Other groups such as evangelical Fundamentalist Christians, Neo-Conservatives , and the so-called Tea Party have taken similarly strong stances in favor of including more of their ideology, representatives, and interests in national politics.
Bureaucratic Responsiveness
Responsiveness of public officials to popular sentiments depends on the presence of several factors in the governmental process. It depends fundamentally on the people's assumptions about what is and what should be in the conduct of government and public-policy making. It is not only a matter of what we establish very loosely as our governmental and societal objectives (and those objectives will conflict), it is also what we take for granted in our expectations about governmental activity.
Second, responsiveness requires meaningful access to the right decision makers and a legitimate opportunity to be heard. Access is a key step in the policy process and, without it, responsiveness cannot be ensured. A key issue regarding access, is—and will continue to be—whether it should be granted or denied by virtue of an individual's (or group's) payment of a “retainer” in the form of a pre-election campaign contribution. Citizen inputs are likely to have a limited effect in attaining bureaucratic responsiveness because of restrictions on citizens' expertise, time, and access to decision makers.
Third, government and its agencies have to be able to respond to potential emergencies, and ongoing policy and program demands, in new ways to meet new threats. Politically, financially, and administratively, agencies must be equipped to deliver services or otherwise satisfy public demands placed on them. These demands have escalated following September 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina, and the Deepwater Horizon British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, with the need for comprehensive planning to minimize the impact of natural and man-made disasters and prevent the actions of known domestic and international terrorist groups. In addition, agencies must introduce fundamental changes in the police power of government that may compromise strict interpretation of civil liberties.
There are two major constraints on responsiveness. The first concerns public expectations. Ideally, public expectations should be realistic, reasonable, and manageable. Admittedly, anyone in government can hide behind excuses of unrealistic, unreasonable, or unmanageable public desires to avoid tackling hard problems that may, by objective standards, need attention. But the point here is that there may actually be conditions that, for legitimate reasons, are difficult to deal with—for example, crime, environmental pollution, offshore oil spills, poverty, or nuclear-waste disposal. If people assume that a problem can be solved and it is not solved, the government may be accused (not entirely fairly) of being unresponsive to public wants. Despite our skepticism, inability to act can be an operating reality for a government agency—perhaps as a result of lack of jurisdiction, limited funds, managerial ineffectiveness, political opposition, or merely difficulties in “making the ordinary happen” (see Chapter 9 ).
The second constraint on responsiveness is that government agencies cannot—or, at least, do not—respond equally to all societal interests. Inevitably, some groups view government as unresponsive because it does not respond to them. And they are often correct in that assessment. The main point, however, is that government is not simply responsive; it is responsive to specific sets of interests and preferences that exist in society at large. Especially in the context of limited resources (fiscal and otherwise), government cannot respond to each and every interest or need, and it is rarely able to satisfy fully those interests to which it does respond.
Administrative Effectiveness and Personal Liberty
It is increasingly possible that, as government machinery strengthens, it acquires additional potential for diluting individual liberties. This does not necessarily occur as the by-product of deliberate decision in the highest councils of government. It can result simply from overzealous implementation of perceived mandates by an individual agency or bureaucrat. It is an even greater possibility when strong public sentiment supports an agency such as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in doing a job that inherently threatens individual liberties. Examples are potential actions by the border patrol, immigration, law enforcement, transportation and national security agencies. In their zeal for securing our borders, preventing further acts of terrorism, and “fighting crime,” there is danger that agencies like the FBI, state law enforcement agencies, or local police may infringe on Bill of Rights protections. This is a serious concern of many people, involving such issues as domestic surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies, search and seizure procedures, wiretapping, profiling ethnic and racial groups, and balancing the priorities of national security versus individual privacy. Civil libertarians are concerned about the USA PATRIOT Act , which loosens the procedures and rules of evidence for surveillance, investigation, spying, and jailing of terrorist suspects. President Bush signed the act into law on October 26, 2001, just five weeks after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. It is a large, complex, and hastily drafted law that was passed by Congress over the objections of civil liberties groups on both ends of the political spectrum. The act gives the executive branch extensive powers and a wider range of tools to limit freedoms of speech, privacy, and due process. The essential point is that, as the machinery of government grows stronger—whether or not it is supported by popular majorities—the potential for infringement of all sorts on individual rights grows apace. 33 This causes operating problems for those in public administration but, because of the basic values at issue, all of society is ultimately involved. Nonetheless, Congress reauthorized the Act in 2011 amid renewed concerns for homeland security.
short title of the controversial post-9/11 antiterrorist legislation (P.L. 107-56) “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” that increased central government powers to investigate, detain, and wiretap persons suspected of engaging in terrorist activity.
The Political Environment of Bureaucratic Power
Like most other government institutions, administrative agencies function within complex and overlapping frameworks of widely scattered legal and political power. Both the formal structure of governmental power and the actual competition for power reflect a lack of centralization in the political system. Competition for power includes conflicts among and within the branches of government (especially within Congress), factional conflict within the two major political parties, and continual jockeying for position and influence among interest groups. This dispersal of power is sustained and supported by the noncentralized nature of the American economy and society, with its strong cultural emphases on capitalism, individualism, and pluralism. This prevailing political culture is accompanied by acceptance of individualism and group competition as appropriate mechanisms for achieving success in politics and other pursuits.
Wide dispersal of political power both constrains and creates opportunities for stakeholders—diverse interested individuals, groups, and institutions—to seek and acquire leverage in a policy arena. The major problem facing any group or agency is that competition for influence in a particular subject area is usually fierce because, at the same time, many other groups and agencies are also seeking to have their preferences adopted as public policy.
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA)
health care reform law signed by President Obama on March 23, 2010 along with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.
Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act compromise legislation signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010 with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) addressing comprehensive healthcare and student loan reform.
Take, for example, proposed changes in government health care policy. This area is of considerable interest to stakeholders such as the medical profession, pharmaceuticals manufacturers, hospitals, medical equipment dealers, insurance companies, patients, the uninsured, and consumer groups. Others with a stake in health care policy include labor unions whose members are covered by company-paid health plans, stockholders of drug companies, allied health professionals employed by health care providers, and government agencies—such as the national Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and state and national health regulatory commissions—that have responsibilities affecting, and affected by, decisions on health care policy issues. In March 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act . These laws are compromised versions of the health care reform agenda of the Democratic Congress and the Obama administration. They include numerous health-related provisions which will take effect over a four-year period: incentives for businesses to provide benefits to employees, expansion of Medicaid eligibility, health insurance exchanges, subsidies for insurance premiums and support for medical research. The statutes also prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The costs of these provisions are offset by a variety of taxes, fees, and cost-saving measures, such as new Medicare taxes for high-income beneficiaries and fees on medical devices and pharmaceutical companies; there is also a controversial tax penalty for citizens who do not obtain health insurance (unless they are exempt due to low income or other reasons). Provisions of the act have been challenged by 20 states in the federal courts as violations of the separation of powers clause. As of this writing, two federal court cases brought by the states have upheld the law and two (Florida and Virginia) have overturned some of its provisions. 34
The key to understanding why bureaucratic agencies are forced to play political roles is the lack of cohesive political majorities within the two houses of Congress and the resultant “fuzziness” in programmatic mandates often enacted by Congress. 35 Political scientist Norton Long, writing over fifty years ago, observed that “it is a commonplace that the American party system provides neither a mandate for a platform nor a mandate for leadership…. The mandate that the parties do not supply must be attained through public relations and the mobilization of group support.” 36 Long went on to suggest that the parties fail to provide “either a clear-cut decision as to what [administrative agencies] should do or an adequately mobilized political support for a course of action.” 37 He continued:
The weakness in party structure both permits and makes necessary the present dimensions of the political activities of the administrative branch—permits because it fails to protect administration from pressures and fails to provide adequate direction and support, makes necessary because it fails to develop a consensus on a leadership and a program that makes possible administration on the basis of accepted decisional premises. 38
Thus Congress, lacking majorities that can speak with clear and consistent voices for sustained periods of time, is characterized instead by shifting political coalitions, the composition of which varies from one issue (and even one vote) to the next.
Another factor contributing to the lack of clarity in legislative mandates to government agencies is the inability of legislatures as institutions—and of individual legislators—to define precisely the exact steps required to put into effect a desired policy or program:
Legislators, not being technical experts, frequently write laws embodying goals that are exemplary but [that] lack details. Skeletal legislation, as it is frequently called, is phrased in occasionally grand and, therefore, fuzzy terms. The implementing agency is told by the legislature [in national, state, or local government] to provide a safe environment for workers, to see that school children are served meals with adequate nutritional content … to assist the visually impaired, to maintain adequate income levels, and so on. 39
Most of the time—but especially when basic statutory language is ambiguous—legislators delegate to administrators the authority necessary to breathe life and specific meaning into such provisions of the law and then to implement them. (Ambiguous language can also be the result of political compromises. For example, it is always easier to agree on support for “affordable health care” than to define exactly what that is.) For whatever reason, then, the usual pattern is legislative enactment of statutes that are phrased in general terms, accompanied by legislative delegation of authority (to define and implement those statutes) to administrative agencies.
Thus, agencies are obliged to make judgments about legislative intent and program management. These decisions carry with them significant political implications. Congress, however, does not simply leave bureaucrats to their own devices. Legislative oversight is a legitimate function of Congress, one that can result in fairly strict control by a legislative committee or subcommittee of actions taken by administrators under its jurisdiction. (Other potential controls will be examined in the discussion of bureaucratic accountability later in this chapter.)
Presidents, who might be expected to provide leadership for bureaucracy from a relatively solid base of political support, ordinarily lack the sort of backing that would permit them to take unequivocal policy positions. Presidents have the largest constituencies and therefore must be, if not all things to all groups, at least many things to many of them. Administrative decisions are inevitably impacted by the need to serve so many diverse and varied interests. This can also pose a considerable challenge to administrators seeking to carry out directives from the chief executive as well as the legislature. 40
the tendency of agencies to try to expand their program responsibilities.
Before discussing the principal political resources of administrative agencies, some other generalizations concerning the political environment of bureaucratic power should be noted. First, formal definitions of agency power or responsibility are not likely to reveal the full scope of actual power or influence. Second, although bureaucratic agencies generally occupy a power position somewhere between total independence from the president and Congress and total domination by either or both, the amount of independence they have in any specific situation is also heavily influenced by the power relationships they have with other political actors and institutions. Agencies with relatively low political standing may be dependent on the support of Congress or the president in order to function adequately, thus running the risk of allowing others to dominate their decisions. Those with higher standing or stronger backing from other supporters are better able to stand on their own in relation to Capitol Hill and the White House. These generalizations also hold true in state and local politics.
Third, the acquisition and exercise of bureaucratic power are frequently characterized by conflicts among agencies over program jurisdiction, the area of responsibility assigned to an agency by Congress or the president. The study of bureaucratic imperialism , that is, the tendency of agencies to expand their program responsibilities, suggests that such expansionism arises because administrative politicians need to maintain a sufficient power base for their agencies. “Power is organized around constituency and constituency around jurisdiction.” 41 In their quest for “sufficient power,” bureaucratic agencies seek support from permanent and semi-permanent coalitions of constituency groups—that is, interest groups —which in turn are organized to pursue policy objectives of their own. To secure backing from such groups, administrative agencies must manage government programs of interest to these potentially supportive constituencies. Thus, agencies always seek to obtain control over programs that have strong support from influential constituencies. Bureaucratic imperialism, however, is neither universal nor automatic; for example, an agency may deny, in its own interests, that it has legal authority to exercise powers within some specified “unpopular” area of jurisdiction. The point is not that agencies are inherently imperialistic or non-imperialistic but rather that an agency's decisions regarding program jurisdiction usually take into account potential repercussions. Thus, conflicts over agency jurisdiction are serious contests for political power.
private organizations representing a portion (usually small) of the general adult population; they exist in order to pursue particular public policy objectives and seek to influence government activity so as to achieve their objectives.
Finally, governmental institutions, including administrative agencies, play at least two roles in the exercise of power and decision-making authority. These roles overlap but are conceptually distinct and can sometimes conflict. On the one hand, institutions may act as unified entities seeking to maximize their influence and their share of available political rewards and benefits. On the other hand, government institutions also serve as arenas of political competition, within which various forces contend for dominant influence in decision-making processes. This is especially evident in Congress, where rival political coalitions are frequently in noisy dispute over well-publicized issues. Media reports that “Congress voted today to …” really mean that a majority coalition was successfully formed on a given vote. Also at issue every time Congress makes a decision is control of the way the question is presented, possible amendments, use of numerous tactics to speed up or delay consideration, and other tactical questions. There is far less visible conflict in the bureaucracy than in Congress, but this pattern of conflict resolution is much the same, complete with conflict over shaping the issue, moving it along or foot-dragging, and so forth. Like Congress, the bureaucracy operates within a complex web of political forces and must respond to the external (and frequently internal) pressures brought to bear on the administration of government programs.
Ordinarily, administrative agencies try to strike a manageable balance between, on the one hand, what they can and want to do to further their own programmatic interests and, on the other, what they must do to ensure their survival and prosperity, however that is defined. Achieving such a balance requires a willingness to compromise, a sure instinct for deciding when to seek a larger or smaller share of the pie, and an ability to read both long- and short-term political forecasts accurately. In addition to those internal skills, however, an agency must first have and maintain the two crucial foundations or sources of bureaucratic power mentioned earlier: expertise in the subject matter of its program responsibilities and political support. Let us consider each of these in turn.
Foundations of Power: Bureaucratic Expertise and Political Support
One of the major foundations of bureaucratic power is the collective expertise an agency can bring to bear on programs for which it is responsible. As various facets of society have become more complex and interdependent and as technological advances have followed one another with astounding speed, the people with know-how—the experts—have acquired increasing influence because of their specialized knowledge. Government is obviously subject to the same forces as the rest of society; this is especially true of particular governmental functions such as intelligence gathering that are uniquely affected by technological change. As a result, government experts now play larger roles in numerous public-policy decisions.
Political scientist Francis Rourke has suggested that the influence of experts rests on five major components: (1) full-time attention by experts to a problem or subject-matter area; (2) specialization in the subject; (3) a monopoly on information in the subject area that, if successfully maintained by only one staff of experts, makes these specialists indispensable in any decision making involving their subject; (4) a pattern of increasing reliance on bureaucratic experts for technical advice; and (5) increasing control by experts of bureaucratic discretion. 42
The last three of these components deserve discussion. Although a monopoly on information is desirable from a particular agency's point of view, it is rarely achieved in practice. This is partly because no single agency controls all governmental sources of information on any given subject, partly because government does not control all information sources in society, and partly because information—itself a source of power and influence—is the subject of intense interagency competition. Thus, when expert staff members have a monopoly on information relevant to making a given decision, their influence increases. Conversely, influence can be more effectively contested when there is greater diversity of information sources. 43
Reliance on expert advice, although on the increase, is not without limits; the influence of experts, therefore, is similarly constrained. Not every agency decision revolves around technical criteria or data. Even when an issue does involve technical data, top-level administrators, for political or other reasons, may prefer a decision that is not the best according to technical criteria (see Chapter 5 ). Thus, in many agencies, expert advisers play a role that, although important and influential, also has its limitations.
Two aspects of the experts' increasing control of bureaucratic discretion are worth noting. First, by exercising discretion, an expert maximizes the ability to decide just how vigorously or casually to implement the public policies over which the agency has jurisdiction. Second, bureaucratic discretion enables agency experts to influence policy decisions by defining the decisional alternatives from which higher-level officials choose the course to be followed. To the extent that responsible policy makers permit bureaucratic experts to define available alternatives, they strengthen the experts' influence through the power to decide what is and is not included among the alternatives presented to those policy makers.
Experts possess another useful resource: their ability to employ the language of their respective trades, speaking in terms and concepts unfamiliar to most of us. This use of specialized language (some might call it jargon) has become a common phenomenon among experts inside and outside of government, and poses problems for the layman who seeks to understand complex developments and issues. By using jargon, bureaucratic experts make it very difficult for others to challenge them on their own territory, so to speak; if we cannot fathom what they have proposed, how can we argue against it? This resource, moreover, has been greatly enhanced by the fact that, in countless cases, proposals put forward by experts have yielded very positive and beneficial results. This combination of obscurity of means and clarity of results can help to strengthen the position and influence of experts in government agencies.
technical vocabulary used by bureaucratic agencies, one effect of which is to restrict access and outside influence.
In recent years, however, the obscurity of means that previously was a source of strength for experts has contributed to growing public disenchantment with big government, bureaucracy, public employee unions and experts in general, especially as salaries and fringe benefits in the private sector have declined. With the increasing desire for broader public involvement in decision making has come a greater unwillingness to take the experts' word and a more insistent demand that experts make clear to the general public exactly what they are doing, proposing, and advocating. In the long run, public reactions and attitudes may have more effect on the influence and power of government experts than any characteristics or actions of the experts themselves.
Political support for an administrative agency has a number of key dimensions. First and foremost, the legislature is a major potential source of support that must be carefully and continuously cultivated. In most instances, an agency derives its principal backing from one subdivision (usually a committee or subcommittee with authority to fund and oversee the agency's operations) rather than from the legislature as a whole. Most agencies are faced with the task of continually generating and maintaining the support of committees, subcommittees, and even individual legislators. They attempt to do this in a number of ways, including (1) responding promptly to requests for information, (2) effectively promoting and managing programs in which legislators are known to have an interest, (3) cooperating administratively with legislators' electoral needs, and (4) anticipating legislative preferences regarding the operations of particular programs.
A second major source of support is the executive branch, which is composed of the president, governor, or mayor and other administrators and agencies formally lodged in the executive hierarchy. Executive influence can be decisive in determining success or failure, and an agency will make every effort to win favor in both the short and long run. An important corollary of presidential or vice presidential backing at the national level is favorable reviews of agency budget requests by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which molds the executive-branch budget proposals submitted to Congress each year. Although the OMB does not itself allocate funds to the agencies, its support can enable an agency to concentrate on persuading Congress (which does hold the purse strings) to back its programs financially. The best position for an agency to be in is one in which its programmatic responsibilities have a high priority on presidential policy agendas year in and year out, but few agencies enjoy this kind of support. Far more common is a pattern in which agencies and their programs compete for support and settle for a “win some, lose some” record. Support for an agency can be earned by giving stronger agency support to programs that are consistent with the current administration's policy priorities; by sharing, at least on the surface, chief-executive concerns about how programs are managed; and by avoiding public conflict with the chief executive over policy and program priorities.
A second means of acquiring executive-branch support is by allying with another agency or agencies in quest of common objectives. Such interagency alliances tend to be limited in scope and duration because most agencies are very protective of their program jurisdictions and there is an element of risk that a cooperating agency might also be a potential rival. An example of such a bureaucratic alliance is the periodic coalition formed by the military services in opposition to cuts in defense appropriations, even as each is contending with the others for a greater share of the fiscal pie. But these are occasional alliances brought about by specific and passing needs; they do not usually outweigh more enduring differences among agencies. In sum, although cooperation with other agencies may indeed be a means of acquiring support, it has its limitations. The agencies with which cooperation would be most logical in terms of programmatic interest are the very ones with the greatest potential for conflict over jurisdictional responsibilities.
A third major source of support is constituent or clientele groups that depend on the agency for satisfaction of their policy demands. These interest groups represent an organized expression of political opinion by a portion—usually a small one—of the adult population. 44 They tend to be groups directly affected by the agency's operations, which therefore have a tangible stake in its policy decisions, rule making, or programmatic output. The political relationship that usually develops between an agency and such a group is one of reciprocity, in which each has some political commodity from which the other can benefit. The agency's greatest strength is its expertise and the control it exercises over particular government programs that are of interest to the group. In turn, the group has political resources that it makes available to the agency in return for agency attention to its needs and desires. The group may provide linkages to other influential individuals and groups, help the agency sell its program to Congress and the president, or aid the agency in anticipating changes in the political environment that would present problems or provide opportunities. 45
Administrative agencies often have more than one constituent group, creating both advantages and disadvantages. A principal advantage is that, with multiple sources of support, an agency can operate more effectively in the political process without having to rely too heavily on any one source of assistance. A corresponding disadvantage stems from the fact that various clientele groups often have differing interests, which lead them to demand different things from an agency or to demand the same things but not in the same order of priority. Not infrequently, an agency faces a situation in which satisfying one group's preferences will seriously interfere with its ability to satisfy those of another. An agency must also deal with Congress as a whole or a specific committee as though it were a clientele group with demands and expectations that must be satisfied. An agency is well advised to consider congressional clientele groups as among its most important, especially when it is confronted with conflicting sets of demands. In other words, it is unwise to regularly disregard the demands of Congress, even if this means making other (private) clientele groups unhappy. In state politics, agencies are frequently tied even more closely to private interest groups. When the governor has somewhat limited formal powers or informal influence, or when the state legislature is relatively passive or weak, support from interest groups is often the greatest (and sometimes the only) source of strength for an administrative agency. Even in states with strong governors and legislatures—such as New York, California, Illinois, and Michigan—the support of key interest groups can benefit an agency significantly. 46
For example, the Illinois Agricultural Association, the state component of the American Farm Bureau Federation, is a vital source of political strength for the state Department of Agriculture; in California, farm organizations help sustain both the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Water Resources. In return, these agencies are expected to advocate and defend the interests of their supporters, such as irrigation for California's farmers. These relationships often become at least semipermanent.
One other aspect of agency-clientele relationships is quite important. Administrative organizations cherish, and thus strive to maintain, their control over particular programs. Sometimes, however, an agency may have to give up some of this control to outside influences, such as legislators or private clientele groups, in return for continuing political support. If this surrender is temporary, an agency loses little and may gain a great deal in the long run. If the agency fails to regain control, however, it is said to have undergone co-optation, whereby a set of outside interests acquires the ability to influence the agency's long-term policies. If this happens, all the agency's substantive policies may be subject to influence, not just those of most direct concern to the outside group or groups.
A fourth source of political support or opposition for an administrative agency is the general public. The potential influence of the unorganized public is great; if mobilized and concentrated on a particular issue, such as public employee salaries and benefits, public opinion can decisively tilt the political balance of power in one direction. The problem for any stakeholder is to mobilize the public successfully, which is no easy task. Ordinarily, most Americans pay scant attention to public issues unless and until the issues affect them personally. The public's attention can be directed to a pending major policy decision, and feelings about it can be aroused. Expression of public opinion can force a decision to be made—for example, withdrawing troops from an unpopular war, combat environmental pollution, and taking steps to reduce government budget deficits. Without broad public demand and backing, these policy directions could not have been proposed or sustained through the political process. In short, public support can be a valuable political asset to strengthen the positions of those in government. Numerous public-opinion studies have suggested that, when the general public has strong feelings on a matter of importance to large numbers of people, the governmental response is usually consistent with those feelings. An agency supported by broad public opinion can, by using public sentiment, generate support for itself and its programs.
In political terms, an agency's overall success can best be achieved by controlling its programmatic responsibilities while simultaneously maintaining adequate support for its operations. This must be accomplished without making any of the agency's clientele groups seriously dissatisfied with the way it is performing its functions. This is far from easy to do, and it is the exception rather than the rule when an agency succeeds on all fronts. More frequent is the pattern of agency adaptation to, and accommodation of, particularly strong interests. Political backing can usually be obtained in sufficient strength to outweigh any losses incurred by diminished program support among weaker clientele groups.
Bureaucrats, Interest Groups, and Politicians: Subsystem Politics in America
There are certain important parallels between the national government bureaucracy and the U.S. Congress. These institutions have three features in common that are important in this context. First, within both, there is a well-established pattern of division of labor; that is, the work to be done is divided among numerous smaller, specialized units. In Congress, these units are the committees and subcommittees of each chamber; in the bureaucracy, they are the multitude of bureaus, staffs, branches, and divisions that make up larger executive agencies. Second, the divisions within both Congress and the bureaucracy are organized primarily according to function and deal with general areas of policy concern, such as education, housing, labor, or defense. Third, the specialized nature of these smaller units is the principal source of their influence in the policy-making process.
It is a pervasive unwritten rule of Washington political life that, all other things being equal, larger institutions defer to the judgments of their more specialized units. This pattern of regularized respect for experts means that, in the great majority of cases, these units tend to be focal points of important decision making. In Congress, although bills passed by the full House and Senate must be identical, committee proposals usually form the core of bills that are eventually passed. Amendment of committee proposals is possible, but the initial form of legislation carries some weight, and key committee and subcommittee members often influence the entire process of deliberation in the full chamber. In the bureaucracy, specialized personnel (the experts described earlier) wield considerable influence in the formulation of proposals that make their way up the formal hierarchical ladder (and to Congress as well) and into the daily processes of program implementation.
In short, it is misleading to assume that influence is concentrated only “at the top” in either Congress or the bureaucracy. The fine details of lawmaking, and of legislative oversight of executive departments, are the responsibility of subject-matter committees and subcommittees of Congress, each assigned jurisdiction over particular administrative agencies and their programs. Only rarely do such matters engage the attention of the full House or Senate. Similarly, the nuts and bolts of administration are normally concentrated in the lower levels of government organizations, not at the top or even very near it. Thus, in the broad picture of policy making in Washington, there is a high degree of fragmentation, with many small centers of influence operating in their respective areas of expertise.
Plainly, bureaucratic expertise is a source of bureaucratic power. Members of Congress also seek to become specialized, for two reasons. First, they are encouraged to do so by constituent interests on the grounds that this is the best route to influence in Congress. Second, they quickly recognize that by becoming influential they can do more for their voters back home. For sound political reasons, most seek to join and eventually lead congressional committees that have jurisdiction over areas of public policy affecting their electoral constituencies. For example, a representative from a constituency with sizable concentrations of low-income and minority groups in a large city would be likely to seek assignment to the Financial Services Committee (especially its subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity), or perhaps to the Education and the Workforce Committee; these deal directly with the problems of urban constituents. Likewise, a senator from a state with a major port or a rail transportation center would cherish a seat on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. And so it goes, all through Congress.
any group or organization interested in the work and actions of a given official, agency, or organization, and a potential source of support for it; also, the interests (and sometimes geographic area) served by an elected or appointed public official.
Obviously, members of Congress do not always get their first choices of assignment. But in pursuit of their own electoral fortunes and policy objectives, legislators are attracted to those committees in which they can have the most impact in policy areas that interest them personally and in which they can maximize their influence in support of constituency interests that could be decisive in their reelection bids. (Note that this implies selective attention to constituency interests, often focusing on objectives and preferences of influential friends and allies before—or at the expense of—objectives and preferences of others less powerful who live in the same constituency.) This naturally leads to increased contact between legislators and others interested in the same policy areas; administrators in agencies with jurisdiction over relevant programs; interest groups that, even more than legislators or bureaucrats, have specialized interests at the core of their existence and activities; and other members of Congress with one or more similar public-policy interests.
Interest Groups and “Iron Triangles”
This coalition of shared specialized interests produces the potential for pooling political resources by individuals and small groups in different parts of the policy-making arena in order to achieve common purposes. Hundreds of quiet, informal alliances have grown up in this manner, with the term policy subsystem—or simply subsystem—used to describe them.
in the context of American politics (especially at the national level), any political alliance uniting some members of an administrative agency, a legislative committee or subcommittee, and an interest group according to shared values and preferences in the same substantive area of policy making; sometimes called an iron triangle.
What is a subsystem ? It is defined here as any political alliance uniting some members of an administrative agency, a congressional committee or subcommittee, and an interest group with shared values and preferences in the same substantive area of public-policy making (see Figure 2-1 ). Subsystems are informal alliances or coalitions that link individuals in different parts of the formal policy structure. 47 Their members usually have some influence in the policy-making process, in part because of their formal or official positions—bureau chief, committee or subcommittee chair, or committee member. The essential strength of a subsystem, however, lies in its ability to combine the benefits of bureaucratic expertise, congressional leverage, and interest group capabilities in organizing and communicating the opinions of those most concerned with a particular public issue. All subsystems have that potential; some, of course, are far more powerful than others.
One example of a very influential subsystem is the medical-industrial complex, composed of doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment manufacturers, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services staff, influential members of House and Senate health and social affairs committees, and each chamber's appropriations subcommittee on Medicare and Social Security expenditures. Parallel executive departments, private insurers, health care professionals, and legislators at the state and local government level are also active stakeholders in this subsystem. The presence in this subsystem of large industries supplying hospital and medical equipment, prescription drugs, and public health care assistance to the poor (through Medicaid) and the elderly (through Medicare) significantly expands the number of affiliated legislators. Numerous public and private interest groups, such as the American Medical Association (AMA), the AARP (formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons), and the American Hospital Association (AHA), direct their lobbying efforts toward key members of congressional committees. 48 Members of these committees are not the only legislators who might belong to a subsystem; other legislators may belong to a subsystem in order to advocate the interests of their constituencies.
FIGURE 2-1 Relative Importance of Relationships in Subsystem Politics
Another example of a very powerful subsystem is the “highway lobby.” Members of the House Public Works and Transportation Committee, officials of the Bureau of Public Roads, and such powerful interest groups as auto manufacturers, auto workers' unions, long-distance truckers, tire companies and their unions, road contractors and their unions, and oil companies and their unions, as well as members of Congress from these groups' states, have a common interest in maintaining and expanding highway usage as well as discouraging mass transit. States represented in this subsystem include (among others) Michigan, Missouri, California, Texas, and Oklahoma, and some key legislators come from those states. It is not surprising, then, that Congress has only reluctantly allocated funds collected from gasoline and road taxes to be used for the expansion of mass-transit systems. This political subsystem ardently opposes gasoline tax increases as a source of federal, state, or local government revenue. Not surprisingly, these same groups opposed a temporary reduction in the gasoline tax in order to relieve consumer complaints about the high costs of fuel.
see subsystem.
Subsystem activity tends to remain behind the scenes. Policy decisions are reached in a spirit of friendly, quiet cooperation among various interested and influential persons; many of their decisions turn out to be key. Bureaucrats derive considerable benefit from this arrangement because they can usually count on adequate support both from inside government (Congress) and from outside (interest groups). Sometimes referred to as the iron triangle , the three-sided relationship ( Figure 2-1 ) allows any one component of the subsystem to activate an effort toward common objectives with the full cooperation of the others. Unless challenged from outside—by other subsystems, the media, or perhaps the president—a subsystem is often able to dominate a policy-making arena.
Admittedly, however, even a strong subsystem cannot ignore the possibility that rivals may emerge. For example, the powerful tobacco lobby has lost considerable influence in the continuing controversies over required health warnings on cigarette packages, payments for the health care of individuals afflicted with smoking-related illnesses, and sales of its products to teenagers; similarly, automobile emission controls, fleet mileage requirements, and air bags were imposed over the objections of auto manufacturers. Under routine circumstances, however, subsystems, including their administrative supporters, exercise decisive influence in the policy-making process.
a legislative tactic that has strengthened the power of Congress over policy subsystems.
Several changes in the environment of subsystem politics have become increasingly noticeable, especially in the past dozen years. One is the process by which House and Senate leaders refer a bill to more than one congressional committee; this is known as multiple referral . 49 Whereas the Senate requires unanimous consent for such a step (a rare occurrence in that chamber), the practice has become more common in the House. The chamber leadership may refer bills jointly (that is, concurrently) to two or more committees; a referral may be sequential, going first to one committee, then to another; or a split referral may occur, with different parts of the same bill being considered by different committees. One effect of multiple referrals is to strengthen the influence of the chamber's leaders (the Speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader), at the expense of committee—and therefore subsystem—control over the decision-making process regarding a particular bill. Therefore, to the extent that multiple referrals become even more common—which is, of course, uncertain—subsystem influence might be reduced still further.
There are other developments that, like multiple referrals, point to a continued weakening of subsystems as pressures rise for more sharply focused, and therefore more centrally directed, congressional responses to a wide variety of policy challenges. One such challenge most evident in debates over budgetary issues is the increasing influence of votes in the full chamber rather than in subcommittees and committees. Another challenge, which was especially noticeable in the weeks of gridlock between President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress in late 1995, resulted in the increased use of what one observer calls special crisis-focused leadership summits. These are also employed at the expense of committee influence in shaping both decision agendas and decisions themselves. Finally, the role of partisanship in congressional decision making has become a great deal more prominent in recent years. This indicates that members of Congress may be subject to stronger pressures to respond to party rather than to committee leaders, thus weakening members' committee and subsystem decision-making roles. This pattern of congressional decision making has been especially apparent since the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in 2011.
derived from term referring to traffic that is so congested that cars cannot move; government is so divided that no consistent policy direction can be established.
political-party pressures on elected members of Congress, state legislature, or local boards and commissions.
For several reasons, the influence of similar alliances is often less extensive in state and local policy making, even taking into account the changes in national politics just discussed. First, in many state legislatures, individual committees do not have the same degree of independent standing or jurisdictional control over policy areas that U.S. congressional committees have. Policy making is more centralized in the hands of legislative leaders, making any interest group relationship with an individual committee less productive. Second, in many states and localities, the policy-making process is dominated by less diverse groups than is the case nationally and the process lacks the intense competitiveness for access, influence, and power that characterizes Washington politics. Therefore, the necessity to develop close working relations with an individual committee or agency is not as great. Third, especially in local government, the policy process is not only less visible but much more informal than at the national level. For many established interest groups (particularly the stronger ones), there are fairly regular opportunities for consultation on policy preferences, so that the influence of these groups is often felt throughout local government, not in just one part of it. Thus, though some elements of subsystem politics can be found in state and local governments, the general patterns identifiable in the national policy process do not operate to the same extent on other governmental levels.
in the context of American politics (especially at the national level), open and fluid groupings of various political actors (in and out of government) attempting to influence policy; “shared-knowledge” groups having to do with some aspect or problem of public policy; lacking in the degree of permanence, commonality of interests, and internal cohesion characteristic of subsystems.
“Issue Networks” and Subsystems: Similarities and Differences
Subsystem politics has been the subject of informed discussion since the late 1950s. Several observers have noted still another pattern of interaction developing in the policy process: the phenomenon of so-called issue networks , which, like subsystems, involve a variety of political actors attempting jointly to influence the course of public policy. Unlike subsystems, however, issue networks are more open and fluid groupings of individuals both inside and outside of government. In political scientist Hugh Heclo's words, an issue network is “a shared-knowledge group having to do with some aspect [or problem] of public policy” 50 —but without the degree of permanence characteristic of subsystem alliances. Such a “floating” network may exist only when a policy question emerges that activates a wide range of interests; members of the network may not deal with one another regularly outside their network contacts; and, significantly, they may not agree on the nature of the policy problem or on possible solutions to it. In all these respects, issue networks differ from subsystems.
Examples of issue networks include the various groups and public officials involved in specific policies, such as those dealing with AIDS research. These include university medical research departments, state medical associations, hospitals and hospital organizations, U.S. Public Health Service personnel, and nutrition specialists, among others. Also involved are homosexuals in the military, Department of Defense program managers, gay rights groups, and civil rights groups interested in preventing discrimination and ensuring benefits to dependents of military personnel. In these examples, many of the participants could not reach even general agreement on policy directions merely by activating the network. Rather, once a policy question was perceived as affecting a broad range of interests, groups and individuals advocating those interests jumped into the fray over policy development, thus creating the network as a means of addressing the policy issues at hand. 51
The foundation of shared knowledge that unites network participants often does not lead to the creation of a “shared-action” coalition or a “shared-belief” (conventional interest) group. Like subsystems, such networks function with relative autonomy but, unlike subsystems, they are rarely controlled in a well-organized way, or even with agreement on policy content among the principals involved. Thus, issue networks contribute further and in somewhat new ways to the fragmentation present in national policy making. The expansion of Internet blogs and social networking has led to an increase in the number of issue networks and shared-knowledge groups.
Bureaucratic Power and Political Accountability
To what extent can bureaucracy be held accountable for what it does or fails to do? The political accountability of a bureaucracy is enforced through multiple channels, both legislative and executive. Political interests in the legislature and in the executive branch are frequently at odds with one another, making it, at best, difficult to enforce accountability consistently or effectively. The situation is made more complex by the fact that most bureaucracies operate under joint authority delegated by both the chief executive and the legislative branch and have considerable discretion to make independent choices. The difficulty is further compounded by the hybrid systems of personnel management found in different parts of the executive hierarchy in the national government and in many states and localities. Frequently, top-echelon executives owe their positions to appointment through political channels, but the bulk of their subordinates are hired and usually retained through job-competence-related merit procedures. In state and local government, the mix of political and merit employees in a bureaucracy varies widely, and the presence of public-employee unions and collective bargaining raises other issues of conflicting political and bureaucratic accountability.
Another factor limiting accountability is the inability of top executives to command wholehearted responses from administrative subordinates. A substantial portion of the work of top executives is inspecting, monitoring, and overseeing the activities of their staffs to bring about as much congruence as possible between executive directives and the performance of agencies. In particular, the executive operates under severe handicaps in this effort. Because of time constraints, the necessity of concentrating on a limited number of general policy priorities, and the complexity of administrative operations, a considerable proportion of bureaucratic activity escapes close examination by the state house or the White House. Furthermore, as noted by the late journalist David Broder, subsystems represent “powerful centrifugal forces” in the nation's capital. Broder wrote: “The interest groups that benefit from specific programs, the agency bureaucracies that run those programs, and the congressional subcommittee members and staffs who create, finance, and oversee those programs are tenaciously resistant to directives from the president.” 52 Thus, the task of holding bureaucracy accountable for its actions assumes formidable proportions.
Bureaucratic accountability implies several things. First, in a legal and constitutional sense, it implies that a political entity—in this case, the bureaucracy—is not beyond the control of other entities in a checks-and-balances system or, ultimately, beyond reach of the consent of the governed. Also, accountability implies that, to the extent that such an entity exercises delegated authority and discretion in decision making (as bureaucracy certainly does), it also has some responsibility to adhere to the broad will of the governed, however that will has been expressed. This also assumes that the “public will” and the achievement of accountability can be defined.
principles of political accountability applied in an effort to control bureaucratic power.
Although it may be possible in theory to define these concepts and circumstances, in practice it is difficult to do so with certainty or finality. One approach is to interpret election results as reflecting the will of the majority and to define bureaucratic accountability as responsiveness to the chief executive (president, governor, mayor), who is dominant in setting policy directions and standards. Opponents of a given chief executive or of executive power in general would resist such definition, however, looking instead to legislatures and sometimes to the judiciary to lay out broad guidelines for measuring bureaucratic accountability. Political conflict over criteria of accountability ensures less than complete adherence to whatever standards prevail at a particular time.
Therefore, it is not simply a matter of bureaucracy being or not being “accountable.” Rather, bureaucracy and all other institutions of government can be accountable only to officials or to institutions outside themselves. Furthermore, the question, to whom for what? must also be answered in meaningful ways for a discussion of program evaluation methods and techniques. Also, the bureaucracy cannot be viewed as a whole; its many subparts have institutional bases, lives, and priorities of their own. All these factors act as constraints on the political accountability of bureaucratic power.
Is it impossible, then, to speak in practical terms of accountability? No, it is not. Allowing for limitations such as those just outlined, it is possible not only to prescribe in theory but to describe in fact some forms and aspects of accountability that characterize political relationships between bureaucracy and other parts of the U.S. polity—although these, too, have their limitations.
a constitutional power available to more than forty of America's governors with which they may disapprove a specific expenditure item within an appropriations bill instead of having to accept or reject the entire bill.
First, both the president and Congress have many instruments of control at their disposal. The president's arsenal includes (1) powers of appointment and dismissal, restricted to the very top positions, which give him or her the ability to staff key leadership posts in the executive branch; (2) considerable initiative in lawmaking, which helps shape the legislative environment surrounding bureaucratic implementation of congressional enactments (this includes congressional delegation of authority to the president to formulate rules and regulations under which the bureaucracy functions); (3) by exercising power through the Executive Office of the President (EOP), presidents can make known their preferences and intentions to the bureaucracy, directly and indirectly; (4) specific entities of the EOP, notably the White House Office and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which carry the full prestige of the presidency when they interact with the bureaucracy and, in the case of OMB, can exert financial leverage that can be persuasive; (5) access to the mass media, through which presidents can generate favorable or unfavorable publicity; (6) power to initiate bureaucratic restructuring, an unwelcome course of action for most agencies though, in the past, it has been used sparingly (see the comments earlier in this chapter regarding structure, jurisdiction, and clientele politics); and at the state level (7) the line-item veto , a favorite way for conservatives to trim budgets. Shrewd presidents have used these instruments to win support for their initiatives, though the process often requires significant expenditure of political capital. In general, governors, local executives, and state and local legislatures have less extensive powers over their bureaucracies.
Congress also has many tools at its disposal with which to conduct legislative oversight of administration. 53 These include (1) appropriations power, the classic power of the purse, and the implied (sometimes real) threat that it can represent to an agency's fiscal well-being; (2) power to conduct legislative postaudits of agency spending and program effectiveness through the Government Accountability Office (GAO), headed by the comptroller-general and operating under the direction of Congress; (3) hearings before congressional committees in which bureaucrats may have to answer very specifically for their actions (most notably during budget hearings before appropriations committees and subcommittees); and (4) occasional devices such as senatorial confirmation of presidential appointees and special committee investigations. These are not perfect instruments, but they do afford Congress many opportunities to look into details of bureaucratic activities and to maintain a degree of control over the administrative apparatus.
Partly because of bureau-clientele ties, a number of studies have questioned whether legislative oversight—as currently conducted—is even minimally effective as a means of holding bureaucracies accountable to the political system at large. The core concern of those raising this possibility is that changes within Congress itself have produced a markedly reduced capacity for congressional supervision of administrative activities. These changes include an emphasis on wider participation by members of Congress in policy-making processes, a resultant dispersion of power within Congress from its standing committees to much more numerous, and more autonomous, subcommittees, and a tendency to devote more of their time to constituent services or casework in pursuit of their own reelection. Casework provides a form of “feedback” between citizen and legislator, and may assist in the early identification of problems with government programs. There has also emerged a generalized pattern of behavior in which legislators regularly call on administrative agencies (and their clientele groups) to facilitate the rendering of services to the public. Administrative agencies benefit during the appropriations process from effectively responding to members' requests for service to their constituents.
refers to services performed by legislators and their staff on behalf of constituents.
Formal responsibility for legislative oversight has also passed from full committees to subcommittees but, although more hearings have been held and more pages filled with testimony, the net effect has been one of less effective oversight. This is attributable to members of Congress simultaneously becoming (1) more dependent on agencies and interest groups as they call on these groups for increased constituent service and (2) less inclined to “challenge the existing relationships between agencies and interest groups” and, thus, “less likely to investigate agencies' implementation of policy unless that implementation flies in the face of these major interest groups.” 54
If congressional supervision of the bureaucracy via subcommittees is indeed less reliable now than in the past, bureaucratic autonomy may be greater than is ideal. We might describe this pattern and others like it as cases in which the micro-institutions (committees and subcommittees) within Congress are unable or unwilling to hold agencies accountable for their actions. But it appears that, as a macro-institution, Congress is also rather limited in its oversight capabilities. This limitation exists principally because legislators often lack incentive to use available oversight instruments (and frequently have incentive not to use them) and because some instruments of congressional control have proved to be fairly “weak reeds.” This is especially true with regard to appropriations: individual members jealously guard their own capacities for largesse but fail to oversee expenditures as a whole. 55 This is perhaps testimony to the strength of our commitment to the concept of checks and balances and to separation of powers, and also to our long-standing belief that Congress is obligated to use a variety of instruments to ensure that laws are faithfully executed by administrative agencies.
In sum, although there may be telling weaknesses in legislative oversight of government bureaucracies, they are not beyond remedy, and there may be alternative means of supervising administrative agencies. This discussion highlights one aspect of the situation that merits explicit emphasis: If we are not content with administrative agencies' behavior, we might do well to pressure Congress to make the desired changes. Indeed, one authoritative observer argues that Congress has already strengthened its own oversight capacity, leading to congressional oversight that is more consistent and effective than many seem to believe. 56 In any event, as political scientist Morris Fiorina notes, “United States congressmen gave us the Washington establishment. Ultimately, only they can take it away.” 57
Some other mechanisms of accountability also exist. Bureaucracies are legally accountable to the courts for their observance of individual rights and liberties, whether in their investigative capacities (especially where regulatory agencies are concerned) or in the course of routine administrative activities. In this respect, they hardly differ from the president and Congress, in that the courts have the ultimate say in defining acceptable legal boundaries of governmental behavior. It is symptomatic of the growth of the bureaucracy and of its impact on our national life that the most rapidly expanding area of court litigation has been in administrative law, in which cases arise out of administrative rules and regulations and their application to individuals, groups, and public and private enterprises (see Chapter 11 ).
Accountability is hampered by the prevalence of technical subject matter in government decision making. In many respects, this limits the potential for accountability to policy experts capable of understanding an issue and the implications of different proposed solutions. A case in point is energy policy, where one thing that stands out is a need for more and better information for decision maker and citizen alike. Few among us comprehend all the intricacies of supply and demand for electrical power, natural-gas pricing, the politics of oil supply here and abroad, and so on. If we the people cannot monitor corporate or government actions, who can be held accountable for them? There is no easy answer.
Accountability also is made more difficult by the fact that administrators must frequently face situations in which competing criteria for decisions are very much in evidence. For example, it has been noted that, in allocating public housing, there are contradictory goals that create conflicts in the possible approaches to decision making: equity (treating like cases alike on the basis of rules) and responsiveness (making exceptions for persons whose needs require that rules be stretched). How does one reconcile these desirable but conflicting objectives? By one set standard to which all adhere? By situational ethics? By following dictates based on the kinds of need? Again, there is no single or easy answer. Note, also, that the “equity-responsiveness” tension can be found in numerous other settings as well (for example, personnel management, making grants and loans, and the college or university classroom).
Bureaucratic agencies are also held to account, as part of our constitutional scheme, by the mass media. The news media's interest in bureaucratic activity is founded on a basic premise of free government and on a powerful ethic of American journalism: that a free press, acting in an adversarial relationship to public officials, serves as a watchdog over government actions. In particular, the investigatory potential of the news media makes bureaucracies wary. Part of an agency's strength is good public relations, and adverse publicity resulting from a media investigation—even if unwarranted and even if successfully counteracted—can damage an agency's political standing. Thus, the mere possibility of such an inquiry is enough to prompt most agencies to exercise considerable caution. Increasing numbers of governments, notably state and local institutions, have employed “media consultants” or public relations specialists to handle the volume of such inquiries.
As in the case of bureaucracy-legislature interactions, relationships between administrators and the media are often two-sided. This creates the possibility that the press, far from maintaining a critical and objective perspective, may become involved in continuing relationships, the principal product of which is an ability to publicize agency programs. Under such circumstances, it is still possible for a reporter, editor, or publisher to investigate or critique agency performance. But if an agency official continually provides good copy for a reporter and also provides inside tips or leads on stories that the reporter can take credit for “breaking,” it is less likely that an agency will be subjected to the feared spotlight of publicity. This is politics on an intensely interpersonal level, but it can matter a great deal in determining how much and what kind of information will come to public attention about a given agency. 58
Finally, the advent of the Internet revolution has brought some measure of bureaucratic accountability directly to the public. Although the general populace rarely has direct access to, or control over, a given bureaucratic entity, a widespread public outcry over bureaucrats' actions can have an effect. Ordinarily, this requires public pressure on other divisions of government to get them to restrict the actions of an agency. Such pressure must be sustained over a sufficient period of time and with sufficient intensity to overcome resistance from the agency and its supporters, but it can be done.
Administrative Discretion and Political Accountability: Alternative Perspectives
In discussions of how concerned citizens might hold bureaucrats and their agencies accountable, there is often an implicit assumption that more accountability and control are needed in order to keep these officials in line and that their natural tendency is to go astray unless they are closely watched. There is no question, of course, that, in our system of checks and balances, every government entity (executive, legislative, and judicial) must ultimately be held to account. In recent decades, however, that principle (as applied to administrative agencies) seems to have acquired an additional dimension that is not necessarily accurate. Many people seem to assume—wrongly—that administrative discretion can only be abused, at the expense of the public interest, and can serve no useful or constructive purpose. Many also bemoan the fact that neither Congress nor the president is able or willing to control administrative actions fully or effectively. This point of view seems to suggest that elected officials can act only beneficially whereas administrators can be expected to act only in a narrowly focused, inefficient, destructive, and otherwise irresponsible fashion. (Recall Charles Goodsell's remarks about perceived bureaucratic shortcomings compared to the realities, quoted in Chapter 1 .) There is, indeed, reason to wonder how much truth there is in this view of discretion.
If exercised positively, administrative discretion has one very positive aspect: program managers are often better able than legislators or judges to make decisions on the basis of the broader public interest—and, according to Wilson's nineteenth-century view, most administrators are capable of doing so most of the time (see Chapter 1 ). Interference with administrative discretion by congressional restraints and controls actually brings about the kind of narrow responsiveness to private interests that such controls seem designed to prevent. There are two reasons for this. First, interest groups often usurp public power through the manipulation of iron-triangle relationships (see Figure 2-1 ), exercising considerable influence through both committees and issue networks. Second, as noted previously, legislators are strongly inclined to look after their own policy priorities and constituency interests; in the process, they pressure administrators to conform to their wishes. Thus, it is possible that if oversight of administration is left to legislators acting primarily in their committee roles, the actions taken by administrators may be more narrowly conceived and implemented than would be the case if those same administrators were given more freedom.
This is not, by any means, a call for the complete autonomy of administrators. There is ample reason to be as concerned about “discretionary” abuses of power or fraud or corruption among public administrators as among any other government officials. However, we might do well to place greater implicit faith in administrators than we now do if we want them to be able to act responsibly. Under these circumstances, it would still be possible to hold them ultimately accountable, consistent with our scheme of government and with public expectations for accountability, at least as effectively as we do at the present time. 59
Summary
Politically, our system of government is a liberal democracy; economically, it is based on free enterprise and capitalism. Throughout our history, key political values have included popular sovereignty, limited government, individualism, and pluralism. We have also emphasized individual liberty and democratic principles such as majority rule, minority rights, and the free exchange of political ideas. Two related concepts—representation and representativeness—have taken on new meanings, leading to definitional uncertainty.
Major objectives of a politically neutral “science of administration” are separation of politics and administration, adherence to scientific management and administrative principles, and, most important, attainment of economy and efficiency in government.
Our political and administrative values, however, are not entirely consistent with each other. One set of values is based on the assumption that individual liberty and the public interest are best served by keeping government restrained—and therefore unable to infringe upon our freedoms. The other set of values, however, is geared toward improving the ability of government agencies to operate efficiently—and also in the public interest. Participation and professionalism often conflict, and it is difficult to incorporate both accountability and access into administrative policy making. Freedom of information and sunshine laws have been enacted to help legislative bodies hold executive-branch agencies accountable. Accountability is made more difficult by the technical subject matter in so much government activity.
Major dimensions of democratic administration include (1) citizen participation, (2) bureaucratic representativeness, (3) responsiveness, and (4) administrative effectiveness as a threat to personal freedoms. Bureaucratic representation is ambiguous, although democratic morality is best served by promoting broadly inclusive representation of interests in interactions among decision makers. Representativeness of women and minorities has increased in the civil service, although with what effects is not entirely clear. Effectiveness of administrative machinery may pose a threat to individual liberties under some circumstances. Concerns about public administration and democratic government include the possible misuse of secrecy, a traditional feature of bureaucracy, to violate the constitutional rights of individual citizens. Recent emphasis has been on the need to protect individual privacy against government invasion and against misuse of personal information. Widening access to the Internet and its capabilities for fraud and identify theft make this an increasingly vital issue for public scrutiny.
Bureaucratic power is exercised in the context of widely dispersed political power. Neither the legislature nor the chief executive has a power base that is consistently strong enough to permit decisive control over the bureaucracy. Administrative agencies build power bases of their own and seek to acquire programs that bring with them constituency support for their activities. Sources of political support include key legislative committees and subcommittees, chief executives and their staffs, other executive agencies (especially those directly under the chief executive), clientele groups that follow agency affairs because of their own interest in the same program areas, the mass media, and the general public, which can occasionally be mobilized on behalf of particular agency objectives.
Subsystem politics in America is built around coalitions that bring together interest group representatives and government officials who share common interests and policy preferences. Because both Congress and the bureaucracy generally divide work among subunits whose expertise they respect, quiet, informal alliances (subsystems) of specialists often dominate their respective policy arenas. Bureaucrats contribute expertise to their subsystems and receive in return an opportunity to share control of a policy area. Promoting accountability of bureaucratic power is not an easy task. Because bureaucracies operate under delegated executive and legislative authority, tight controls from either are difficult to impose, and tight controls from both would be likely to conflict. Accountability suggests that bureaucracy is, or should be, answerable for its actions to other institutions and to the public. This is difficult to put into practice because of the noncentralized nature of both government and bureaucracy. All instruments of accountability have some impact on bureaucratic behavior, but none is perfect. It is also possible that more, not less, administrative discretion would serve the political system well, providing for pursuit of both the broader public interest and administrative accountability.
Discussion Questions
1.
What are the basic democratic values that underlie our society? How have they changed in recent years? How have these changes affected public attitudes toward democratic government and public administration?
2.
Discuss the political values central to “liberal democracy.” In your judgment, which elements stand out as most important? Why? Has the constitutional principle of limited government been lost? Why or why not?
3.
Discuss the key problems and issues associated with the value of “representation” in governmental decision making, including the need for efficient, rational, and neutral policy making by government officials.
4.
What is the importance of “citizen participation” as a basic component of democratic administration? Identify and discuss various forms of citizen participation that have been employed over the past three decades to increase access and representation.
5.
What steps can be taken to secure and perhaps increase governmental accountability to the people? In your opinion, how effective is each of the devices likely to be? Why?
6.
Compare the role played by each of the following in keeping public administration accountable to the public and to elected officials: (a) freedom of information laws, (b) sunshine laws, and (c) sunset laws.
7.
In Anytown, U.S.A., a citizens' group is clashing with the city government over the imminent zoning of a large plot of vacant land. (a) Imagine that you are a bureaucrat. At what level of participation would you want the citizens to engage? Why? (b) Imagine that you are an elected official. What level of citizen participation do you favor? Why? (c) Imagine that you are a member of the citizens' group. What level of participation would you want? Why?
8.
Discuss how an administrative agency seeking to maximize its political support should manage its clientele group relations. To whom should it look for support? What can it offer to supporters? What should it try to avoid?
9.
How do bureaucratic and legislative specializations contribute to the phenomenon of subsystem politics? Explain the power of subsystem politics and how they contribute to the “iron triangle” of mutual responsiveness among administrative agencies, congressional subcommittees, and interest groups.
10.
Can bureaucrats and bureaucracies be made accountable? If so, to what extent and to whom? By what means? Why are there no clear-cut answers to these questions? Discuss.
Key Terms and Concepts
liberal democracy , 50
capitalist system , 50
popular sovereignty , 50
limited government , 50
representation , 51
representativeness , 51
affirmative action , 51
judicial review , 51
individualism , 52
pluralism , 52
due process of law , 53
pluralist democracy , 57
administrative efficiency , 58
accountability , 59
sunshine laws , 61
sunset laws , 61
Freedom of Information Act (1966) , 62
WikiLeaks , 64
Bureau of Consumer Protection , 64
community control , 67
public interest groups (PIGs) , 67
co-optation , 68
empowerment , 69
Neo-Conservatives , 72
USA PATRIOT Act , 73
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) , 74
Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA) , 74
interest groups , 77
specialized language , 79
constituency , 84
subsystem , 84
iron triangle , 86
multiple referral , 86
gridlock , 87
partisanship , 87
issue networks , 87
bureaucratic accountability , 89
line-item veto , 90
casework , 91
Suggested Readings
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Davidson, Roger H., and Walter J. Oleszek. Congress and Its Members. 11th ed Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2009.
Fiorina, Morris P. Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment. 2nd ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989.
Garvey, Gerald. Facing the Bureaucracy: Living and Dying in a Public Agency. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993.
Gore, Albert S. An Assault on Reason. New York: The Penguin Group, 2007.
Kaufman, Herbert, with the collaboration of Michael Couzens. Administrative Feedback: Monitoring Subordinates' Behavior. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1973.
Kearns, Kevin P. Managing for Accountability: Preserving the Public Trust in Public and Non-Profit Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.
Martin, Roscoe C. Grass Roots. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1978.
———, ed. Public Administration and Democracy. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1965.
Peters, B. Guy, and J. Pierre, eds. Handbook of Public Administration. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2007.
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