Published on Public Administration Network of India
Wilson & Goodnow on Dichotomy
The term “Politics-Administration Dichotomy” was neither coined by Woodrow Wilson nor by Frank Goodnow. It is said that Dwight Waldo was the first person who used this term.
Woodrow Wilson’s essay was seminal in the sense that it laid the foundation of Public Administration as a new discipline of academic inquiry. He made significant observations in the context of American public administration that was grappling with serious maladies, corruption being one of them. To Wilson, it was getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one.
Wilson held that American administration lacked economy, efficiency, and effectiveness; and all that was the result of corrupting influence of politics. That is why Wilson wanted the American public administration might get rid of the nudges of politics.
He identified that the politics and the administration were two different spheres of activity with no overlapping. He observed,
“Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the task for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its office”.
While the administration had to deal with the “detailed and systematic execution of law”, politics is credited for making the law. He said that politics was the special province of the statesman and administration that of the technical official. Wilson clearly demarcated the boundaries of the two and wanted a generic science of administration.
Similarly, Frank Goodnow held that politics and administration were two different functions of the government. Politics expresses the state's will and frames the policies accordingly; administration, on the other hand, is responsible for the execution of those policies. While the former represents a legislative character, the latter essentially shows the executive character of the government. Goodnow believed that these two different functions could not be assigned to one branch of the government.
Dilemma of Dichotomy
Politics-Administration Dichotomy clearly differentiates between the non-career political executive and non-political career executive. C. E. Merriam advocated that ‘politics’ should supervise and control ‘administration’ but should not extend this control farther than what is necessary for the main purpose.
Putting a line of demarcation between the two vocations is not an easy task for we cannot separate politics from administration and vice-versa. In fact, Woodrow Wilson himself had a predicament about the separability and inseparability of the two. While Frederick C. Mosher was confident that Wilson called for a separation of administration from politics, Fred Riggs, on the other hand, held that Wilson was under no illusion that administrative development could take place in a political vacuum.
Woodrow Wilson’s arguments for inseparability are equally important when he observes in The Study,
“No lines of demarcation, setting apart administrative from non-administrative functions, can be run between this and that department of government without being run uphill and down dale, over dizzy heights of distinction and through dense jungles of statutory enactment, hither and thither around “ifs” and “buts,” “whens” and “howevers,” until they become altogether lost to the common eye…”
In 1891, he said,
“Administration cannot be divorced from its connections with the other branches of public law without being distorted and robbed of its true significance. Its foundations are those deep and permanent principles of politics”.
Demise of Dichotomy
Politics-Administration Dichotomy lost its validity in the wake of New Deal movement and the war efforts. It invited serious criticism from people like Luther Gulick, L. D. White, Paul H. Appleby. Gulick rejected the separation of politics and administration as “impractical, impossible and undesirable”. According to Gulick, Politics-Administration Dichotomy had met a sad demise as it was a fact that administration was necessarily involved in both politics and policy process. In his article Next Steps in Public Administration, he observed,
We need more than the "service of knowledge." We need also the service of appraisal, of foresight, of values; yes, and the service of character as well. Thus the old dichotomy between "politics" and "administration" breaks down, and we need to develop a new doctrine and practice for the fullest possible use of the expert in an appropriate framework of political and professional responsibility.
Paul H. Appleby, who was one of the major proponents of New Deal, rejected the dichotomy claiming that the public administration was policy-making. In Classics of Public Administration, Jay M. Shafritz and Albert C. Hyde observe,
Appleby wrote perhaps the most skillful polemic of the era, which asserted that this theoretical insistence on apolitical governmental processes went against the grain of the U.S. experience. Appleby in Big Democracy compared government to business. In his chapter "Government Is Different", he emphatically shattered public administration’s self-imposed demarcation between politics and administration. He held that it was a myth that politics was separate and could somehow be taken out of administration.
To Appleby, a theory of public administration meant a theory of politics also. Appleby's Big Democracy emerged was an obituary to Politics-Administration Dichotomy. Van Riper thought that there was "no permanent solution, no fixed paradigm to this or any other end-means continuum". He states,
As we all know by now, politics and administration are inextricably intermixed. Both are central to effective action. One problem is to bring them together in a symbiotic association yet keep each in its proper place. The other is understand that the 'proper place' of each will vary through time.
Question of Accountability
Maass and Radway (2001) are of the opinion that there is a close relationship between the formulation of public policy and its execution. They held that public policy was being formed as it was being executed and it was being executed as it was being formed. Bureaucratic feedback acts as an input for the public policy process which is offered by the bureaucracy manned by professionals and experts and not merely clerks. In a representative democracy, accountability plays a vital role in setting government agenda and governmental responses to public aspirations. So, bureaucracy being at the central stage of the policy process is frowned upon on the question of accountability.
Wilson provides a solution that public agencies should be accountable to the legislature which in turn should be made accountable to the people. Wilson provides a hierarchical view of democratic accountability, thus confirming a distinction between politics and administration. This scheme of accountability in the hierarchy seems not very plausible as Friederich held that administrators would "likely to be more attuned to questions of administrative responsibility instead of democratic accountability". Frederick C. Mosher also held that future administrators should be imbued with a sense of democratic responsibility.
Finer and Lowi call for "increased supervision of administrative actions as a means of limiting bureaucratic discretion along with 'representative bureaucracy' and public participation.
Significance of Dichotomy
R. K. Sapru points out that the issue of Politics-Administration Dichotomy is not dead and it still inspires many debates in the discipline of public administration. He gives three reasons:
1. Developing Independent Studies of Institutions
Public administration is an area of action by the public organizations which imparts it an institutional outlook where it functions within certain agencies and not throughout the government. This inferred that a study could be developed independently of both the studies of politics and that of administration.
2. For Operating Public Agencies on Business like Basis
Woodrow Wilson observed that the American administration lacked economy, efficiency and effectiveness. This was due to political interference in the administrative chores. Wilson's conviction stands still relevant to get rid of corruption and inefficiency in the administration.
3. Defining Role in Relationship
It is important to define and understand the relationship (not dichotomy) between politics and administration it goes to the heart of what public administration is all about.
Naved Ashrafi is a Guest Faculty (Public Administration) at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.
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