public administration

1. the implementation of public policy, largely by the executive branch.

2. a field of study preparing persons for careers in such work.

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Introduction

      the implementation of government policies. Today public administration is often regarded as including also some responsibility for determining the policies and programs of governments (state). Specifically, it is the planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, and controlling of government operations.

      Public administration is a feature of all nations, whatever their system (political system) of government. Within nations public administration is practiced at the central, intermediate, and local levels. Indeed, the relationships between different levels of government within a single nation constitute a growing problem of public administration.

      In most of the world the establishment of highly trained administrative, executive, or directive classes has made public administration a distinct profession. The body of public administrators is usually called the civil service. In the United States and a few other countries, the elitist class connotation traditionally attached to the civil service has been either consciously abandoned or avoided, with the result that professional recognition has come slowly and only partially.

      Traditionally the civil service is contrasted with other bodies serving the state full time, such as the military, the judiciary, and the police. Specialized services, sometimes referred to as scientific or professional civil services, provide technical rather than general administrative support. Traditionally, in most countries, a distinction is also made between the home civil service and those persons engaged abroad on diplomatic duties. A civil servant, therefore, is one of a body of persons who are directly employed in the administration of the internal affairs of the state and whose role and status are not political, ministerial, military, or constabulary.

      In most countries the civil service does not include local government or public corporations, such as, in the United Kingdom, the National Coal Board. In some countries, however—particularly those unitary states in which provincial administration is part of the central government—some provincial staffs are civil servants. In the United States, all levels of government have their own civil services, federal, state, and local, and a civil service is specifically that part of governmental service entered by examination and offering permanent tenure.

      Certain characteristics are common to all civil services. Senior civil servants are regarded as the professional advisers to those who formulate state policy. In some countries entry requirements for a career in the higher civil service stress qualifications in technical fields such as accounting, economics, medicine, and engineering. In other countries legal training is deemed appropriate, and in others no specific technical or academic discipline is required among candidates for senior posts. Whatever their precise qualifications, senior civil servants are professional in the sense that their experience of public affairs is thought to provide them with the knowledge of the limits within which state policy can be made effective and of the probable administrative results of different courses of action. Civil servants in every country are expected to advise, warn, and assist those responsible for state policy and, when this has been decided, to provide the organization for implementing it. The responsibility for policy decisions lies with the political members of the executive (those members who have been elected or appointed to give political direction to government and, customarily, career civil servants). By custom, civil servants are protected from public blame or censure for their advice. The acts of their administration may, however, be subject to special judicial controls from which no member of the executive can defend them.

      Civil services are organized upon standard hierarchical lines, in which a command structure rises pyramid-fashion from the lowest offices to the highest. This command implies obedience to the lawful orders of a superior, and in order to maintain this system the hierarchy of offices is marked by fixed positions, with well-defined duties, specific powers, and salaries and privileges objectively assessed. In some countries there may be direct appointment to higher office of persons not previously employed by the service, but even then a recognized system of internal promotion emphasizes the nature of the hierarchical pyramid.

      This article discusses the growth of public administration through history as well as its development under different political systems. Special attention is paid to the problems of administrative law and bureaucratic structure. For discussion of a subject integral to public administration, see government economic policy (government budget). For further discussion of the various regimes under which public administration operates, see political system.

Frederick C. Mosher Brian Chapman Edward C. Page

History

Early systems

      Public administration has ancient origins. In antiquity the Egyptians and Greeks organized public affairs by office, and the principal officeholders were regarded as being principally responsible for administering justice, maintaining law and order, and providing plenty. The Romans (ancient Rome) developed a more sophisticated system under their empire, creating distinct administrative hierarchies for justice, military affairs, finance and taxation, foreign affairs, and internal affairs, each with its own principal officers of state. An elaborate administrative structure, later imitated by the Roman Catholic Church, covered the entire empire, with a hierarchy of officers reporting back through their superiors to the emperor. This sophisticated structure disappeared after the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe in the 5th century, but many of its practices continued in the Byzantine Empire in the east, where civil service rule was reflected in the pejorative use of the word Byzantinism.

      Early European administrative structures developed from the royal households of the medieval (Middle Ages) period. Until the end of the 12th century official duties within the royal households were ill-defined, frequently with multiple holders of the same post. Exceptions were the better-defined positions of butler (responsible for the provision of wine), steward (responsible for feasting arrangements), chamberlain (often charged with receiving and paying out money kept in the royal sleeping chamber), and chancellor (usually a priest with responsibilities for writing and applying the seal in the monarch's name). With the 13th century a separation began between the purely domestic functions of the royal household and the functions connected with governing the state. The older household posts tended to disappear, become sinecures, or decline in importance. The office of chancellor, which had always been concerned with matters of state, survived to become the most important link between the old court offices and modern ministries, and the development of the modern treasury or finance ministry can be traced back to the chamberlain's office in the royal household.

      From the middle of the 13th century three institutions began to emerge as the major bodies for handling affairs of state: the high court (evolving primarily from the chancellery), the exchequer, and the collegial royal council. In England and France, however, it was not until the early 14th century that such bodies emerged. In Brandenburg, which was governed by an elector (a prince with a right to elect the Holy Roman emperor) and which later formed the basis of the Prussian state, they became distinct entities only at the beginning of the 17th century.

      Apart from justice and treasury departments, which originated in old court offices, modern ministerial structures in Europe developed out of the royal councils, which were powerful bodies of nobles appointed by the monarch. From the division of labour within these bodies the monarchs' secretaries, initially given low status within a council, emerged as perhaps the first professional civil servants in Europe in the modern sense. The proximity of the secretaries to the monarch gave them more knowledge of royal intentions, and their relative permanence gave them greater expertise in particular matters of state than could be found among the more transient nobles on the council. They were also assisted by staffs. The secretaries grew in importance in the 15th and 16th centuries as they became more or less full members of the council.

      The distribution of functions among secretaries was initially based upon geography. In England this geographical allocation—with, for example, a secretary of the North and a secretary of the South—persisted until 1782, when the offices of home and foreign secretary were created. In France a more complex allocation of territorial responsibilities among secretaries of state had begun to give way to functional responsibilities by the end of the ancien régime in 1789.

      The civil service in China (Chinese civil service) was undoubtedly the longest lasting in history; it was first organized, along with a centralized administration, during the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and improved under the T'ang (618–907) and Sung (Song dynasty) (960–1279). The administration was organized so well that the pattern stood until 1912. During the Sung dynasty there developed the full use of civil service examinations. Candidates were subjected to successive elimination through written tests on three levels, more than a hundred persons beginning the ordeal for each one who emerged successful. Although there was strong emphasis on the Chinese Classics (because knowledge of the Classics was thought to form the virtues of a good citizen), there was also an effort to devise objective and meaningful tests for practical qualities, and there were always long contentions over subject matter and testing methods. To preserve the anonymity of the candidate and to ensure fairness in grading, examination papers were copied by clerks, examinees were identified by number only, and three examiners read each paper. Higher officials were privileged to nominate junior relatives for admission to the bureaucracy, but the great stress on examination grades in promotion, the use of annual merit ratings, and the practice of recruiting many lower officials from the ranks of the clerical service ensured a considerable freedom of opportunity.

Modern developments

Prussia

      The foundations of modern public administration in Europe were laid in Prussia in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The electors of Brandenburg (who from 1701 were the kings of Prussia) considered a rigidly centralized government a means of ensuring stability and furthering dynastic objectives. Their principal effort was devoted in the first instance to the suppression of the autonomy of the cities and to the elimination of the feudal privileges of the aristocracy. Civil servants were therefore appointed by the central government to administer the provinces, where the management of crown lands and the organization of the military system were combined in a Kriegs-und-Domänen-kammer (“Office of War and Crown Lands”). Subordinate to these offices were the Steuerräte (“tax councillors”), who controlled the administration of the municipalities and communes. These officials were all appointed by the central government and were responsible to it. At the apex of the new machinery of government was the sovereign.

      This centralized system was strengthened by creating a special corps of civil servants. In the beginning these civil servants—in a real sense servants of the crown—were sent out from Berlin to deal with such purely military matters as recruiting, billeting, and victualing the troops, but in the course of time they extended their supervision to civil matters as well. By 1713 there were clearly recognizable administrative units dealing in civil affairs and staffed by crown civil servants.

      Special ordinances in 1722 and 1748 regulated recruitment to the civil service. Senior officials were required to propose to the king the names of candidates suitable for appointment to the higher posts, while the adjutant general proposed noncommissioned officers suitable for subordinate administrative posts. Further steps were taken throughout the 18th century to regularize the system of recruitment, promotion, and internal organization. All of these matters were brought together in a single General Code promulgated in 1794. The merit system of appointment covered all types of posts, and the general principle laid down was that “special laws and instructions determine the appointing authority to different civil service rank, their qualifications, and the preliminary examinations required from different branches and different ranks.” Entry to the higher civil service required a university degree in cameralistics, which, though strictly speaking the science of public finance, included also the study of administrative law, police administration, estate management, and agricultural economics. After the degree course, candidates for the higher civil service spent a further period of supervised practical training in various branches of the administration, at the end of which they underwent a further oral and written examination. The basic principles of modern civil services are to be found in this General Code.

France

      A fundamental change in the status of the civil servant came about as a result of the French Revolution of 1789. The fall of the ancien régime and the creation of a republic meant that the civil servant was seen as the servant no longer of the king but rather of the state—even though rule by a king or emperor was soon brought back and continued in France for nearly another century. The civil servant became an instrument of public power, not the agent of a person. This depersonalization of the state encouraged a rapid growth in the field of public law concerned with the organization, duties, and rights of “the public power,” of which civil servants were the principal component. To the ordered structure of the Prussian bureaucracy there began to be added the logical development of administrative law.

      This bureaucratization was greatly fostered by Napoleon I, who built up a new civil service marked not only by some of the features of military organization but also by the principles of rationality, logic, and universality that were the inheritance of the Enlightenment. There was a clear chain of command and a firmly established hierarchy of officials, with duties clearly apportioned between authorities. Authority was depersonalized and went to the office and not the official—although Napoleon insisted that each official should be responsible for action taken in the name of his office. France was divided into new territorial units: départements, arrondissements, and communes. In each of these, state civil servants had a general responsibility for maintaining public order, health, and morality. They were all linked in a chain to the national Ministry of the Interior. A special school, the École Polytechnique, was set up to provide the state with technical specialists in both the military and the civil fields—particularly in general administration. In the field of general administration, the Conseil d'État (“Council of State”), descended from the old Conseil du Roi (“Council of the King”), imposed an intellectual as well as a judicial authority over the rest of the civil service; as the first major European administrative court, it became the creator of a new type of administrative jurisprudence. The prestige of the new French administrative organization and the logical arrangement of its internal structure prompted many other European countries to copy its principal features. And the expansion of the French Empire spread many of its features across the world.

      In France under the Third Republic (1870–1940) there developed, however, considerable political interference in some branches of the civil service; and much of its vitality was diminished as its bureaucratic practices tended to become unwieldy and its personnel lethargic. Not until 1946 was the system reformed—which involved overhauling the administrative structure of the central government, centralizing personnel selection, creating a special ministry for civil service affairs, and setting up a special school, the École National d'Administration, for the training of senior civil servants. This school in particular has attracted worldwide attention for its ability to instill in its graduates both specialist and generalist skills.

The British Empire

 The first attempts by Great Britain to create efficient administrative machinery arose from its commitment to govern India and to avoid in that country the periodic scandals that marked some of the rule of the East India Company. Robert Clive (Clive, Robert, 1st Baron Clive of Plassey), appointed governor of Bengal for the second time in 1764, introduced a code of practice that prohibited servants of the company from trading on their own account or accepting gifts from native traders. Subsequent governors strengthened the ban, compensating for the loss of benefits by substantially increasing salaries, introducing promotion by seniority, and reorganizing the higher echelons of administration. Recruitment was carried on by the company in London, and after 1813 entrants to the civil service had to study the history, language, and laws of India for a period of four terms at Haileybury College, England, and to obtain a certificate of good conduct before taking up their posts. As a result of advocacy by Thomas Macaulay (Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron), secretary to the board of control, examination rather than patronage was adopted as a recruitment method. New rules from 1833 stipulated that four candidates had to be nominated for each vacancy and that they were to compete with one another in “an examination in such branches of knowledge and by such examinations as the Board of the Company shall direct.”

      There was further criticism of the way India was run, however, and in 1853 another legislative reform of the administration was proposed. The experience of the Indian Civil Service influenced the foundation of the modern civil service in the United Kingdom. A report was published in 1854 on the organization of the Permanent Civil Service in Britain. Its principal author, Sir Charles Trevelyan, had acquired a reputation for searching out corruption in the Indian Civil Service during 14 years of service there. The report of 1854 recommended the abolition of patronage and recruitment by open competitive examination. It further recommended (1) the establishment of an autonomous semijudicial body of civil service commissioners to ensure the proper administration of recruitment to official posts, (2) the division of the work of the civil service into intellectual and routine work, the two sets of offices to have separate forms of recruitment, and (3) the selection of higher civil servants more decidedly on the basis of general intellectual attainment than specialized knowledge. The Civil Service Commission was established in 1855, and during the next 30 years patronage was gradually eliminated. The two original classes were increased to four, and some specialized branches were amalgamated to become the Scientific Civil Service. The new civil service managed to attract to its senior levels highly capable, discreet, and self-effacing university graduates. Graduates of Oxford and Cambridge became—and remain to the present—especially prominent in the ranks of senior civil servants in Britain.

The United States

      In the United States patronage remained the norm for considerably longer than in Britain. From the early days of the federation two principles were firmly held. First, there was antipathy to the notion of a cadre of permanent civil servants; President Jackson (Jackson, Andrew) clearly dismissed this notion of a highly professional caste when he said, in 1829, that “the duties of all public officers are . . . so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.” As a consequence, he said, “I can not but believe that more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience. No one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” The second principle—that as far as possible public office should be elective—followed more or less automatically. But because this principle could not be practically applied to the subordinate levels of administration, there developed the “spoils system,” in which public office became a perquisite of political victory, being widely used to reward political support. This system was susceptible to persistent, blatant, and ultimately unacceptable degrees of inefficiency, corruption, and partisanship. These particular faults were strongly felt after the Civil War (1861–65), during the period of rapid economic and social development. Under considerable pressure, the federal government accepted a restricted principle of entry by competitive open examination, and in 1883 the U.S. Civil Service Commission was established to control entry to office in the federal service. The work of the commission was mainly restricted to the lower grades of employment, and it was not until the first 20 years of the 20th century that the merit system of recruitment was expanded to cover half the posts in the federal service. After that period the commission's control gradually increased, mainly over the lower, middle, and managerial offices in the federal service. After 1978 the functions of the commission were divided between the Office of Personnel Management and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Principal policy-making posts, numbering some 2,000, remain outside the jurisdiction of these two bodies, being filled instead by presidential nomination.

      The development of civil service in U.S. local government varied among states, counties, and cities. The adoption of a merit system can usually be dated from the early 20th century, during the reform period of the muckrakers. In some states the merit system became well established, with a central personnel office that included a civil service commission or board similar to the federal model. At the other extreme there was simply a central personnel office headed by a single personnel director with no advisory board. At the municipal level, by the mid-20th century, most large cities in the United States had developed some sort of merit system; in smaller cities, however, merit systems were correspondingly less common. In the counties, the majority of which were rural and had relatively few public employees, formally established merit systems were rare.

The Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)

      In Russia the Revolution of 1917 (Russian Revolution of 1917) swept away the tsarist civil service. The Communist Party (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) at first held that a strong administrative organization was bound to damage the revolution by dampening spontaneity and other revolutionary virtues. But it soon became clear that a regime dedicated to social engineering, economic planning, and world revolution needed trained administrators. The party fell back, albeit reluctantly, upon the expertise of the more reliable tsarist civil servants. It did, however, surround the new civil service with elaborate controls in an attempt to ensure that its members remained loyal to party directives.

      As the Communist (communism) Party itself became bureaucratized and as the more enthusiastic revolutionary leaders were eliminated, special industrial academies were set up for party members who had shown administrative talent. With the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32) the status of civil servants was improved, and their conditions of service were made less rigid, even though the party never relaxed its tight system of control over all branches of the state apparatus. In 1935 the State Commission on the Civil Service was created and attached to the Commissariat of Finance with responsibility for ensuring general control of personnel practice. This commission laid down formal patterns of administrative structure, reformed existing bureaucratic practices, fixed levels of staffing, standardized systems of job classification, and eliminated unnecessary functions and staff. The inspectorate of the Ministry of Finance ensured that the commission's general policies were carried out in the ministries. The commission itself remained under the close supervision of the Council of People's Commissars to ensure that it complied with party directives, and the commission's members were appointed directly by the council.

      The Soviet commission, unlike those in such countries as Great Britain and the United States, was given no jurisdiction over the recruitment of civil servants, which remained the function of the ministries and agencies. The highest administrative and technical staff members were recruited by each ministry. Each branch of industry and administration had its own training schools, from which it selected qualified students with satisfactory records. On appointment, the student was bonded for a minimum of three years and liable to criminal proceedings if he refused or subsequently relinquished his assignment. At the lower levels of administration, recruitment and job placement were the responsibility of the Commissariat of Labour Reserves.

      The Communist Party made determined attempts to recruit higher civil servants as party members. These drives, which followed periodically after the 1930s, went a long way toward transforming the party itself into an administrative and managerial elite and uniting the party and the state administration. The highest levels of the civil service came to constitute an influential apparatus and power centre in their own right. The internal structure of the civil service, moreover, had been fashioned along classic French and German lines; and titles, ranks, insignia, and uniforms officially appeared in various parts of the public services.

China (Chinese civil service)

      The People's Republic of China also illustrates the conflict between revolutionary suspicion of bureaucracy and the need to construct strong administrative machinery in order to attain revolutionary goals. China's long tradition of bureaucracy remained important even after the Communist Party came to power in 1949. Within a decade the weight of the administration had already led, according to party dogma, to a gap between the elite and the masses and also to excessive stratification among the ruling bureaucrats, or cadres, themselves. There was not only a distinction between “old cadres” and “new cadres,” depending on nothing more substantial than the date of an official's entry into the revolutionary movement, but also a complex system of job evaluation that divided the civil service into 24 grades, each with its own rank, salary scales, and distinctions. The number of ratings represented very considerable differences of power, prestige, and prerogatives and produced psychological barriers between the highest and lowest grades at least as great and as conspicuous as between the cadres and the masses. These distinctions and discrepancies were widely attacked during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, but they remained deeply ingrained in the administrative structure.

Japan

      Until the 17th century, Japan under the shogunate was administered by a military establishment made up of vassals and enfeoffed nobles. After the 1630s a civil bureaucracy developed and began to assume a more important role than the military. Appointment within the bureaucracy was based upon family rank, and officials were loyal primarily to the feudal lord. It was not until after Matthew C. Perry sailed four U.S. warships into Uraga Harbour in 1853, thus forcibly ending more than two centuries of Japan's isolation from the rest of the world, that the Japanese bureaucracy moved away from feudal rank as the basis of appointments, establishing in its place loyalty to the emperor rather than to feudal lords. Merit appointments were made on a modest scale immediately after Japan was opened to the West, yet it was not until the 1880s, during the Meiji Restoration, that a modern civil service was created on the basis of job security, career paths, and entry by open competition. Tokyo University law graduates tended to dominate this new civil service. Personal allegiance to the emperor was reflected in the status of Japanese civil servants as “Emperor's Officials.”

      After World War II the Allied occupation authorities directed the passage of a Japanese law guaranteeing that all public officials should be servants of the people rather than of the emperor. The National Public Service Law of 1947 set up an independent National Personnel Authority to administer recruitment, promotion, conditions of employment, standards of performance, and job classification for the new civil service. Technically the emperor himself became a civil servant, and detailed regulations brought within the scope of the new law all civil servants from labourers to the prime minister. Civil servants were classified into two groups, the regular service and a special service. Civil servants in the former category entered the service by competitive examination on a standard contract with tenure. The special service included elected officials and political appointees and covered such officials as members of the Diet (legislature), judges, members of the audit boards, and ambassadors.

      Although in theory the sovereign people have an inalienable right to choose and dismiss all public officials—who are constitutionally described as “servants of the whole community”—both tradition and political practice have allowed the civil service in Japan to retain and consolidate its old position in government. The idealization of the scholar-bureaucrat (a Confucian tradition borrowed from China) makes the civil service an independent power centre. Political struggles in the Diet have led to constantly changing ministries, and individual ministers rarely stay at a post long enough to establish firm control of their administration. As in many democratic countries with volatile political systems, administrative control has tended to pass to senior civil servants.

Developing nations

      Less-developed countries have had to face the opposite problem with their civil services. After World War II many such countries became independent before they had developed effective administrative structures or bodies of trained civil servants. Few of the colonial (colonialism, Western) powers had trained indigenous administrators sufficiently. The British left a viable administrative structure in India and a partly Indianized civil service, but the newly independent Pakistan had few experienced civil servants. The Belgians left the Congo without any trained administrative or technical staff, and for some years there was near anarchy.

      Even when they inherited reasonably efficient administrative organizations, the newly independent countries' politicians frequently proved incapable of fulfilling their supporters' expectations. Civil servants from the old colonial powers who remained behind often found radical policies and new masters uncongenial. The resulting exodus of many such civil servants worsened matters, for indigenous civil servants were seldom an adequate substitute.

      The lack of qualified personnel sometimes led to not only a reduction in efficiency but also a decline in administrative morality. Nepotism, tribalism, and corruption as well as inefficiency in the civil service were difficulties often added to the other trials of independence. In many countries the incapacity of the civil service was a factor leading to military rule, as were the political failings of the elected leaders. Military regimes have frequently been the last resort of a country where the civil power has failed to cope with the problems of independence. Consequently, the United Nations (UN), in conjunction with the governments of advanced countries, began to develop training programs for civil servants from underdeveloped countries. The first request came from Latin America, which led to the founding of a school of public administration in Brazil, followed in 1953 by an Advanced School of Public Administration for Central America. Various other international organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank, supported institutions for the training of administrators in the less-developed countries. Such institutions included the Arab Planning Institute in Kuwait, the Arab Organization of Administrative Sciences in Jordan, and the Inter-American School of Public Administration in Brazil. Civil servants from the less-developed nations also studied administration at such places as the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Neth., the Institute of Local Government Studies in Birmingham, Eng., and the International Institute of Public Administration in Paris.

      After the 1970s the international agencies gave less help toward training, on the assumption—often unrealized—that the less-developed nations would take on greater responsibility themselves. Training also tended to be generalist and academic, leading to acute shortages of trained administrators in specialized fields such as finance and planning. However, organizations such as the British Council began in the early 1980s to remedy some of these deficiencies.

Brian Chapman Edward C. Page

Principles of public administration

The classical definition

      Throughout the 20th century the study and practice of public administration has been essentially pragmatic and normative rather than theoretical and value free. This may explain why public administration, unlike some social sciences, developed without much concern about an encompassing theory. Not until the mid-20th century and the dissemination of the German sociologist Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy was there much interest in a theory of public administration. Most recent bureaucratic theory, however, has been addressed to the private sector, and there has been little effort to relate organizational to political theory.

      A prominent principle of public administration has been economy and efficiency, that is, the provision of public services at the minimum cost. This has usually been the stated objective of administrative reform. Despite growing concern about other kinds of values, such as responsiveness to public needs, justice and equal treatment, and citizen involvement in government decisions, efficiency continues to be a major goal.

      In its concern with efficiency and improvement, public administration has focused frequently on questions of formal organization. It is generally held that administrative ills can be at least partly corrected by reorganization. Many organizational principles originated with the military, a few from private business. They include, for example: (1) organizing departments, ministries, and agencies on the basis of common or closely related purposes, (2) grouping like activities in single units, (3) equating responsibility with authority, (4) ensuring unity of command (only one supervisor for each group of employees), (5) limiting the number of subordinates reporting to a single supervisor, (6) differentiating line (operating or end-purpose) activities from staff (advisory, consultative, or support) activities, (7) employing the principle of management by exception (only the unusual problem or case is brought to the top), and (8) having a clear-cut chain of command downward and of responsibility upward.

      Some critics have maintained that these and other principles of public administration are useful only as rough criteria for given organizational situations. They believe that organizational problems differ and that the applicability of rules to various situations also differs. Nonetheless, and despite much more sophisticated analyses of organizational behaviour in recent decades, such principles as those enumerated above continue to carry force.

      Public administration has also laid stress upon personnel. In most countries administrative reform has involved civil service reform. Historically, the direction has been toward “meritocracy”—the best individual for each job, competitive examinations for entry, and selection and promotion on the basis of merit. Attention has increasingly been given to factors other than intellectual merit, including personal attitudes, incentives, personality, personal relationships, and collective bargaining.

      In addition, the budget has developed as a principal tool in planning future programs, deciding priorities, managing current programs, linking executive with legislature, and developing control and accountability. The contest for control over budgets, particularly in the Western world, began centuries ago and at times was the main relationship between monarchs and their subjects. The modern executive budget system in which the executive recommends, the legislature appropriates, and the executive oversees expenditures originated in 19th-century Britain. In the United States during the 20th century, the budget became the principal vehicle for legislative surveillance of administration, executive control of departments, and departmental control of subordinate programs. It has been assuming a similar role in many of the developing countries of the world.

Recent interpretations

      The classical approach to public administration described above probably reached its fullest development in the United States during the 1930s, although since that time, through educational and training programs, technical assistance, and the work of international organizations, it has also become standard doctrine in many countries. However, some of its elements have been resisted by governments with British or continental-legal perspectives, and even during the 1930s it was being challenged from several quarters. Since that time study of the subject has greatly developed. It has also become somewhat confused as a result of certain inconsistencies in approach.

      The orthodox doctrine rested on the premise that administration was simply the implementation of public policies determined by others. According to this view, administrators should seek maximum efficiency but should be otherwise neutral about values and goals. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even more so during World War II, however, it became increasingly evident that many new policies originated within the administration, that policy and value judgments were implicit in most significant administrative decisions, that many administrative officials worked on nothing except policy, and that, insofar as public policies were controversial, such work inevitably involved administrators in politics. The supposed independence of administration from policy and politics was seen to be illusory. Since the 1930s there has thus been increasing concern with policy formation and the development of techniques to improve policy decisions. Although the concept of a value-free, neutral administration is regarded by many as no longer tenable, no fully satisfactory substitute has been offered. How to ensure that responsible and responsive policy decisions are made by career administrators, and how to coordinate their work with the policies of politically elected or appointive officials, remain key preoccupations, especially in democratic states.

      It was with governmental efforts to combat the Depression that new informational devices were introduced, including national income accounting and the scrutiny of gross national product as a major index of economic (economic planning) health. The applied techniques of fiscal and monetary policy have become established specializations of public administration. Economists occupy key posts in the administrations of most nations, and many other administrators must have at least elementary knowledge of the economic implications of government operations. France, Sweden and other Scandinavian nations, Great Britain, and the United States were among the leaders in developing economic planning techniques. Such planning has become a dominating concern of public administration in many of the developing countries.

Responses to incrementalism

      As economic and social intervention by governments has increased, the limitations of “incrementalism” as a public administration practice have become increasingly apparent. Incrementalism is the tendency of government to tinker with policies rather than to question the value of continuing them. A number of techniques have been introduced to make decisions more rational. One such technique, widely applied, is cost–benefit analysis. This involves identifying, quantifying, and comparing the costs and benefits of alternative proposals. Another, less successful, technique was the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS), introduced into the U.S. Department of Defense in 1961 and extended to the federal budget in 1965. According to PPBS, the objectives of government programs were to be identified, and then alternative means of achieving these objectives were to be compared according to their costs and benefits. In practice, PPBS made little difference in federal budgeting, partly because the objectives of governmental programs were difficult to specify and partly because comprehensive evaluation took too long. PPBS was abandoned in 1971, and similar attempts, such as Management by Objectives and Zero-Base Budgeting, both introduced in the 1970s, were equally short-lived and ineffective. Comparable schemes in western Europe, such as the method called “rationalization of budgetary choice” introduced into France in the late 1960s and the so-called Programme Analysis and Review in Great Britain in the 1970s, were likewise unsuccessful.

      Quantitative economic measurement is useful up to a certain point, but the value of human life, of freedom from sickness and pain, of safety on the streets, of clean air, and of opportunity for achievement are hardly measurable in monetary terms. Public administration has thus increasingly concerned itself with developing better social indicators, quantitative and qualitative—that is, better indexes of the effects of public programs and new techniques of social analysis.

      Another development has been an increasing emphasis on human relations (human resources management). This originated in the 1930s when what became known as the Hawthorne research, involving the workers and management of an industrial plant near Chicago, brought out the importance to productivity of social or informal organization, good communications, individual and group behaviour, and attitudes (as distinct from aptitudes).

      Awareness of the importance of human relations influenced the conduct of public administration. Many shibboleths of administration (hierarchy, directive leadership, set duties, treatment of employees as impersonal “units” of production, and monetary incentives) were challenged.

      By the late 1930s the human relations approach had developed into a concept known as “organization development.” Its primary goal was to change the attitudes, values, and structures of organizations so that they could meet new demands. Trained consultants, usually from outside the organization, undertook intensive interviewing of senior and junior staff, and sensitivity training and confrontation meetings were also held. Unlike the rationalistic PPBS approach, organization development stressed the identification of personal with organizational goals, the “self-actualization” of workers and managers, effective interpersonal communication, and broad participation in decision making. Its direct use within governmental agencies has been limited and has not always been successful, but it has had considerable indirect influence upon administrators.

      Another modern movement in public administration has been the greater participation of citizens in government. It was stimulated during the 1950s and '60s by a growing feeling that governments were not responding to the needs of their citizens, particularly minority groups and the poor. A variety of experiments to involve citizens or their representatives in making governmental decisions were begun in the 1960s. These involved the delegation of decision making from central to local offices and, at the local level, the sharing of authority with citizen groups.

Public policy approach

      From the early 1970s increasing analysis of the way government policies affected the public resulted in a concept called the “public policy approach” to administration. This examines to what extent each stage in devising and executing a policy affects the overall shape and impact of the policy. According to the concept, the way a problem is conceived in the first place influences the range of remedies considered. The nature of the decision-making process may determine whether a course of action is merely incremental or truly radical. Indeed, it has been argued that the nature of the decision-making process shapes the outcome of the decision itself, particularly when the process is dominated by a powerful interest group. Moreover, the willingness of the government to evaluate programs, and modify them if necessary, affects the outcome. Many supporters of the public policy approach regard the concept as an important tool for constructing a body of knowledge on which recommendations can be based.

      Until World War II there was relatively little exchange among nations of ideas about public administration. As early as 1910, however, a professional organization, which eventually became the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS), had been established. At first its membership consisted principally of scholars and practitioners of administrative law in the countries of continental Europe. By the late 1980s the IIAS had a membership drawn from some 70 countries. Its triennial congresses have covered all aspects of the field.

      Since World War II international interest in administrative systems has grown, precipitated by the necessity of cooperation during the war, by the formation of international organizations, by the occupation of conquered nations and the administration of economic recovery programs for Europe and the Far East, and by aid programs for developing countries. One by-product of aid programs was a renewed appreciation of how crucial effective administration is to national development. It has also become apparent how parochial and culture-bound styles of public administration have often remained within individual countries.

      Another effect of this international communication and sharing of experiences has been the realization that development is not exclusive to the so-called underdeveloped countries. All countries have continued to develop, and public administration has increasingly been perceived as the administration of planned change in societies that themselves have undergone rapid change, not all of it planned. Government has no longer been merely the keeper of the peace and the provider of basic services: in the postindustrial era government has become a principal innovator, a determinant of social and economic priorities, and an entrepreneur on a major scale. On virtually every significant problem or challenge—from unemployment to clean air—people have looked to the government for solutions or assistance. The tasks of planning, organizing, coordinating, managing, and evaluating modern government have likewise become awesome in both dimension and importance.

Education and training

      European universities have traditionally produced administrative lawyers for their governments, but legal skills alone are hardly adequate for handling contemporary problems. U.S. universities began graduate programs in the early years of the 20th century, and by the late 1980s there were more than 300 university programs in public administration. Nevertheless, very few of the scientists and other specialists who become administrators in their fields attend such programs.

      Training programs have particularly flourished since World War II, many of them with government help. Some are attached to universities. In establishing the École Nationale d'Administration as one of its civil service reforms of 1946–47, France provided an extensive course for recruits to the higher civil service. It was not until 1969 that Britain established a Civil Service College under the new Civil Service Department. In the United States the government established a variety of educational and training programs during the 1960s, including the Federal Executive Institute and the Executive Seminar Centers. Many less-advanced countries have since established centres for the training of public administrators.

Frederick C. Mosher Edward C. Page

Additional Reading

The most comprehensive treatment of public administration is Andrew Dunsire, Administration: The Word and the Science (1973, reprinted 1981). Included among the classics in the field are Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), available in numerous later editions; Henri Fayol, General and Industrial Management, rev. ed. (1984; originally published in French, 1917); and Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vol. (1978; originally published in German, 4th rev. ed., 1956). Marshall W. Meyer, Change in Public Bureaucracies (1979), is an important quantitative study of the process of change; and E.N. Gladden, A History of Public Administration, 2 vol. (1972), is an informative survey of developments from the 11th century to the present day. For further study, useful information can be found in Jay M. Shafritz, The Facts on File Dictionary of Public Administration (1985); and also in Robert D. Miewald, The Bureaucratic State: An Annotated Bibliography (1984).The traditional approach to public administration and its principles are set forth in Luther H. Gulick and L. Urwick (eds.), Papers on the Science of Administration (1937, reprinted 1987); and L. Urwick, The Elements of Administration, 2nd ed. (1947). Challenges to the principles, as well as efforts to build a theory of decision making as central to administration, appear in Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (1938, reprinted 1979); Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behaviour: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization, 2nd ed. (1957, reissued 1965); and Herbert A. Simon, Donald W. Smithburg, and Victor A. Thompson, Public Administration (1950, reprinted 1971). A thoughtful review of the evolution of public administration in its relation to society is provided in Dwight Waldo, The Administrative State: A Study of the Political Theory of American Public Administration, 2nd ed. (1984). A challenge to the traditional dichotomy between policy and administration is expressed cogently in various works of Paul H. Appleby, most notably in his Policy and Administration (1949, reprinted 1975). Later developments of similar views are found in David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public Opinion, 2nd ed. (1971); Emmette S. Redford, Democracy in the Administrative State (1969); and Harold Seidman and Robert Gilmour, Politics, Position and Power: From the Positive to the Regulatory State, 4th ed. (1986). The nature and role of cost–benefit analysis is discussed in Peter Self, Econocrats and the Policy Process: The Politics and Philosophy of Cost-Benefit Analysis (1975). The incremental approach to decision making is set out in Charles E. Lindblom, The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making Through Mutual Adjustment (1965); the problems involved in applying techniques such as PPBS and Programme Analysis and Review are discussed in Aaron Wildavsky, The Politics of the Budgetary Process, 4th ed. (1984); and Andrew Gray and William I. Jenkins, Administrative Politics in British Government (1985). The prophet of the human relations movement was Mary Parker Follett, some of whose writings are published in Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, new ed., edited by Elliot M. Fox and L. Urwick (1973, reissued 1982). The derivative movement, now called organization development, is treated in Chris Argyris, Integrating the Individual and the Organization (1964); Rensis Likert, New Patterns of Management (1961, reprinted 1987); and Warren G. Bennis, Organization Development: Its Nature, Origins, and Prospects (1969). A wide-ranging discussion of issues in policy analysis is provided in Brian W. Hogwood and Lewis A. Gunn, Policy Analysis for the Real World (1984). A growing literature has developed since World War II in case studies of actual administrative experience. Pioneered and led by the American Inter-University Case Program, the use of cases has spread to many other countries. An example of the use of cases in comparative analysis is Frederick C. Mosher (ed.), Governmental Reorganizations: Cases and Commentary (1967). John E. Rouse, Jr., Public Administration in American Society: A Guide to Information Sources (1980), is a comprehensive annotated bibliography.On the administrative systems of different countries, see Brian Chapman, The Profession of Government: The Public Service in Europe (1959, reprinted 1980); F.F. Ridley (ed.), Specialists and Generalists: A Comparative Study of the Professional Civil Servant at Home and Abroad (1968); Fred W. Riggs, Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society (1964); Morroe Berger, Bureaucracy and Society in Modern Egypt: A Study of the Higher Civil Service (1957, reissued 1969); and Joseph La Palombara (ed.), Bureaucracy and Political Development, 2nd ed. (1967).Brian Chapman Frederick C. Mosher Edward C. Page

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