1. Chapter 3: The Meaning of Public Administration

2. Public Administration
Size and scope of public administration: government bureaucracy encountered everywhere
Administrative responsibility: efficient program implementation with accountability to elected officials and the people

3. Public Administration as the Administrative State
Waldo notes that the expansion of the “administrative state” began post–World War II.
Citizens have demanded more, and thus government has provided more.
Compared with the governments of other industrialized nations, the American government is among the smallest.

4. Public Administration: The Study of Public Bureaucracy
The study of public administration
Public bureaucracy refers to public organizations: the formal, rational system of relations among persons vested with administrative authority to carry out public programs
Public bureaucracy is too inefficient to accomplish much of anything but at the same time is made up of all-too-efficient users (and at times abusers) of power

5. Public Administration and Money
The federal government spent $3.7 trillion in 2010.
The federal government has more customers than any private company: over 300 million: the American people.

6. A Common Definition of Public Administration?
Suffers a “crisis of identity”
Is distinct from private administration
Role of public authority
Characteristic organizational processes
Contributes to policy execution and formation
Emphasizes administrative responsibility

7. Public Organizations vs. Private Organizations: The Rule of Law
The federal Antideficiency Act forbids government officials from spending on all not explicitly authorized by law. Private organizations can spend on all not forbidden by the law.
Steven Kelman: Organizations must balance goals and constraints (public orgs are heavy on constraints; private orgs heavy on goals).

8. Processes: Public Organizations versus Private Organizations
Career service
Measures of performance: any direct way of evaluating an organization’s outputs in relation to the cost of the inputs to make them
Competing standards
Public scrutiny
Persuasion
Oversight: public administrators’ exposure to public scrutiny

9. Public Organizations and the Profit Motive
Public and private activities cannot be distinguished by profit motive.
Private, nongovernmental organizations can be nonprofits and advance a social agenda.

10. Policy Execution verses Policy Formation
Public and private organizations share basic features of policy execution.
Public organizations also contribute to policy formation.

11. Public Organizations and Policy Execution
Policy execution: the task of public administration in translating written law into action.
Laws created by the chief executive and elective legislative permit things to happen. Administrators have to shape these ideas into reality.

12. Public Organizations and Policy Formation
Policy formation: 1) before policy is made, advising elected officials, 2) after policy is made, making sense of it.
The role of administrators in early policy formation process has developed in two ways:
Increased technicality of public policy, followed by a growth in the specialized competence of administrative agency staffs
Expansion of the chief executive’s role as a major agenda setter for government policymaking

13. Policy-Administration Dichotomy
In the early twentieth century, scholars separated policy or the political work of making policy from administration.
Many students reject this policy-administration dichotomy because it is now obvious that administrative staffs share in the policy formation function.
Yet, the motivations and behaviors of policymakers and public administrators are very different (a KEY issue for public administration).

14. Administrative Responsibility: A Part of Every Public Organization
Public organizations have a system to hold subordinates accountable to their superiors.
Administrative responsibility goes beyond external controls (i.e., burdensome red tape) and includes internal controls, or internalized guides, to be conducted by administrators.

15. Administrative Responsibility and Internal Controls
Administrators must be sensitive to the legitimate roles of other elements of the government.
Administrators have a loyalty to their agencies and the programs entrusted to them.
Administrators are loyal to their professional standards and motivated to win the respect of members of the profession outside the government.

16. The Study of Public Administration
Nicholas Henry identifies periods of the study of public administration ; ; ; ( ); post-1970
Three generalizations to the study of public administration

17. Three Generalizations to the Study of Public Administration
Public administration is timeless but time-bound.
Public administration is universal but also culture-bound and varies according to the situation.
Public administration is complex but is intelligible only by a simplified model or a step-by-step combining of such models.

18. Woodrow Wilson
Study of public administration as a neutral instrument distinct from policy, politics, and a particular regime
Classic “The Study of Administration”
Two themes advanced
Basic contradictions embedded in the themes

19. Complexity and Simplicity
Organizational systems are complex and need varied models to study them
Complicating factors
Interconnections of policymaking and execution
Coordination
Relationships and power
Floating in seas of time
Top-down and bottom-up
Information
Headquarters and field
Values