A response to beryl radin and terry cooper

Abstract

Public administration is shaped by its context. This is true not only for the discipline as a whole but for the individuals who study, teach, and practice public administration. Radin and Cooper offer an insightful view of administration shaped by their activist involvement with the great social and political upheavals of the sixties. Their “public action” approach finds fault with the “professional paternalism” that characterized the papers delivered at the first Minnowbrook. They follow the basic direction of the Min-nowbrook perspective, but ask for more—more normative input, more “citizen” participation, more prescriptive policy, and a looser, more subjective view of research and reality. What is the essence of practical politics in a democracy? A short list of characteristics would include the give-and-take of bargaining, open dialogue, the power to persuade, and the right to try to convince others that you deserve their support. If public administration is to service its critics then it must, as a profession and as a discipline, pursue such activities. This would complete the circle, the reciprocity, of the democratic bargaining that Radin and Cooper point to as one of the “most important processes” of their perspective. If public administration is going to play politics, it must take as well as give, or otherwise be “bargained” right into a corner. To a great extent public administration is already in that corner: it has listened to the public but it has not been heard; it has given to the public but it has not received. If administrators are going to create ideas (i.e., prescriptive policies), they must learn to sell them. Otherwise no one listens, or if a success is somehow achieved, someone else—a politician— gets the credit. In short, if public administrators are going to be involved in politics, they must be politicians. The only difference between administrators and “real” politicians is that the latter try to generate support for an office, while administrators need to generate support for programs. In other words, the effiective program administrator is an effective program politician. Radin and Cooper note that their perspective requires an “informed and articulate citizenry.” Given the low level of understanding of what bureaucracy does and how it does it, we can surmise that the citizenry falls short on this one. It is not their fault but ours; we have yet to correct the unilateral nature of the public/ bureaucracy communication network. We need not adopt some of the more gauche aspects of modern-day politicking, but the effort must be convincing; public administration is competing with those “other politicians” who have an incentive to blame bureaucracy for all the nation's ills and take credit for bureaucracy's successes. This is public action of a different sort; the action is directed to the public rather than by the public. This approach should be part of the curriculum of university programs. A new subfield—program politics—should be added to the traditional list of personnel, budgeting, and so on. If there is going to be more politics in administration, then administrators must learn to be better program politicians. At present, most programs have a course on bureaucratic politics, but the focus of such courses usually reflects the unilateral nature of the public/ bureaucracy relationship. The students learn how bureaucracy responds to demands from the public and then receives political support from program beneficiaries if those demands are met. Students seldom learn how to campaign effectively for programs to ensure that public demands are reasonable. Under the best circumstances, such program politicking would permit the public to assess agency performance—not by the extent to which the agency delivers government largess, but the extent to which the agency contributes to the larger goals of society and government. An expanded role for program politics is, in my opinion, a natural outgrowth of the Minnowbrook perspective and Radin and Copper's public-action philosophy, both of which argue for more democratic politics in bureaucracy. Program politics merely makes politicians out of those who would be made a “part of the political process.” It would require, however, a change in focus. Much of the original Minnowbrook discussion was concerned with protecting and nurturing the individual bureaucrat; now the need is to protect and nurture public administration as a profession. Because administration is now politicized and democratized, this can best be accomplished by program politicians who are adept at building a bilateral dialogue with the public.