Public Administration Education and Formal Administrative Position: Do They Make a Difference? A Note on Pope's Proposition and Miles' Law in an Intergovernmental Context

Abstract

Tis education forms die common mind; Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined (Alexander Pope, 1734). you stand depends on where you sit (Rufus Miles, 1978). Few topics promote more extensive and even endless debate than issues surrounding the impact, positive and negative, of education. Does education in general, and professional public administration education in particular, make a difference in the performance or the perspectives of its recipients? Alexander Pope's couplet stated in the epigraph casts education as having a presumed long-term influence on the mind (attitudes or perspectives) of mature persons. By way of contrast, Rufus Miles' simple assertion, first offered many years ago, concisely captures the assumed attitude alteration that is expected to accompany a shift in formal administrative position. Miles coined the phrase to describe the altered outlook of a person shifting posts from one agency (central staff unit) to another agency (line-functional department) in the national government. If Pope's proposition were restated in a form similar to Miles' Law, it might read, Where you stand depends on where/how you were seated/educated. If Miles' Law and Pope's proposition were extended to their logical and extreme conclusions, they would be incompatible. The former claims the dominant and controlling character of the current position as the variable explaining present attitudes or views. The latter offers an unspecified type of a previous mind-shaping process as the variable most pertinent in explaining contemporary outlook or inclination. There is, of course, no inherent reason to push these assertions to such extremes. Indeed, one purpose of this article is to examine the explanatory power of both these variables. For the education variable we are interested in seeing whether the attainment of a public administration degree makes some difference in an attitude variable. For the position variable we explore whether line (functional) specialists hold views that are notably different from central staff (generalist) personnel. Finally, for the dependent (attitude/perspective) variable, we create and analyze an intergovernmental attitude dimension - perceived national influence. We posit two basic hypotheses, one for education and one for formal position. (1) Administrative heads of state agencies who receive federal aid differ in the amount of perceived national influence (PNI) exercised over their staff and agency depending on whether they have or have not) obtained a college-level degree in public administration (PA). Those with a PA degree are expected to record higher levels of PNI than those without a PA degree. (2) State administrators who head agencies that are central staff, control, or coordination entities should record higher levels of PNI than administrators who head line, functional, or program delivery agencies. This hypothesized difference simply expresses the common generalist-specialist conflict that is often captured by the picket-fence metaphor popularized 25 years ago by then-governor Terry Sanford (1967). Intergovernmental Perspectives How do intergovernmental participants at each level perceive other participants' policies or outlooks? Research responding to this question is well established, for example, on the intergovernmental perceptions of city officials (Kane, 1984; Pressman, 1975; Wright, 1973), federal aid administrators (Pressman, 1975; U.S. Senate, 1965), state legislators (Thomas, 1979), state administrators (Wright, 1982), and various other actors (Weidner, 1954, 1960). We cannot provide an extensive exposition of research on intergovernmental perspectives, but mention various studies only to acknowledge the diverse but generally non-cumulative character of this research approach to federalism and intergovernmental relations. Most perception studies recognize that not all officials within the same governmental level (or unit) develop similar views when they see the positions taken by actors at a different government level. …