Public Policy and Administration: The Goals of Rationality and Responsibility

Abstract

No problem is more momentous for the modern democratic state than its capacity to develop rational, responsible, goal-oriented policy. In many fields, including the most crucial ones, foreign policy and defense, the staff work on which well conceived public policy must depend can scarcely be supplied elsewhere than in the great government departments. To only a somewhat lesser degree this is true of agriculture, finance, commerce, and labor. Accordingly, a major task of administration is the formulation of policy proposals for consideration by the political executive and the legislature. The capacity of our administration organizations to perform rationally and responsibly the task of formulating the policy alternatives for politically responsible superiors is the major criterion of organization efficiency. The beginning of wisdom in administrative analysis consists in a realistic assessment of the capacity of the organization to think. The conception, now formally abjured, of the separation of policy and administration has obscured the vital thinking role of organized bureaucracy in government. The doctrine of the political supremacy of the elected over the nonelected branch of the government has inspired the delusion that to be politically supreme the legislature must not only make final decisions on policy but must also have primacy in the whole process of policy formulation - that the bureaucracy should be an instrument rather than a brain. The necessities of the case have forced the abandonment of this view save as folklore and political metaphysics. In practice it must be recognized that the bureaucracy is a part, and a highly important part of the collective brain that somehow thinks or emotes a government policy... In the occasions of life, we deal with values and in our dealing with them give them much thought. This experience is not a realm devoid of reason and evidence, but a realm in which reasoned argument has an efficacious place. Investigation of this experience show that though it may not be scientific, we nevertheless do have knowledge in the value-laden field of politics; and exploration of our procedures may lead to evidentially tested proposals for their improvement.... If one of the most important tasks of administration is conceived to be the formulation of policy proposals to solve problems, interesting consequences for organization follow. In this view, the rational organization of government would reflect the major problem areas whose boundaries have evolved from and been defined by socially felt needs and the state of relevant technology for meeting them. Organizations would be structured to ask the questions and provide the facts necessary for solutions.... The nature of the policy to be formulated implies the theoretical, factual, and value premises necessary for its rational and responsible development. The institutional structure can then be considered in terms of personnel possessed of values, drives, and skills so structured as organizationally to simulate a reasoned inquiry. The test of organizational rationality is the capacity of the organization to make explicit and controlling the theory on which its actions depend, to spell out and test the crucial hypotheses involved in the theory, and to amass and focus the facts needed to test the hypotheses. Such an organization can have experience that approximates the self-correcting discipline of a science. From the point of view of goal-oriented behavior and problem-solving capacity, it is an ideal.... II Value in politics and administration is most often expressed as a kind of - be it that of political superiors in the legislature, the sovereign, or the people. The pyramidal form of most ideal organization charts, the preoccupation with the location of authority, and the structuring of a tight paper-chain of command evidence basic concern with administration as will organization. The concern with legitimate hierarchy is similar in nature to the legalist's devotion to sovereignty. …