Public Administration vs. Political Science

About one evening in three I spent with him as an adult–and after he had had his third Bombay Sapphire martini–my late grandfather Earl H. DeLong would start to rant about how the study of public policy as an academic discipline had gone way downhill over his lifetime as people who saw themselves as studying “public administration” were replaced by people who saw themselves as studying “political science”. Oh, there were exceptions–Grandfather Earl had a lot of respect for Aaron Wildavsky and James Q. Wilson–but, he said, rather than building up the mass of case studies and analyses from which one might actually be able to generalize and begin to draw useful and durable lessons about public management, people with chairs in graduate schools of public policy increasingly wanted to build orrerys and explain how their policies would bring about utopia.

As he used to say: “everyone wants to fantasize about Rommel, and nobody wants to be a real quartermaster, even though real quartermasters won a lot more battles than real Rommels have”.

But James Q. Wilson was an exception. And Buce has a very nice catch from his Bureaucracy::

Buce: Underbelly: From the Annals of Administrative Train-wreckery: Just Sayin’:

Executives who want to influence policy but who define “policy” largely in terms of what outside constituencies want (or will not denounce) are in an awkward position…. To change their agency, these officials need to understand its workings, know its people, and appreciate its constraints. But the external, constituency-serving orientation of such executives, combined with their short tenure in office, reduce the time and energy they can devote to this learning process. As a result, the policy changes they make are likely to be ill-considered and inadequately managed. Even the Social Security Administration… seriously underestimated the difficulty of implementing the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program in the early 1970s. Top executives were busy assuring Congress and the White House that the SSA could do the job of identifying three million aged, blind, or disabled persons, verifying their eligibility for SSI benefits, and hiring fifteen thousand new employees to service these beneficiaries; meanwhile, the working-level managers were approaching a state of panic…. It could not possibly train the people and install the computer systems fast enough to meet the deadlines.

Martha Derthick concluded her study of this episode with language that could describe executive-agency relations in many bureaus: 

It is impossible not to be struck by the differences between the view from the top, reflected in the serene pride that valuable social ends are about to be served, and the mounting panic and frustration in the field offices as unreadiness for the concrete task becomes all too clear.

Wilson, James (1991-01-29). Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It (Basic Books Classics) (p. 206). The Derthick reference goes to Martha Derthick, Agency Under Stress: The Social Security Administration and American Government (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, forthcoming), chap. 5.

And I suppose I should link to David Cutler’s 2010 letter trying to keep ObamaCare implementation from being a train-wreck…

608 words…