In a world of true old public administration dwells the political-administrative split. It refers to the separation of elected government officials and administrators.
It goes by the rule of bureaucracy emphasizing hierarchical decision making process and requiring administrators to just focus on implementing the rules set by the elected government officials. They have no right to work with citizens. They do not need to meet one. As instructed, they must remain neutral at the time of implementation. Yet accountability cannot be thrown out of the window. In fact, this works in hierarchical way also and thus it has a model given below. With all honesty, government structure is not this restrained. The issues given after the model will explain it.
The Accountability Pyramid of Political-administrative Split
- People bring politicians to office through voting.
- Politicians make rules and thus, are accountable to people.
- Administrators implement the rules and remain accountable to politicians.
Issues of Political-administrative Split
Under this theory, administrators remain unaware of how to establish a relationship with the elected officials, making it difficult for them to participate in policy process. After all, they are to stay neutral. Secondly, they take a huge amount of risks. This is because according to this theory, if they attempt to work with politicians within policy formulation stage they risk getting fired. With no proper guideline on the relationship and inability to work with the citizens, administrators are left to come up with law interpretations that do not fully serve the public interest.
They can still make themselves look fair by pointing out the fact that the written laws are vague and that they have the knowledge on how to implement them. Actually, this is the reason why, a time came when government saw logic in hiring experts to do the administration work. This led to the birth of scientific approach to handling the implementation process. But all in all, it began to make elected officials appear less knowledgeable and participation of the citizens less important. The elected officials certainly did not lose their grip on the power. They still remained where they were. However, it was the group of citizens who lost the power to say anything, for their decisions were then taken by the experts.
There was actually a time when this rule was very much in action. Back then, the term implementation did not exist. It was just that the administrators listened to the instructions of the elected officials and went ahead performing their task. They were not required to work on adding new rules to the policies. Small amount of variation was okay, but this did not impact the overall structure of the policies. The idea that political-administrative split was superficial began to surface after the 40's. Still the implementation process was not a topic of discussion. The focus remained drown beneath the overall management structure of the government departments.
It was in 1973 when the term implementation began to steal the limelight. The credit for this goes to Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, the writers of Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland.
In this book, they explained the implementation issues which caused a massive project of Federal Economic Development Administration to fail miserably in California. They argued that it is difficult for a policy to turn into a reality without giving thought to how it must be implemented.
There was actually a time when this rule was very much in action. Back then, the term implementation did not exist. It was just that the administrators listened to the instructions of the elected officials and went ahead performing their task. They were not required to work on adding new rules to the policies. Small amount of variation was okay, but this did not impact the overall structure of the policies. The idea that political-administrative split was superficial began to surface after the 40's. Still the implementation process was not a topic of discussion. The focus remained drown beneath the overall management structure of the government departments.
It was in 1973 when the term implementation began to steal the limelight. The credit for this goes to Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, the writers of Implementation: How Great Expectations in Washington Are Dashed in Oakland.
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