Themes in Public Administration and Affairs

The purpose of this research is to review the book by Nicholas Henry, entitled Public Administration and Public Affairs (1995). This review will analyze the central themes of the work and address its strengths and weaknesses.

Henry begins by explaining the role of public bureaucracy and public administration in democratic society. He notes that bureaucracy and democracy are in fact antithetical. Bureaucracy tends to be hierarchical in nature and elitist. Democracy, on the other hand, tends to be egalitarian in nature. But in order for a democratic society to function properly, the bureaucracy and democracy must be reconciled (p. 1). Bureaucracy represents the technological elite, the body of persons skilled in how to get things done. The democratic mass is charged with determining the direction of public policy, but it is the skilled bureaucracy that carries the know-how to implement the policy in an efficient and productive manner.

The larger the democratic society, the larger and more specialized the public bureaucracy that is needed (pp. 4-5). There are three leading models of why government grows in size and complexity. One model is known as "political pluralism." The pluralist model posits that society is comprised of a number of competing groups with a broad range of interests. This means that demands for government services are high and a national bureaucracy is necessary to reconcile these demands. A second model is known as the "displacement/concentration hypothes

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provided the opportunity of applying management science in new ways. Public administrators have been a leading force in developing these new and expanded techniques of government. A second reason for this trend is that public administration has learned to rely less and less on its "mother discipline"--political science. Many of the accepted methodologies of political science are now irrelevant to the practice of public administration. Some of the instruments of political science are useful to public administrators, such as public opinion polling. But many of the other leading instruments of political science, such as legislative roll call analysis, content analysis and international aggregate data analysis, bear little utility for public administration. Consequently, the field of public administration has developed its own unique methodologies (p. 294). Some of these instruments include operations research, systems theory, statistical analysis, computer science and budgeting. As society becomes more complex, so must the public administration methods used to regulate it. The "law of requisite variety" states that regulatory mechanisms must equal in complexity the systems they are designed to regulate. Thus, the growing specializ

Category: Government - T