Reforming the Public Sector: How to Achieve Better Transparency, Service, and Leadership

8. Politicians and Administrators: Two Characters in Search of a Role

Our title is a play on the title of a celebrated Italian work first performed in 1921, Sei personaggi in cerca di autore [Six characters in search of an author], by Luigi Pirandello. Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934,“for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art.” Contemporary politicians and administrators are indeed players on a public stage, seeking their appropriate contemporary roles. Introduction The relationships and roles of politicians and administrators have long been a well-debated issue in the literature on public administration.1 In the traditional model of public administration, administrators are viewed as bureaucrats , professionals, and mere executors of the political mandate.According to this model, politicians provide guidance whereas administrators provide neutral skills for the benefit of the policy process and for translating decisions into concrete results.2 Waves of “modernization” in the public sector have meant that administrators are increasingly being asked to wear the hat of managers.3 Once again, however, politicians and administrators are seen as actors with separate functions : the former are supposed to play a strategic role, deciding on broad policies and setting targets for managers, and the latter are expected to reach these targets in an efficient and effective manner.4 This standard “dichotomic” outlook has been challenged by more empirical approaches, which tend to view the boundaries between the political and the managerial spheres as being more blurred.5 According to these approaches, 157 8 Politicians and Administrators: Two Characters in Search of a Role mariannunziata liguori, mariafrancesca sicilia, and ileana steccolini the two roles are complementary and overlapping instead of separate. Furthermore , their actual features are far from being fixed and may depend on contextual, organizational, and individual factors.6 In order to contribute to this debate, in this chapter we investigate the emerging roles of politicians and administrators by achieving a better understanding of their overlapping components and combinations. Our study was conducted by taking a survey of Italian politicians and administrators at the level of local governments (LGs) of political units with more than 80,000 inhabitants. The findings suggest that three broader factors (in terms of roles and behaviors) exist—which we call managerial, professional, and political— and that the two roles are blurred in some cases and even swapped in others. In the following section we review the relevant literature; in the third section we describe our analytical methodology; in the next section we present and discuss results; and in the final section we draw some conclusions and suggest ways forward for research. Developments and Unresolved Issues in the Relationship and Roles of Politicians and Administrators Developments in the roles of politicians and administrators and the unfolding of their relationship are characteristic of the public sector. According to traditional theory, there is a strict separation between politicians and administrators , based on the idea that the former define policies and the latter implement them.7 This image of a clear division of labor exalts the authority of politicians, who dominate administrators. The latter are seen as bureaucrats, experts with professional know-how and skills who are responsible for the efficient implementation of policies; they are considered neutral and lacking authority and discretion to make their own decisions.8 The two actors have been seen to have different decision-making criteria: administrators tend to rely on technically defined and feasible solutions, whereas politicians make decisions with a view to political advantage and consensus.9 The traditional model of public administration, based on the primacy of politicians and the neutrality and professionalism of administrators, is reversed in the model suggested by New Public Management (NPM).10 NPM backs the drive to transform bureaucrats into managers, who are seen as central actors in the process of change because their focus on efficiency, effectiveness , and results embodies economic rationality.11 The role of administrators as managers is supposed to be less concerned with the neutral use of professional expertise than with defining and reaching goals, as well as with quality management of financial and human resources. The normative 158 m. liguori, m. sicilia, and i. steccolini division of roles between politicians and managers is resumed in this new model, but the primacy of politics gives way to the primacy of management. The managerial sphere is granted greater autonomy from the political one, under the manifesto of “letting the managers manage.”12 An increasing number of authors have pointed out that...