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84 / Pluralist Approach to Public Administration tween irreconcilable dispositions, different choices will tend to be made by different men; and this vagary of choice will have an effect, being a form of experiment , in the development of the species” (1978, 44). Politics, Constitutionalism, and Public Administration What are the implications of this view of politics for public administration? Some might argue that we would be much better off and safer if public administrators simply left politics to their democratically elected political masters and followed the directives that are agreed upon by these masters.This was certainly the view of Max Weber, who, notwithstanding his concerns about bureaucracy, believed that, “according to his proper vocation, the genuine official . . . will not engage in politics,” but rather should engage in “impartial administration” and that “the honor of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction” (1946, 95). Herman Finer also famously expressed such a view in a spirited debate with Carl Friedrich in the 1940s, when he wrote that “the servants of the public are not to decide their own course; they are to be responsible to the elected representatives of the public, and these are to determine the course of action of the public servants to the most minute degree that is technically feasible” (1941, 336). However, whatever our unease with the practice of politics in administration, the uncomfortable reality is that our constitutional form of politics makes the practice of a purely apolitical or instrumentalist approach to public administration very difficult, if not actually impossible. This is because power is highly dispersed and fragmented within our constitutional system so that, rather than following the directions of any one political leader or group of leaders, public administrators are able—and, in fact, in many cases find themselves compelled—to negotiate political support for their activities from a diverse set of political leaders and client groups. As a consequence, their activities are subject to the scrutiny, power, and influence of a multitude of different political actors, each of them advancing their own particular agendas and values (Long 1949; O’Neill 1988; Rohr 1986; Wilson 1989). As Norton Long made clear for us some sixty years ago, “the American system of government does not generate enough power at any focal point of leadership to provide the conditions for an even partially successful divorce of politics from administration,” so that public administrators simply “cannot depend on the formal chain of command to deliver enough political power to permit them to do their jobs” (1949, 258). Rather, public administrators find themselves working within “a structure of interests friendly or hostile, vague and general or compact and well-defined,” with power flowing “in from the sides of an organization” and also “up the or- Pluralist Approach to Public Administration / 85 ganization to the center from the constituent parts” (258). Timothy O’Neill has argued similarly that the “forces fragmenting and diffusing political authority within and among the constitutionally described institutions of American government . . . compel the many American bureaucracies to build political support for their goals and programs” (1988, 390). As a result, we have what Dahl terms “a decentralized bargaining bureaucracy” (1956, 145), one in which public administrators bargain for support from other political actors and, as a result, cannot help but be intimately involved in the practice of politics. As Dahl succinctly expresses it, our bureaucracy “has become a part of . . . the ‘normal’ American political process” (145). Because of our constitutional traditions, public administrators have inevitably been drawn into our political practices of procedural justice and have found themselves involved in situations that often require them, whether they like it or not, to hear the other side in administrative questions and, as a result, make choices among competing conceptions of the good. Public administration has become increasingly politicized, not in partisan terms so much, but rather in the sense that administrative decision making, in order to be effective , must be responsive to influence from a plurality of different and often conflicting interests and viewpoints within our system of governance.This is why, as O’Neill argues, “the language we use to describe bureaucratic policy-making— fragmented, disjointed, incremental, interest-group oriented—is similar to the language we use to describe the most accessible institution in the national government : the Congress” (1988, 391). This politicization of public administration, which has its roots in our constitutional structure of governance...

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