Governments confront perhaps the greatest confluence of global challenges today: the first-world financial and fiscal challenges of late capitalism’s conflict with humanism; the looming ecological catastrophe of climate change and quagmire of future energy production; and the third-world challenges of population explosion, urbanization and intensifying conflict over dwindling resources. At the same time, public administrators tend to poll about as well as your average congressional member.

Distrust of government administrators today is a scenario not unlike the nation’s last great economic calamity, when public officials responded to the Great Depression by strengthening the Great Fiction of our field: the separation of policymaking from the administration of government.

The modern conception of the policy-administration dichotomy is often attributed to the writings of Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow. Wilson, in his famous directive for American administrators to emulate a murderous fellow’s skills for sharpening a knife “without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it,” prescribed a comparative study of the “ways and means” of foreign government as a form of self-improvement (Wilson, 1887). Goodnow addressed the flaws in conceiving of an “extreme” literal interpretation of the constitutional separation of powers that ignores the differentiated duties of various authorities within government (Goodnow, 1900).

Wilson was concerned with the corrupting influences of political parties on government administration, as well as with Congress delving into the minutia of management (Stillman, 1973). Goodnow worried that political interference would lead to inefficiencies if administrators cared more for the favor of party bosses than for the good of their departments. But he accepted some level of political involvement and administrative policymaking influence when he noted that “much must be left to official discretion, since what is demanded of the officers is not the doing of a concrete thing, but the exercise of judgment” (81). Foremost, both early founders of Public Administration were seeking to define a “zone of competency” for public professionals to operate in with discretion and developable areas of expertise.

This artificial separation was exacerbated by debates over the organizational differences between business and government, and whether the discipline is more artistry or science. Despite the best efforts of administration scholars, the root-stems of the dichotomy survive in modern American governance and impede the ability of practitioners to establish an acceptable “zone of influence” in policy advising. Worse, the public appears at a loss to comprehend and appreciate the vast size and scope of the tasks government administrators have been charged with performing.

Current scholar James Svara (1998) called the dichotomy model that would grow out of their writings more an “aberration” in the history of government administration theory, one that neither man ever prescribed or even mentioned beyond the general desire to break the hold of spoils-era corruption on public management.

In promoting the council-manager form of government, Richard Childs envisioned the public administrator as a leadership figure in the community who would bring only questions of general policy to the council. Such empowerment of unelected leadership would later become a politically unpopular and minimalized characteristic of the progressive reform era, much to Childs’ disillusionment.
 
Tax Revolts, and Poorly Understood Progressivism
The dichotomy dates back to the 1927-1936 period in which financial support from the Rockefeller Philanthropies was contingent upon the rhetorical separation of so-called “neutral” government research from the more politically interested social sciences as they were then viewed (Roberts, 1994). Because of the social stigmatism attached to the name of billionaire namesake John Rockefeller, the various organizations his non-profits supported were keenly sensitive to the implication that they were trying to influence the political process. In order to secure support, Roberts wrote, early advocates of government research had to establish a “demonstration of neutrality” to secure funding or simply survive the rampant anti-tax sentiment among the Depression-racked citizenry.

This rhetorical imperative of some fledgling municipal research bureaus coincided with the rise of professional organizations in the decade after 1925, centrally organized around the Public Administration Clearing House and International City Managers Association, both run by Louis Brownlow. A former journalist, author, and municipal manager, Brownlow embraced the notion of professional neutrality for public administrators while at the same time espousing a expanded zone of influence for improving the lives of citizens. It was an “activist” and liberal view of government action Brownlow adhered to himself as a city manager and one he prescribed for the federal government while chairing President Franklin Roosevelt’s Committee on Administrative Management.

The Brownlow Committee would be credited with enlarging the powers of the presidency, and transforming the office into one more focused on administrative management (Stillman R. J., 1998). Still, both Brownlow and fellow administrative professionalist Luther Gulick were heavily indebted to the Rockefeller philanthropies for funding their work and took their charge to avoid government advocacy to heart (Roberts, pg. 225). The economic conditions overwhelming much of the government infrastructure during this period led such efforts to become heavily focused not just on government reform in the council-management government, but the drive for greater efficiency to become the dominant organization goal.

Similarly to Childs’ disappointment over the turn that his municipal reform movement took toward efficiency, Brownlow and Gulick were never disciples of marrying the establishment of professional standards to efficiency alone. Gulick would go on to become a fervent critic of the policy-administration dichotomy, although he is erroneously linked with espousing the model earlier in his career. Following his work on the Brownlow Committee, Gulick would go on to become an advocate for Keynesian full-employment policies for post-World War II economies (Markwell, 2006).

Nonetheless, early administration scholars oversaw the establishment of a new field, the spread of public administration departments at universities across the country, and the greatest period of government expansion and advocacy in history. The scholarship that followed would both seek to challenge and expand the zone of competency, to be more honest and self-critical, fueling a still unresolved argument over the theoretical foundations of the field that has hindered the authority of practitioners.
 
The Role of Values in Public Administration
Submitted to empirical testing, the politics-administration dichotomy was never an ideal type built to last. Herbert Simon implored administration scholars to abandon the squishiness of “proverbs” in favor of more rigorously testable theory-building that could “rebuild those tools to usefulness,” and clearly articulates a role for administrators in his positivistic prescription. “Certainly neither the practitioner of administration nor the theoretician can be satisfied with the poor analytic tools that the proverbs provide him,” he wrote. (Simon, 2008).

Simon’s influence on policymaking is informative in that he acknowledges the crutch the Classic Paradigm has become for administrators in policymaking. Although his writings urge the development of an empirically driven science of administration that would both develop theory and inform practitioners, he felt the need to wean the professional side of the field from its paradigmatic shelter by proposing a fact-value dichotomy.

But this formulation was equally problematic. Simon envisioned decision-making premises divided along these two lines: fact-based and value-based, in which fact-based premises are falsifiable while value-based premises are not. Therefore, administrators in the policy process should be focused on fact-based premises, which leads to testing whether alternative policy proposals produce the expected outcomes or not. Value-based premises are inherently judgment calls about whether a policy choice is “good” or “bad” and should be left to the less technically minded political leadership (Simon, 1957). By jettisoning the old approach which he found problematic both descriptively and normatively, Simon prescribed a “different standard for administrative behavior,” in which standoffish neutrality was supplanted by involvement in the policymaking process and predictability due to the value-premises imbued in the organization via recruitment and socialization (Fry & Raadschelders, 2008).

Simon’s distinction articulated in Administrative Behavior was immediately criticized as harmful to the development of scientifically based yet politically realistic administration. Although he defended the distinction, it became an afterthought in his later organizational work (Subramanian, 1963). However, the treatment and contention of contradiction between values and facts as Simon conceptualizes them – and others criticize them -- deserves some unfolding here to serve our purposes.
 
Simon and Waldo, Revisited
The Behavioral movement that began in the 1940s wasn’t the only pressure-point brought to bear on government. Dwight Waldo would argue that Classical scholars were in fact describing a social science in their emphases on principles of management, efficiency, and consolidation of power in the executive which were value-laden. Waldo also rejected the policy-administration dichotomy as a cover for the underlying ideological goals of the Classical paradigm, which he saw as developing government-centered expertise to foster greater efficiencies and advance the “mission of America.” (Waldo, 1971).

The accepted history in texts is that the Behavioral and Politics-as-Administration approaches “devastated” the Classical Paradigm, and yet the remains are with us today. What did this devastating assault leave in its place? How did the absorption of both Simon’s and Waldo’s arguments impact the “zone of competency” and what are the lasting effects on policy analysis?

In retrospect, Simon’s substitution of the fact-value dichotomy for the policy-administrative remedies neither the problem of the professional sphere of influence nor the lack of scientific theory-building. Instead, his proposal perpetuated the myth of separateness between policymaking and administration. Because Simon’s conceptualization of organization decision-making as one where all actors in the hierarchy utilize “decision premises” that are in effect the formulation of policy, his own theoretical contribution undercuts the false choice of values or fact-based decision-making he presents.

Simon endeavored to give lift to a “science of administration” as well as a practical scientific basis for government management. But his refusal to accept values as an endogenous element of decision premises – and thus a value-influenced policy formulation at work in every level of government – left policy in the same rut. Those who followed disavowed value-free administration explicitly and articulated vastly different positions for public managers.

Charles Lindblom assaulted classical rationalism in policymaking and discredited the view of neutral competence. Out of fear of the bureaucratic organizations he considered anti-democratic, Lindblom sought to replace analytical problem-solving with a combative sphere of partisan research fueling the mutual adjustment of political actors.  Unlike Simon, he does not support the notion that administrators can employ neutral, scientific principles to design and apply appropriate government remedies to problems identified by the public through political leadership (Gregory, 1989). Ironically, Lindblom later in his career appears to lament the end-result of such partisan analysis and triumph of lay ideas in political ends, noting that “we are governed by presidents of dubious qualifications, often working with teams of cronies rather than experienced political leaders,” (Lindblom, 2002).

Likewise, Waldo’s modern treatment of the classical approach is tilted heavily toward his early career, when the scholar admits to having viewed public administration with contempt. Most cursory examinations of Waldo’s contributions overlook the softening of his position toward the dichotomy and the role it played in fostering political reform. Waldo went so far as to write that the policy-administration dichotomy was still engrained in the field’s culture and no satisfactory alternative had emerged (Waldo, 1980).
It is fitting that Waldo – perhaps the field’s most distinguished historian and critic – offered virtually no constructive theory to replace the discredited but not discarded classical paradigm. Public Administration in the United States is at a period of quandary and crisis. Faith in the institutions of government – and by extension, the people behind the machinery -- is faltering without a clear empirical rationale as to why this should be. Every week, we are confronted with growing evidence that public support for the modern governmental apparatus of effectuating public aims is slipping.

One potential long-term remedy is to behave organizationally much like Philip Selznick’s definition of cooptation: “The process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy determining structure of an organization as a means of averting threats to its stability or existence.” (Selznick, 1949). Selznick was describing the Tennessee Valley Authority’s methods in the 1930s for generating local buy-in for its mission to improve flood control, electricity generation, fertilizer manufacturing, and economic development to the Depression-racked Tennessee Valley. But the concept seems aptly suited for confronting the present disconnect between the public and their government.

Cooptation is applicable to an organization threatened by societal pressure as a form of adaptation to inoculate itself. Although wishful thinking, why couldn’t public administration make similar efforts to strengthen government agencies threatened by modern tax revolts? Much like some countries require citizens to serve in the military, government would be better-suited by political leaders with some level of training in administrative theory and procedures.

Selznick writes that “cooptation reflects a state of tension between formal authority and social power,” and its affect is to limit choices, and change the character and role of the organization. He writes that the phenomenon has taken hold as society has democratized, voluntary associations have formed, and the government has greater need to broaden the public’s participation as a means of control.

Today, quite the opposite patterns of fact have emerged: public participation in government has dropped precipitously over the years. Politicians are hailed for showcasing their lack of basic understanding of governance. While it is unlikely public administrations will resign their positions in mass and run for public offices, the discipline today needs to take a hard look at antiquated prescriptions for policy analysis against the backdrop of today’s modern perceived policy failures. Who is failing whom?
 
Bibliography:
Fry, B. R., & Raadschelders, J. C. (2008). Mastering Public Administration. Washington D.C.: CQ Press.
Goodnow, F. J. (1900). Politics and Administration: A Study in Government. New York: Russell & Russell.
Gregory, R. (1989). Political Rationality or 'Incrementalism'? Charles E. Lindblom's enduring contribution to public policy making theory . Policy & Politics , 139-53.
Lindblom, C. E. (2002). The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Price, D. K. (1941). The Promotion of the City Manager Plan. Public Opinion Quarterly , 563-578.
Roberts, A. (1994). Demonstrating Neutrality: The Rockefeller Philanthropies and the Evolution of Public Administration, 1927-1936. Public Administration Review , 221-227.
Simon, H. A. (1957). Administrative Behavior. New York: Free Press.
Simon, H. A. (2008). The Proverbs of Administration. In J. M. Shafritz, & A. C. Hyde, Classics of Public Administration (pp. 124-37). Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Stillman, R. I. (1973). Woodrow Wilson and the Study of Administration. American Political Science Review , 582-588.
Stillman, R. J. (1998). Louis Brownlow: Apostle of Administrative Management. In R. J. Stillman, Creating the American State (pp. 138-160). Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Subramanian, V. (1963). Fact and Value in Decision Making. Public Administration Review , 232-237.
Svara, J. H. (1998). The Politics-Administration Dichotomy Model as Aberration. Public Administration Review , 51-58.
Waldo, D. (1971). Public Administration. In J. A. Uveges Jr., The Dimensions of Public Administration: Introductory Readings (pp. 71-73). Boston: Holbrook Press.
Waldo, D. (1980). The Enterprise of Public Administration: A Summary View. Novato: Chandler & Sharp Publishers.
Wilson, W. (1887). The Study of Administration. Political Science Quarterly , 2.

Academics on the conference circuit sometimes justifiably get a bad reputation for the perception that travel is less work than play.

Despite a severe political fight in Illinois over public spending, my department found a way this month to send myself and two colleagues to Thailand for talks to establish or expand joint-degree programs with Thai and Chinese universities and to attend the 6th International Conference on Local Government hosted by Khon Kaen University.

Local government in Thailand takes on a different meaning than in the U.S. context. While the cities are administered by municipal clerks, the central government – led by the military -- appoints them and calls the shots in local development, service delivery and finance decisions.

The same week we met with political science department administrators at Thammasat University to discuss the parameters for a joint-Master’s in Public Administration program with Northern Illinois University, hundreds of students and activists marched to Bangkok’s Democracy Monument to mark the nine-year anniversary of the country’s 2006 military coup. Thailand has had a succession of military juntas since then, and protests are technically outlawed. In the Bangkok Post, government officials threatened to hold the organizers of the protest “accountable.” 

The protests were meant to embarrass the country’s current military-backed prime minister, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, who is slated to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York about Thailand's plans for poverty alleviation and sustainability, as well as when elections could be held (maybe 2017).

Thailand is a tourism mecca, but it’s also an urban development hub where research on urban sustainability could find an audience. Everyone knows about Bangkok, a 14-million-population hub of investment, transportation and health-care companies from the Asian economic boom. But the country’s provinces are also in an anxious mood to boost development – creating Special Economic Zones (SEZ) where in some cases, residents are being displaced to make way for massive development projects.

At the conference, I presented some research on Florida’s growth-management history which shared some commonalities with the Thai experience. Florida centralized its growth-planning in the 1980s in order to achieve more consistent and less-sprawling, environmentally damaging development patterns (although the policy never perfectly synced with the institutional design). 
Like many well-intentioned governmental efforts, Florida never adequately funded its growth-management system. My dissertation work (admittedly unpublished so far) has consistently found evidence that local government managers in Florida generally attempted to adhere to their comprehensive plans and resist sprawling, leap-frog types of development patterns. This negative managerial effect is conditional, of course, on the structure of the legislative institution in the community. Council members representing more concentrated areas in counties had a positive effect on more intensive land uses, offseting the effects of managers to some extent. And the mangerial effect differs between counties -- the locus of sprawl -- and cities.

In a fit of political hubris – made possible by the broad disaffection with Florida’s sprawling results – Gov. Rick Scott and lawmakers decentralized growth-planning in 2011, handing control back to the local policymakers and developers who weren’t trusted to make those decisions in the 1980s. Where the state goes in terms of future growth is an open question. 

But my Thai experience reinforces the mandate scholars have to make our work relevant, not only to practitioners in the United States, but in developing countries where lessons from experiments in urban planning can offer insights. Thai professors I spoke with generally distrust elected politicians as a result of the widespread bribery when the country was under democratic control. At the same time, there was a general sense that the country needed more local control of its growth decisions in order to better protect the rights of marginalized populations.  U.S. federalism has allowed us to experiment with a wide array of variants in local government structure and policies, and those experiences need more comparative work. 

Managing urban land use and development poses challenging governance issues to state and local governments not just in the United States but around the globe. Cities account for more than half of the world’s population (UN 2012) and will be home to 66% by 2050. At the same time, 70% of all greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change come from urban areas (IPCC 2014).  Current global land-use trends suggest urbanization will accelerate globally over the next two decades -- in fact, we're on pace to develop more land between 2010-2030 than in all of recorded human history.

Applying our findings – stretching them to see if they hold up in an international context – should be the primary goal of urban scholars in the coming years and decades. This is a precise moment in time when it makes the most sense to expand social science research investment. Hopefully, I can get back to Thailand and developing urban centers elsewhere to do that. 

In recent years, urban researchers have been understandably doing lots of work on sustainability – this conceptualization of the economic development, environmental protection and social equity activities of local governments as single, unidimensional latent construct.

While the literature to date has offered a lot of insights, my co-author William Swann and I argue in a new Journal of Urban Affairs article that researchers need to now move beyond treating all “green” policy tools as these equally weighted commitments to sustainable governance.

Specifically, we explore whether the degree of such commitment reflects different motivations and test for distinct political economies underlying decisions to commit to energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction policy tools. We find evidence that the determinants for the two types of policies are distinct, and subsequent research should focus on disentangling these distinct motivations for sustainable action by governments.

It's been nearly five decades since Robert Dahl called local governments a "laboratory" for democracy, but only seven years since urban research was re-christened a "black hole" of political science from which "[n]o ideas escape the event horizon ... " (Sapotichne, Jones, & Wolfe, 2007).

Despite the many valid criticisms (or perhaps in response to some), public policy has continued recently to explore the problems of urban growth and decline in a multi-disciplinary fashion, focusing multiple theoretical lenses on questions of governance and division of authority as well as the practical applications for areas of policy specialization. 

I wrote a paper for the Policy Studies Journal 2015 Yearbook edition which reviews recent articles on income, housing, and racial/ethnic stratification, and the common link of mobility-based prescriptions. It also reviews the role sustainability, equity and cultural norms play in scholarship. The field is moving in a direction that integrates classical rational choice and sociological explanations for policies addressing sustainability and equity, the role of cultural identity in urban renewal efforts, and long-standing problems of citizen participation in government decision-making.

CHICAGO -- It sounds like the kind of nerd fight that might make for a marginally successful SNL sketch: How do we get the young folks interested in federalism again?  But for local government scholars, the multi-year discourse over how to stem declining interest in the American Society for Public Administration's local and regional governance section is a touchy subject.

Last week at ASPA's national conference at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, the debate came to a head. 

A group of scholars led by Chair Richard Feiock of Florida State University pushed through an amendment to the bylaws changing the definition of the Section on Intergovernmental Administration and Management (SIAM) to re-define the scope of the research its members undertake. The change was resisted by some who argued the new mission statement didn't adequately take into account the research on federalism and rural regions, and made minor omissions like failing to mention collaboration between the public and private sectors. After some debate, the section voted 16-14 for the new mission statement, with several grumbling that this was no way to increase membership.

A more controversial measure to change SIAM's name to the Section on Governance was postponed for a year after Chair-elect Eric Zeemering made a motion to appoint a new committee to study the implementation of the new mission statement (and ostensibly consider new options for names). It averted what might have been a far nastier fissure in the group. (One fellow student told me the fight was the most interesting thing he saw at the five-day conference).

The parliamentary moves in one esoteric wing of an academic discipline are less significant than the overriding concern among ASPA higher-ups that junior scholars are finding other outlets for their networking and research sharing. ASPA, like SIAM, is witnessing a pronounced decline in membership.

Last fall, Dr. Feiock (my major professor at FSU) tapped Drs. Benoy Jacob at the University of Colorado-Denver, Cali Curley at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), Jennifer Connolly at the University of Miami, and myself to report back on what SIAM needed to do to better brand itself with junior scholars. During our first conference call, most of us confessed we'd never heard of SIAM, and were unsure how membership might be useful for our careers.

Herein lies part of the problem: Urban scholarship is highly fragmented between a number of disciplines, including sociology, political science, economics, urban planning, among many others (just look up the disciplines of a randomly selected volume of the Journal of Urban Affairs). 

Urban scholars have their own associations (Urban Affairs Association and APPAM, not to mention political science sections on policy and urban politics), and convincing them that ASPA membership has something unique to offer will be a tough task. These researchers often find more familiarity among scholars from other disciplines who share interests in specific urban policies like charter schools, public housing, gender and racial/ethnic equity and other forms of social stratification. The scholars SIAM wants to recruit are already being serviced by these specialized membership organizations.

If we couldn't think of a reason to join, why would anyone else?

How would anyone even know public administration's SIAM (an acronym with negative connotations for Thai residents) from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics?

Public administration sections are, frankly, far behind many of their peer disciplines in tapping into social media. Go to the Midwest Political Science Association conference in April, for instance, and watch the kinds of Twitter exchanges that break out. By comparison last week, the ASPA hashtag #ASPA2015 looked like it was being populated by about six highly caffeinated but extremely lonely people.

SIAM (or whatever name it assumes next year) now has a blog here, hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago's Jered Carr and Aleea Perry. Yours truly has been tapped with attempting to develop a social media presence for the section. But before you can sell new urban scholars on SIAM, the organization needs to develop a pitch that distinguishes this venue from the myriad options they have now.

The problem is compounded by the mandatory short-term self-interests of untenured scholars who need to derive some benefit from membership in a section beyond networking. Junior scholars need to be laser focused on the tangible payoffs that will pad their tenure applications. A section like SIAM needs to provide an outlet where young (I use this term interchangably with "junior," even though I hardly qualify as "young" anymore) researchers can sharpen their papers, cultivating potential future research collaborators and get better panel placement. In good, old-fashioned economic terms, they need to be able to maximize their utility -- increase their chances of publication, or tap into new networks of collaborators with the potential for high short-term research payoffs. 

This might sound a bit selfish or myopic, but these are the realities facing the kinds of hungry folks any organization that hopes to survive needs populating its business meetings and paying dues. Luckily for SIAM, the section has a significant base of excellent scholars who have much to offer to junior analysts. The question is whether junior scholars can be successfully matched in ways that allow them to derive intellectual inspiration, productivity motivation, and take-home utility. 

The next year will be an interesting experience. 

Thanks to the directive for more problem-oriented NSF projects and the need for better inter-disciplinary research on resource management, organizations like the University of Maryland's National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) are working to bring social and physical scientists together for team research into environmental problems.

I was fortunate enough in the Fall of 2014 to get approved for an 18-month Graduate Pursuit research grant along with a team of five other political science, engineering, environmental science and economics students. The project is examining the water-stress and institutional influences on "water management transitions" in three U.S. cities -- Los Angeles, Miami, and Las Vegas -- over a 20-year period. This is allowing us to bring modeling for hydrology and the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework together in a novel application of Elinor Ostrom's "Institutional Grammar" tool. The tool involves coding the rules, norms and shared strategies for water management which overlap and are nested in varied governance arrangements.

The project has already been eye-opening and challenging, and promises to lead to interesting insights regarding how these three water-challenged metropolitan areas have responded to increasing water stresses. The mission of SESYNC is to develop existing data into actionable policy recommendations, so one of our primary goals is to produce a policy briefing we hope to share at conferences and other water-management forums. We have already come up with some novel research strategies which promise to make for interesting journal articles by the time the project wraps up. 

I would highly recommend taking advantage of SESYNC's resources, if anyone has the opportunity. The organization is top-notch. Here's a more in-depth description of our project: https://www.sesync.org/project/graduate-student-pursuit-rfp/water-miami-vegas-la