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9

Th eories of Governance

Introduction: Public Administration’s

Need for a Th eory of Governance

During the last quarter-century, industrialized democracies have witnessed a fun-
damental shift in the purposes and methods of government. Various elements
combined to produce this change: increasing defi cits, economic stagnation, dis-
enchantment with the intermittently met promises of the welfare state, and a
general sense that government was encroaching on individual liberty. Reversing
a trend characteristic of post–World War II development, governments in the
1970s, 1980s, and 1990s became less hierarchical, more decentralized, and in-
creasingly willing to cede their role as dominant policy actor to the private sector
(Kettl 2000).
Th ese changes raise questions about the scope and nature of public administra-
tion, both as a profession and as a scholarly discipline. For virtually all of the twen-
tieth century, public administration was synonymous with bureaucracy, hierarchy,
and accountability. Although the golden age of theoretical hegemony in public ad-
ministration collapsed in the 1950s under the combined assault of Dwight Waldo,
Herbert Simon, and others, the retreat of the politics-administration dichotomy
as the discipline’s core organizing principle did not alter the constitutional or in-
stitutional nature of government. Th e collapse of orthodox theory meant that bu-
reaucracies within centralized policy jurisdictions could no longer be considered
outside or above politics, but they remained the central suppliers of public goods
and services and continued to defi ne what administration theory was called upon
to explain. Th e theoretical pluralism that followed struggled with mixed success to
explain bureaucracy’s newly acknowledged relationship with legislatures, execu-
tives, and the rest of the polity, but those relationships, the technical arrangements
underpinning them, and the role of civil servants in maintaining them remained
more or less untouched. Th e theoretical landscape of public administration
changed, but its professional and empirical reality remained stable.