Allison’s Paradigm of Bureaucratic Politics 47
toward the overall goal of effi ciency. Waldo said that Simon was simply recast-
ing the problem by substituting a logical division of politics and administration
for an institutional division, and was doing so to preserve the central principle
of orthodox administrative theory, namely, effi ciency.
Effi ciency could not remain the discipline’s talisman against politics, Waldo
argued, because administration is political. In Waldo’s perspective, effi ciency it-
self is a political claim. For example, how does one assess the effi ciency of, say, a
library, or the Department of Defense? If effi ciency is defi ned as an input-output
ratio, one has a choice of inputs and outputs to assess effi ciency in both instances,
although none is the unassailably objective “factual” option. As choosing among
these options unavoidably involves values not just facts, effi ciency can hardly be
value neutral (Stone 2002, 65). If public administration insisted that its orthodox
principles were politically neutral, Waldo argued, it would never be rid of the
theoretical straitjacket it used to restrain itself from the world of politics. Wal-
do’s argument bought a tart response from Simon (1952b), but even as Simon
went on the off ensive, there were signs that Waldo’s point had sunk deep into the
discipline. Published concurrently with Simon’s essay was another by an equally
prominent scholar—Peter Drucker (1952)—who wholeheartedly agreed with
Waldo’s assessment of the fundamentally political character of large-scale organi-
zations, and suggested that, if anything, Waldo had not pushed his arguments far
enough (see Simon 1952a for the complete essay on this point).
Waldo argued that at the heart of the problem with administrative theory is a
version of the problem James Madison struggled with in Federalist No. 10: How
do you preserve individual liberty without destroying the freedoms that make it
possible? For Madison, it was the dilemma of constructing a government strong
enough to protect individual liberty without making it vulnerable to the forces
that would crush the liberties of others for their own selfi sh interests. For Waldo,
“Th e central problem of democratic administrative theory, as of all democratic
theory, is how to reconcile democracy . . . with the demands of authority” (1952,
102). How do we construct a theory that accommodates the hierarchical and
authoritarian nature of the bureaucracy, the foundation of the modern adminis-
trative state and a seemingly necessary component of contemporary government,
with the seemingly contradictory egalitarian, ineffi cient ideals of democracy?
Waldo bestowed this grand and sweeping question upon the discipline rather
than provide its answer, but the question is surely enough to justify the need to
meld administrative theory with political theory, to motivate the search for a
theory of bureaucratic politics.
Allison’s Paradigm of Bureaucratic Politics
In the two decades following the publication of Th e Administrative State
(Waldo 1948), an embryonic theory of bureaucratic politics began to emerge
from a series of studies examining decisionmaking in the executive branch. Th e