Summary 65
decentralized nature of the American system meant a program’s success or failure
was tied to the political muscle of the bureaucracy it was entrusted to. As Long
succinctly put it, “Th e lifeblood of administration is power. Its attainment, main-
tenance, increase, dissipation, and loss are subjects the practitioner and student
can ill aff ord to neglect” (1949, 257). Long argued that ignoring the political role
of the bureaucracy robs administrative theory of a crucial connection to the real
world and consigns any number of the prescriptive conclusions of scholarly work
to failure.
Summary
Such scholars as Long, Gaus, and Waldo argue that, like it or not, bureaucracy is
a political institution and that any useful theoretical framework has to recognize
and account for this simple fact of political life. Public administration theory, in
other words, must also be political theory. Th eories of bureaucratic politics are
designed with this objective in mind, and pursuit of this goal remains a profi table
activity for students of public administration.
Allison’s Model III and the theory of representative bureaucracy represent
two of the better-known and most widely employed bureaucratic politics frame-
works. Although it is hard to underestimate Allison’s contribution, it clearly falls
short of a generally applicable theoretical framework. Allison’s Model III is likely
to continue to fi nd gainful employment in structuring administrative studies, but
evidence has steadily mounted that it is underperforming in practice. Wilson’s
work shows that Allison’s Model III was perhaps too limited in scope, as it leaves
out organizational issues and ignores the fact that bureaucratic politics exist in a
complex network, far beyond the confi nes of the executive branch.
Although having a considerably older lineage than Model III, the theory of
representative bureaucracy in one sense remains curiously underemployed. Th e
basic model is parsimonious, and its predictive hypotheses are intuitively easy to
grasp. Simply stated, the theory argues that a civil service refl ecting the diverse
interests and values of the community it serves will take those interests into ac-
count when exercising its discretionary authority. Th e validity of the theory is tied
to the hypothesis that passive representation will lead to active representation.
Although there are diffi culties in operationalizing such tests, a growing number
of published studies are aimed squarely at empirically assessing this claim. So
far, these have produced mixed and sometimes contradictory results. Since the
literature on representative bureaucracy is also increasing in sophistication, per-
haps it represents the most promising theoretical development for understanding
bureaucratic politics.