252 10: Conclusion: A Bright Future for Th eory?
is that from the theory’s beginnings as an organizing construct in public admin-
istration, there has been wide recognition that reality inconveniently contradicts
the keystone assumption of the dichotomy.
From a purely theoretical standpoint, systematic thinking about public ad-
ministration is aided enormously by sticking with the politics-administration di-
chotomy. Th is tractability comes at a price: Th e inaccurate portrayal of the real
world represented by the dichotomy lessens the replicative, descriptive, and pre-
dictive capacities of the theory. Since Dwight Waldo (1948) and Herbert Simon
(1947/1997), assuming away the salience of politics has become virtually impos-
sible for anyone engaged in the serious study of administration. Waldo, espe-
cially, made a persuasive argument that at a fundamental level administration is a
powerful form of politics and that any attempt to separate the two is likely to fail.
Rebuilding a fi rewall between politics and administration that can withstand the
battering ram of Waldo’s critique is an extraordinarily diffi cult challenge.
In answering that challenge, scholars have avoided the orthodox mistake of
simply assuming a clean separation between administration and politics, seeking
instead a realistic accounting of the working relationship between administra-
tion and politics. Such scholars as James Svara (1994) convincingly demonstrate
that administration clearly treads within the political arena, and vice versa. Yet
Svara also shows that decisionmaking areas are dominated by administration or
politics. Th is mixed relationship and the relative infl uence of the administrative
or the political sphere seems to be determined, at least in part, by organizational
structure and the formal and informal roles and responsibilities it imparts to ad-
ministrative actors.
Numerous frameworks have been constructed to describe and explain the el-
ements of this varied relationship between the administrative and political func-
tions of government. Capture theory explains the political role of the bureaucracy
by suggesting that public agencies “go native,” that is, they become advocates of
those they purportedly regulate. Although logically sound, capture theory has
never had much empirical support. Th e theory of client responsiveness explains
how structure can determine bureaucracy’s political role—as bureaucracy is split
into functional specializations, each distinct administrative operation becomes an
advocate for its clientele. Th e most promising work to come out of the theory of
client responsiveness is Michael Lipsky’s (1980) examination of the street-level
bureaucracy. He found that rather than being advocates for their clients, bureau-
crats are more realistically described as people who deal with diffi cult social situa-
tions but who have limited resources and little guidance from political authority.
In this situation, Lipsky concluded, bureaucrats in eff ect are forced to make pol-
icy decisions.
Th e most promising framework in which to coherently distinguish and
link the administrative and political elements of government is agency theory.
Th is theory is grounded in economics and describes a contractual relationship
between elected and appointed government actors. Elected offi cials are the