254 10: Conclusion: A Bright Future for Th eory?
traditional public administration. As the latter came crashing down, so did public
administration’s unifying paradigm. Th is left public administration groping for a
framework to defi ne itself and cleared the way for eff orts at theoretical coloniza-
tion from other disciplines.
Th ere is a payoff to this seismic shaking of public administration’s intellectual
foundations: Politics gets recognized as a fundamental component of administra-
tion, and vice versa. Even though this recognition may have sounded the death
knell of theoretical hegemony in public administration, it also recognized some of
the long-ignored (at least in a theoretical sense) realities of administration in prac-
tice. Th e architect of the bureaucratic politics movement was, of course, Waldo
(1948). His devastating critique of the fi rst half-century of public administration
scholarship not only exposed the suspect theoretical assumptions underpinning
public administration theory but also convincingly demonstrated the fundamen-
tally political role of administration. Indeed, Waldo made a supportable claim
that public administration’s intellectual framework was a normative political
philosophy. Th is claim—and Waldo made it extraordinarily hard to challenge—
made it virtually impossible for scholars of administration to continue assuming
away the bewildering complexities of politics. Aft er Waldo, a central challenge of
the discipline was to square a theoretical circle by reconciling the authoritative
and hierarchical nature of bureaucracy with the egalitarian values of democracy.
Any theory of administration, as Waldo (1952) famously put it, has to be a the-
ory of politics.
Th eoretically integrating the political role of bureaucracy has proven to be
extraordinarily diffi cult. Th e basic approach to accomplishing this task is to treat
bureaucracy and bureaucrats as political actors in their own right, actors with
identifi able agendas who engage in the push and pull of bargaining and compro-
mise that results in policy decisions. Th is characterizes both Graham Allison’s
(1971) model of bureaucratic politics and the theory of representative bureau-
cracy. Both of these approaches have enjoyed mixed success in fulfi lling the three
purposes of theory listed previously.
Allison’s project is notable because it was the fi rst truly comprehensive at-
tempt to answer Waldo’s challenge to create a theory of politics with administra-
tion at its center. Model III, in Allison’s taxonomy, had ambitions of universality
but turned out to have signifi cant weaknesses. So much was included in this
framework that, in seeking to explain everything, it explained not much at all. As
originally presented by Allison, Model III groaned under the weight of an extra-
neous clutter that belies the hallmark of comprehensive theory. As scholars began
trimming this clutter back in an eff ort to apply Model III as a guide to empirical
study, they quickly discovered its limits—its fi eld of application turned out to be
relatively narrow, and its explanatory powers weak.
Th e theory of representative bureaucracy has a sharper explanatory target
than Allison’s Model III. Rather than explain the entire process of policymak-
ing, representative bureaucracy scholarship attempts to explain how bureaucratic