Administrative Th eory as Political Th eory 43
Nevertheless, numerous studies have confi rmed the need for systematic
frameworks accounting for the political role of the bureaucracy. Several re-
sponses to this need have provided important insights into the political role of the
bureaucracy, and in doing so, signifi cantly expanded our understanding of public
administration.
Administrative Th eory as Political Th eory
Th e seminal work that justifi ed the need for a theory of bureaucratic politics is
Dwight Waldo’s Th e Administrative State (1948). Waldo did not construct a the-
ory of bureaucratic politics in this book, but here and in later writings he made
two critical contributions that have supported all subsequent eff orts to do so.
First, he undertook a devastating critique of the extant research literature. He
argued that public administration scholarship revolved around a core set of be-
liefs that cumulatively served to constrain theoretical development. Key among
these were the beliefs that effi ciency and democracy were compatible and that the
work of government could be cleanly divided into separate realms of decision and
execution. Th ese beliefs led public administration scholars to champion effi ciency
as the central goal of public agencies, to develop a “science” of administration to
maximize that effi ciency, and to ignore the political ramifi cations of these beliefs
and the prescriptions they implied.
Second, and probably more important, Waldo argued that administrative
scholarship was itself driven by a particular philosophy of politics. A good por-
tion of Th e Administrative State is devoted to examining the scholarly public
administration literature through the lens of fi ve key issues in political philos-
ophy: (1) the nature of the Good Life, or a vision of what the “good society”
should look like; (2) the criteria of action, or the procedures for determining
how collective decisions should be made; (3) the question of who should rule;
(4) the question of how the powers of the state should be divided and appor-
tioned; and (5) the question of centralization versus decentralization, or the
relative merits of a unitary state versus a federal system.
Waldo concluded that public administration scholarship was anchored by
well-developed responses to all of these issues. Like theorists from Machiavelli
to Marx, public administration scholars had a vision of what the “good society”
looks like: It is industrial, urban, and centrally planned; it has no poverty, no cor-
ruption, and no extremes of wealth. Science is its ideal, and waste and ineffi ciency
are its enemy. Th ese same scholars also had a clear preference for the criteria of
action: A scientifi c analysis of the facts should decide what should be done. Public
administration orthodoxy espoused particularly fi rm beliefs about who should
rule: “Th e assertion that there is a fi eld of expertise which has, or should have, a
place in and claim upon the exercise of modern governmental functions—this is
a fundamental postulate of the public administration movement” (1948, 89–90).
Technocrats blessed with the requisite competence and expertise were public