46 3: Th eories of Bureaucratic Politics
by running agencies according to sound, scientifi c management principles; by
making technical competence the criterion for civil service employment; and by
shielding these technical experts from whatever winds happened to be stirring the
dust in the political arena.
Waldo thus viewed the political philosophy inherent in public administration
scholarship not as an attempt to usurp democracy, but as a necessary corrective
to save it. As Waldo put it, “Democracy if it were to survive, could not aff ord to
ignore the lessons of centralization, hierarchy, and discipline. Put bluntly, it was
the maxim ‘Autocracy during hours is the price of democracy aft er hours’” (1952,
87). Th eoretically, the undemocratic elements of administrative orthodoxy—its
emphasis on effi ciency, hierarchy, and authority—could be seen in the service
of democracy as long as the politics-administration orthodoxy held. An effi cient
and expertly run administrative apparatus insulated from politics and under the
authority of a powerful executive would increase accountability and promote ef-
fective, competently run public programs and policies. If things did not work, ev-
eryone would know whom to blame and why, and the representative institutions
of democracy could act accordingly.
Th e problem, as numerous scholars have pointed out, was that the politics-
administration dichotomy did not hold. As Waldo meticulously detailed in his
literature review, there was ample evidence that bureaucracies pushed some val-
ues over others, that bureaucracies acted as power brokers among competing
special interests, and that lawmakers were increasingly reliant on and infl uenced
by the expertise and opinions of administrators. Administrative theory simply
could not ignore these realities and continue to usefully shape the direction of
the discipline. At a minimum, Waldo argued, the concept of democracy and all
its messy implications had to be brought back into administrative theory. Ad-
ministrative scholars had to recognize that their central principle—effi ciency—
was not value neutral, and that its uneasy relationship with democratic principles
had to be recognized (Waldo 1952, 90).
Waldo suggested that continued attempts to create a science of adminis-
tration would result in theoretical dead ends because “science” was, in eff ect,
a code word for preserving the core principle of effi ciency, a signal for another
attempt to inoculate administration against politics. In an essay in the Amer-
ican Political Science Review, Waldo singled out Herbert Simon’s argument
separating questions of administration into issues dealing with fact and issues
dealing with values. Simon’s enormously infl uential Administrative Behavior
(1947/1997) had essentially demolished the extant research seeking to defi ne
and promulgate the “principles” or “laws” of a science of administration. Yet
Simon sought to save the possibility of that science. He argued that it was con-
ceivable if it limited its attention to decisions centered on facts (statements
that can be tested to assess whether they are true or false) as opposed to values
(statements that are validated by human fi at). Decisions of fact were central
to the administrative realm, Simon argued, and could be scientifi cally guided