Public Administration and Society: Critical Issues in American Governance by Richard C Box

Author:Richard C Box [Box, Richard C]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317461920
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

POLICY IMPLEMENTATION

The classical model of public administration, as noted earlier in this chapter, holds that administrative matters are not political, but rather technical. According to this view, policy implementation requires the establishment of an appropriate set of routine activities that will bring about the result intended by the choice made in the policy decision. The classic presumption is that partisan and political-interest jockeying ends once a law is enacted or a judicial ruling decreed. However, this orthodox position ignores the reality that the achievement of a program’s objectives (or a court order) entails a “process of assembling numerous and diverse program elements” (Bardach, 1977, p. 36), many of which are dispersed across levels of government or held by persons or organizations in the private sector. Converting a law or court ruling into action is not automatic, because the implementation of policy in the American federal union occurs within a matrix of multiple governments and power relationships characterized by fragmented authority and contending political interests. Because many of the government officials and private citizens who must be marshaled to implement a policy are independent of each other and these diverse actors possess their own preferences on a given policy (e.g., favor or oppose), bargaining is required to elicit their cooperation. Choices made by agency managers and staff will often reflect more than their professional judgment about how best to achieve the legislature’s or court’s intent; their decisions will also reflect compromises or trade-offs among contending interests and values. Consequently, implementation combines the technical tasks of administration with the resolution of political issues.

Citizens are supposed to be sovereign in a constitutional democracy, and democratic theory holds that policy choices made by the people’s elected representatives are the authoritative expression of public purposes (Appleby, 1962; Mayo, 1960). Madison, in The Federalist Papers, argued that the proposed constitution would place the executive branch under the control and direction of Congress. For Madison this meant the litmus test of accountability in a republican system of legislative supremacy was the adherence by administrators to legislative intent. That is, to the degree policy implementation diverges from the policy enacted by a legislature, then the people’s purposes are undercut. However, the ability of administrators to effect the legislature’s intent is a function of: (1) the design of the policy itself; (2) the resources provided to and the constraints imposed on administrative agencies; (3) the choices made by agency personnel; and (4) the larger political context surrounding the policy initiative (Mazmanian & Sabatier, 1983, pp. 20–33). These same factors also affect the relationship between bureaucrats and citizens as well as the quality of service to citizens.

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