The Case for Gridlock by Ethridge Marcus E.;

Author:Ethridge, Marcus E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

During the summer of 1968, an influential group of teachers and students of public administration attended a conference in Minnowbrook, New York, to discuss a movement they would call New Public Administration.54 Spiritual descendants of James Landis and Charles Groves Haines, these analysts claimed that their new approach amounted to a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the political theory of public administration. They wanted to dismantle the pillars of “traditional” public administration—expertise, efficient management, central authority, and objectivity—and replace them with different principles. Instead of efficiency, administrative officials should pursue social equity. New Public Administration shared Landis’s taste for activist institutions, but they wanted to ensure that his administrative activism would predominantly serve Progressive policy goals.

New Public Administration would have only limited impact with respect to theoretical development in public administration. Its failure, however, is instructive. The architects of New Public Administration wanted to maintain and expand active, energetic administrative authority operating independently of the sluggish congressional-presidential system which they, like Progressives from a half-century before, felt was the bastion of status-quo elites: “Administrators are not neutral. They should be committed to both good management and social equity as values, things to be achieved. . . .” (Frederickson 1971, p. 312).

Yet, unlike Landis and the other New Dealers, they were critical of what they saw as an administrative establishment so wedded to the ideals of neutral expertise and hierarchy that it could not be sufficiently sensitive to the environmental and egalitarian goals that were implicit in New Public Administration’s partisan agenda. In short, they wanted both continued administrative independence from the Madisonian institutional system and selective (but coercive) supervision of administrators to ensure that they were pursuing social equity. The NPA movement was thus a crystallization of the incompatible objectives of the Second Stage reforms in administrative law.

The Second Stage reforms did not embrace the Constitutional Principle because they were designed to preserve administrative independence and the narrowly targeted political action it inevitably encourages. The representational problems of the administrative state were not solved by New Public Administration or the Second Stage reforms for the same reasons that Landis’s earlier vision of the administrative process proved ultimately disappointing to his generation. Tullock’s rent-seekers and Olson’s distributional coalitions found that being effectively organized and oriented toward narrow policy goals was more politically profitable than ever because the Second Stage changes provided new ways for those with organizational strengths to work the system.

Many Progressives began to see that public participation in rule-making and “hard look” judicial review had not worked. Moreover, dramatic shifts in the national political scene during the 1980s brought the unsettled issues raised by the Second Stage to new heights of legal and political controversy. The institutional structure that largely defined the New Deal would increasingly serve a political agenda that previous supporters of administrative power could not accept. Administrative law would become shot through with inconsistencies and vagueness as modern Progressives and their newly vigorous opponents fought over the legal principles that shape the administrative state. The system that

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