What's gone wrong with public administration?

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, Vol. 6 , 329-338 (1986)

What’s gone wrong with public administration?

PETER SELF

University of London and the Australian National University

Bernard Schaffer was deeply interested in public administration. In his earlier career he was fascinated by the subtle skills and behaviour of administrative figures. The Administrative Factor (1973) brought some of these writings together. Later on, however, he became disillusioned with the traditional concerns of public administrators and writers on this subject. These concerns revolve around the problems of ‘implementing’ political decisions while preserving the ‘neutrality’ and ‘integrity’ of the administrator and of carving out a sphere of administrative efficiency, concerned with departmentalism, reorganization, budgetary reform, etc. Much of this activity which went on at the top of the system seemed to him rather peripheral to the question of service delivery at the base of the structure. Moreover he recognized many subtle forms of political permeation and rule- bending within the administrative system which contradicted the ideal model of impartial administration still widely held or believed in. Finally perhaps he was disillusioned by the small interest of practitioners in new academic approaches to administrative issues. So that in the end public administration, as conventionally understood and taught, appeared as an inflated, self-important and self-indulgent subject which would be seen as rather peripheral to the facts of political and administrative behaviour, and to the forces which shaped social change.

Whether or not this impressionistic account captures rightly the evolution of Schaffer’s thought, it does compound with a more general disillusionment about the role of bureaucracy and public administration. These words must be understood carefully within a historical context. Thus bureaucracy has frequently been a pejorative word, and there is nothing new about a highly critical view of the role of administrator. However after World War Two, when he started his career- initially at the Treasury-in Britain, British administration enjoyed a high reputation. The British general administrator was widely admired for qualities of intelligence and versatility, and for his ability to mix a pliant adaptability to democratic leadership with a forthright independence of advice, and pliancy and skill over policy applications. This reputation was not confined to Britain. It rubbed off upon the administration of the soon to be independent colonies, whose leaders easily supposed that they were inheriting a first-rate administrative sytem. Thus the reputation of British administration spanned the two worlds with which Schaffer was to become engaged, the developed and the developing.

Professor Self is Emeritus Professor of Public Administration in the University of London and Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. His most recent book is Political Theories of Modern Government, Allen and Unwin, London 1985.

0 1986 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 0271-2075/86/040329-10$05.00

330 P. Self

What has happened to the reputation of public administration since those days? Many things, and not the same ones in the developed and developing worlds. Rather has there occurred a diverse and complex evolution of thought about public administration, much of it highly critical, but delivered from contrasting critical and political standpoints. A short essay such as this can only take a broad and selective approach to these developments before attempting to reassess the role of administrators in the modern world. This will be done through asking three general questions. First, has public administration become overloaded with excessive responsibilities and expectations? Secondly, has administration been undermined and corrupted by pluralist and egoist influences? Third, to what extent does the ‘access theory’, which Bernard Schaffer pioneered, undercut the claims or the possibility of impartial administration? The answer in each case (and indeed the relevance of the question) must of course vary across the spectrum of states and cultures, and particularly between the developed and developing worlds. Here the treatment, as I warned earlier, has to be cursory and impressionistic.

Administrative overload is no illusion, although it needs definition. The concept does not imply that administrators are overworked (although some doubtless are). Overload refers to the increased expectations held of public administration, and indeed of political systems generally, in the post-1945 world. These expectations led to a big increase in the formal tasks and responsibilities of government, but of course it does not follow that these tasks have been adequately implemented. Clearly they have not. How did this situation come about? (Rose, 1980).

The reasons were different in the developed and the developing worlds. In the former case it was widely accepted that government should cure or correct the many defects of the market system-its instability, its inequality and its generation of many adverse ‘externalities’ such as pollution of air and water, destruction of scarce natural resources, tendencies towards urban congestion and sprawl, etc. These concerns required policies of full employment, economic planning, regional development, and what is popularly called the ‘welfare state’-meaning a comprehensive network of income supports and basic social services available to all. These tasks look somewhat herculean; but were they impossible?

In developing countries the task of administration was differently conceived- it was to promote development itself. This was judged essential because of the lack of domestic entrepreneurs able to produce economic growth. But what kind of development was required or wanted? The conventional view was to see economic growth as the same desirable pathway for all societies, except that they were at different stages along the way. Different development stages implied different economic strategies. Indeed for developed countries too, economic growth soon appeared as the dominant imperative. It was judged essential, partly to keep up in the international league table, but more specifically to support the welfare and employment policies to which governments were committed. As growth increased and technology advanced, the range of adverse ‘externalities’ which government had to cope with increased also-more pollution, more erosion of resources, and more welfare casualties from rapid economic and social change. Simultaneously the resurgence of capitalism and its much advertised values of mass consumption put strains upon the provision of collective goods and supports, while simultaneously stimulating changes in social behaviour and values which

What’s Gone Wrong With Public Administration? 331

required corrective public action-crime, drugs, pollution, urban decay, and marginalized or dependent individuals detached from earlier kinship bonds.

In developing countries, however , massive poverty excluded the same impacts of economic and social change. Community and kinship values continued to be of great importance, although often expressed in narrow or particularistic ways. The impact of economic growth there took the form of the ‘dual economy’, expressed physically in the growth of gigantic capital cities where resided both the rich beneficiaries and middlemen of the developed or export economic sectors, as well as that of a vast marginalized poor population driven into the city by rapid population growth (partly a function of elementary improvements in disease control) , by the backwardness and inequalities of the rural economy and capitalist and anti-rural bias in development strategies.

It should not be supposed that goals set for public administration in the post- 1945 world were intrinsically incapable of realization. For a time, indeed, government policies in the developed world seemed to be working reasonably. This was the time of Andrew Shonfield’s Modern Capitalism and of Daniel Bell’s End of Ideology. Western governments could combine institutions and values of a capitalist society with the pursuit of full employment, regional development, and improvements in incame security and social services. France, Britain and especially the Scandinavian countries did so-albeit with some striking blunders due to an ill-informed paternalism towards the poor. But the seeds of eventual conflict and breakdown were evident then, and exposed (from one angle) in such writings as Fred Hirsch’s Social Limits to Growth.

It is no accident that neo-Marxist theories have enjoyed a rapid resurgence since about 1970. This is because the most obvious obstacle to welfare goals in both the developed and developing worlds has clearly emerged as being the workings of international finance capitalism. The causations or sins of capitalism can be exaggerated. Technological and social changes have a momentum of their own independently of capitalism, as can be seen from the comparable if slower emergence of issues such as pollution, drugs, individual alienation and the weak- ening of kinship ties in more ‘advanced’ communist countries. However changes in the evolution of capitalism, and accompanying changes in class structure and political behaviour, have certainly had a deep effect upon the possibility of national planning for welfare goals.

The difference between Shonfield’s era and the present lies in the much stronger international character of capitalist investment and in the increasingly erratic monetary movements between national economies. For any government to insulate itself from these flows requires an immediate sacrifice of consumption values and expectations which democratic politicians will not entertain, at any rate until the onset of some acute international crisis. Even Sweden is struggling to maintain its deep-rooted welfare policies, although so far fairly successfully. Ironically of course Shonfield, like many others, saw the growth of international trade as a vital support of welfare planning, but on the assumption of sufficiently elastic and generous financial relationships between creditor and debtor nations. This assumption is now quite vitiated, perhaps beyond remedies, and we are viewing an escalation of international financial instability and competition which parallels (and indeed is bound up with) military escalation.

332 P. Self

In developing countries, international capitalism has still more baleful effects upon domestic planning. In the poorest states particularly, it creates or reinforces a situation where much of the profits from investment flow abroad, much foreign exchange is spent upon luxury consumption, and political power is largely mon- opolized by the privileged dependants or friends of external interests. Some developing countries in Asia, especially some small ones, may be close to incor- poration within the Capitalist club, but this is in no way true of Africa or Latin America. The answer to my first question therefore is that public administration has been loaded with objectives and tasks which are intrinsically beyond its capacity under the emerging conditions of international capitalism, especially given economic and social changes which create more problems for government while reducing the resources available for their discharge.

So far I have been concerned with the changing structural context of public administration, not the behaviour of administrators themselves. How has this been affected by these structural changes?

Some of the effects are familiar. As administrative functions have multiplied, and have been linked with the differential pressures of interest groups, competition has grown between administrative groups and agencies. Government has become more internally pluralistic and more externally latched into the structure of interests, the form of this relationship being a contested issue between pluralists and corporatists. But since governments seek to present a unified front, and since policy priorities are floating and resources are scarce, much administrative time goes on ‘co-ordination’, although the results are often shallow or formal.

Then again, administration has been absorbed more closely into the national social and economic system. As numbers have grown, the special p r ide-or special arrogance-associated with public service has diminished. Unionism, sometimes of a militant kind, has sprung up. The period of Keynesian policies and more buoyant tax revenues certainly gave an opportunity to public service unions to channel much of this increased finance into improvements to their pay, conditions and professional standards.

However, the academic reputation of public administration in Western countries has suffered more than these developments can warrant. The paradigm for this change of attitude is the figure of the rationally egoistic bureaucrat postulated by public choice economists. There is an irony here. Welfare economists were promi- nent among those who earlier assigned to government a large and benevolent role for correcting the imperfections of the market, without bothering about actual political or administrative behaviour. But then other economists turned the table with a vengeance by postulating that political and administrative man will behave in the same rationally instrumental and egoistic manner ascribed to economic man (although in fact descriptive economics tries to drop such assumptions).

This is not the place for a review of public choice theories which I have attempted elsewhere (Self, 1985) and about which Schaffer and Lamb say a good deal in Can Equity be Organized? (1981). The actual predictions about administrative behaviour which this methodology has produced are variable and inconsistent, because of the complexity of institutions and an innate uncertainty as to how rigorously the concept of rational egoism can be sustained under conditions of norm-oriented group behaviour. The point here is that writers such


as Downs, Tullock, Niskanen and Breton have struck a populist right-wing chord through their supposed logical demonstrations of the inevitably self-seeking, empi- re-building and obfuscating behaviour of the higher bureaucracy. Much of this was said earlier by the less pretentious Northcote Parkinson, and most of it is at least partly (though variably) true-since egoism is always one pole in any form of behaviour. But the portraits are grossly simplified because they ignore not only more complex or principled individual motivations, but the persuasive (and culturally variable) context of group or institutional pressures, loyalties and norms, whose influence in a political-administrative context cannot be ‘assumed away’ in a way that is at least more plausible in relation to market exchanges.

Thus the reputation of public administration has got ground between two opposite explanatory schema, which defend also the interests of opposing systems. On one view, public administration is, or anyhow should be, the docile servant of market systems, whose own imperfections seem to have been largely forgotten. Its tasks are intrinsically ‘unproductive’, consisting in necessary acts of policing, regulation and minimal welfare, unless inflated by ‘welfare lobbies’ or demands for redistribution. On an alternative (neo-Marxist) view, public administration is imprisoned-explicitly or not-by a dominant capitalism which requires from government a wide array of supportive services but which closely restricts the scope for national planning or welfare goals. The former approach takes easily to the idea that public officials will behave wastefully and inefficiently in the absence of market tests and incentives. The latter approach sees these officials as being tied in to the structural requirements of the capitalist system. No doubt this dichotomy is over-simplified, but both forms of ‘economism’ offer a dismal view of public administration. But the second question I asked-whether administration has been corrupted by pluralist or egoist influences-cannot be answered in these terms, and before tackling it we should consider the ‘access’ literature.

By reversing the Weberian perspective upon administration, and by analysing instead the experiences of disadvantaged clients over access to public services, Schaffer’s writings inevitably convey a rather bleak picture of public administration and the behaviour of officials. But how far does the ‘access’ literature condemn public administration itself, as opposed to the structure of the political environment? Or is this distinction fanciful: are politics and administration a single continuum whose workings can be described by the same general theory? We can approach these issues by first considering some forms of disadvantage which clients may experience, without (necessarily) seeking to be comprehensive.

First comes the obvious problem of the client’s ignorance of his or her rights and of the alternatives open. This actually is a problem of which intelligent and fair-minded administrators (who do exist) are becoming more aware, while the possible remedies fall within the realm of ‘enlightened administration’ as conventionally understood. Thus efforts can be made to train the counter staff to explain rights, explanatory leaflets can be printed, and liaison officers can be appointed to assist particular disadvantaged groups with their applications. For example, the last measure has been helpful over enabling Australian aborigines to get their social security rights. It is true that in this case (as in many others) aboriginal customs over birth records, the naming of individuals, tribal marriages, mobility between outstations and towns, etc. create many difficulties over the

334 P . Self

determination of entitlements. But these obstacles are hardly the fault of the bureaucracy, and concessionary arrangements can be (and are being) made to modify their impact (Sanders, 1986). The problematic question of course is: under what circumstances will bureaucracy reform itself (or be reformed) to take a sympathetic view of the difficulties of poor clients? lsolated reforms may show the possibility of change, but hardly answer the question.

A second and deeper issue concerns the impartiality of the counter staff and their supervisors over rule application. The arrogance of petty officials was a familiar target of early critics of western bureaucracy, and it remains a familiar feature of official behaviour in developing countries, coupled with or reinforced by petty bribery. Even in modern western societies where the idea of the ‘service state’ is prevalent, some cultural bias is likely to exist. It is hard for officials to rid themselves of the idea that the poor and ignorant are less deserving and less trustworthy than the rich and ‘respectable’, especially in societies pervaded by an ethos of the necessity (and economic possibility) of self-help. Comparing American and Swedish welfare administration might be helpful on this point.

But the stronger forms of discrimination arise where administrative patronage occurs along ethnic or party lines. Ethnic permeation of particular departments is to be found in developed societies such as Australia, but it is a much more prevalent feature of developing countries. This system can be defended on the grounds that it overcomes the impersonality of Weberian bureaucracy and achieves sympathetic treatment for clients belonging to the same group as the officials, in the same way as Banfield and others have defended the patronage and corruption of the old-style political machines in American cities. Where people are anyhow poor and resources are scarce, the argument can be taken further into a case for subsidizing some form of community self-management by and for the members of a disadvantaged group. This of course is to establish specialized enclaves of discretionary self-government outside the framework of unified state administration, or else to turn the whole state into a set of such enclaves, thus ending the concept of common citizenship.

It is just this issue which divides Australian opinion over aboriginal policy, and which is pertinent in other ‘advanced’ societies having primitive or native minorities. If Australian aborigines are conceded normal social security and wage entitlements on an individual basis, the communal basis of their culture is denied and there are undeniable problems of heavy unemployment, drift, anomie and drink; but if instead funds are directed into elective community groups living on their own land, the individual rights available to other Australians may be withheld. Reform measures alternate between these alternatives. In developing countries policy alternatives may in a sense be similar, but the reality is starker. Where most people are poor it is hardly practicable or equitable to concentrate resources upon a particular small minority.

There is the ever-present problem of scarce resources and their effects upon the formation and length of queues. Administratively speaking, the basic problem is insoluble unless either more resources are provided or legal entitlements are cut back to the resources available. But, as Schaffer pointed out, long queues inevitably offer more opportunities for administrative discrimination and the services of intermediaries. Thus the result can vary from mild cultural discrimination (in some developed countries) to a quasi-market of bribes and commissions (in


developing ones). Yet, where resources are very scarce and kinship ties are strong, can this result be avoided?

The greatest source of discrimination, at any rate in developed countries, lies not in the processes of service delivery but in those of policy formation. It is here that the unequal pressures of pluralism (or corporatism for that matter) make their impact upon the design and allocation of services. Poor and dependent clients, organized weakly or not at all, are no match for powerful interests with established access to government departments. Within the structure of the modern liberal state, two remedies for this neglect of weak interests have been possible. One is the role of political leadership over mobilizing the votes of the disadvantaged in exchange for measures of support. The other remedy is the advocacy of professional groups or ‘enlightened’ administrators on behalf of their dependent clientele.

But how available are these remedies? Political entrepreneurship on behalf of the disadvantaged may be effective where, as with the Roosevelt New Deal, the disadvantaged constitute a majority; but where they comprise fragmented, rela- tively small minorities, the situation is much bleaker. Western societies after 1945 witnessed decline of majoritarian political rule (whether of the Right or Left) in favour of the unequal influence of administratively entrenched interests (although recently direct political rule from the Right has certainly been reinvigorated). This situation placed more onus for the protection of dependent clienteles upon groups within the administration, linked with often weak political allies. Unfortunately the power of some professional groups has been used not just paternalistically but arrogantly.

A good example is the recent history of public housing in European countries. The massive post-1945 public housing programmes partly reflected the political ability of an underprivileged majority (the working classes) to promote large-scale collective provision. The rules for allocation of houses in Britain or Scandinavia were tolerably fair, at any rate before the arrival of immigrants with unmet housing needs. Initially too the design of many planned developments was pleasant and acceptable to their occupants. But then came the ‘high-rise fallacy’-the mass construction of monumental high-rise flats which proved highly unpopular among most occupants, were sometimes unsafe, were frequently vandalized, were devoid of social facilities and became stigmatized as ‘welfare housing’ of the worst kind. But how did this happen? It was not that high-rise housing was a cheap option- in Britain at least it was costlier per unit than conventional housing; and the programme was exraordinarily wasteful, since some of this housing was soon pulled down and much of the remainder has had to be expensively refurbished or let to students and others at nominal rents. So much for the Treasury’s perspicacity and influence!

The explanations lay rather in unequal pluralism-the pressure of developers offering new techniques of mass production, of farmers and ex-urbanists seeking to exclude public housing from their land, of some city fathers wanting to retain population-and of many (but not all) architects and planners within government using their captive clientele as a resource for their own aesthetic or sociological experiments (Dunleavy, 1981; Self, 1982). In this instance the clients were betrayed by their own professional sponsors.

The failures of politicians and professionals to protect poor and dependent

336 P. Self

clients gave rise to attempts to mobilize the disadvantaged themselves for asserting their needs directly. This was the basis of the ‘advocacy movement’ which brought certain lawyers and other do-gooders to the ramparts of institutional conflict, and of Kennedy and Johnson’s anti-poverty programme and its paler British imitation for alleviating poverty in the inner cities. These top-down policies were precarious, and became assimilated within more conventional programmes. But meanwhile advocacy for the disadvantaged passed to numerous grass-roots urban movements, variously demanding rent control, better public housing, jobs and the protection of urban communities against destructive developments. Capitalism, land profiteering and bureaucracy or ‘technocracy’ are the targets of these shifting movements, which often eschew any strong party allegiance. Comparable movements in the large Third World cities seek to mobilize much vaster numbers of urban poor against similar enemies. Here is evidence in plenty of failures by public administration to service properly its dependent clientele. How deep is this failure?

How far is the Weberian legal-rational form of bureaucracy biased against the interests of poor and dependent people? That is the issue which much of the access literature inescapably raises. Thus when Schaffer and Lamb talk of the ‘irony of equity’ they are referring to the mismatch between substantive and procedural justice. Substantive justice may be present in a formal equality of rights, but procedural justice frustrates these expectations. The disadvantaged individual is, so to speak, isolated and dehumanized under the weight and complexity of bureaucratic rules about compartmentalism, categorization, eligibility, etc; and subjected to a general institutional bias (Schaffer and Lamb, 1981, pp. 60-66).

Undoubtedly this description points us to real individual experiences. But is it exactly clear what is being claimed? Laws themselves may be biased and inequi- table, and/or the formal rules of bureacracy may be vitiated in practice. Further than this, is the legal-bureaucratic system itself in principle discriminatory and oppressive, as the authors appear to claim?

This viewpoint is in sharp contrast with the traditional assumption that Weberian bureaucracy defends individual rights through the control of official discretion by rules, through the ‘merit principle’ (meaning that bureaucrats should be competent), and through the official’s lack of material interest in the results of his decisions. Of course we know that, even in a well-administered state, bureaucracy does not work in quite this way. There will be some cultural bias. The complexity of rules can obfuscate rights and, as the rules are elaborated to meet yet more special situations, produce some ‘ironies of equity’. Moreover Weberian bureaucracy is certainly dehumanizing, but then some of its aspects (the strict hierarchy and impersonality) can be modified without destroying the principles of official impartiality, competence and detachment from personal interest which surely are necessary even if not sufficient conditions of an equitable State.

In developing countries (and some developed ones) it is the extensive violation of these Weberian principles through patronage, bribery and corruption which creates much of the experience of discrimination and alienation. Thus in one sense Schaffer and Lamb seem to be hitting the wrong target. However, this point should not be confused with a different criticism of Weberian bureaucracy: it underrates the practical tasks of development: resources are spent upon admin-


istrative staffs and routines which ought to go upon the work of field officers and experts. Inevitably field administration in developing countries requires a looser framework of rules and a greater degree of official discretion than the legal- rational model suggests; but there is the same need for systems of recruitment which ensure competence, detachment from personal interest and (as far as is possible) impartiality-which still points to a framework of appropriate public service laws.

Of course, as has been sufficiently emphasized, bureaucracy cannot be insulated from its political environment. I will not enter into the debate as to how far bureaucrats function as ‘gatekeepers’ on behalf of capitalist or other powerful interests, or as protectors of their own (or sometimes their clients’) interests. In some countries, bureaucrats are major political actors. In all countries, bureaucratic and technical experts play a considerable role over the design of policies and standards within imposed constraints of economy and variable external pressures. In so far as bureaucrats are powerful, it would be surprising if they did not often advance their own interests and convenience, or favour those policies which they consider technically or culturally appropriate. Bureaucratic power is a menace to the rights and liberties of individuals where political controls and constraints are weak; but where political pressures are both strong and biased, bureaucracy becomes perverted or corrupt. In this sense the adage that democracy and bureaucracy ‘need each other’ remains true (Etzione-Halevy, 1983); and the bureaucratic element in its turn needs the protection of Weberian-type rules, however much they may need to be humanized.

Much neglect of clients’ interest, and much waste of resources, occurs through the adoption of ill-designed programmes and standards. The mistakes of British housing policy can be multiplied indefinitely by cases from developing countries. The problem often arises from the application of technical standards or economic policies in ways which take little account of the actual circumstances, capacities and aspirations of poor and dependent persons. The only answer, especially where the bureaucratic system is also corrupt and prejudiced, seems to lie in the mobilization of the disadvantaged to articulate their wants and secure their rights.

Schaffer and Lamb have analysed the possibilities and limitations of such mobilization far better than I could manage (Schaffer and Lamb, 1981, pp. 101-113). But I do not believe that such mobilization, while certainly desirable, is the only path to reform. The votes of the underprivileged need to be harnessed to more conventional political action by parties and elected representatives. In one sense this should be easier in developing countries (to the extent that political rights really exist) because, unlike the developed countries, the poor are a large majority.

All this may be whistling in the dark against the forces which are shaping public administration in the modern world. Although many more factors should be introduced, one can see well enough why Bernard Schaffer, like many others, became disillusioned with public administration. In analysing the question of ‘access’, he has put a subject on the agenda which may stir the wheels of reform. Adequate reforms, however, will turn upon a mixture of political pressure and radical structural and institutional transformations. Weberian bureaucracy is not itself the main culprit.

338 P. Self

REFERENCES

Dunleavy, P. (1981). The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945-75, Clarendon Press,

Etzioni-Halevy, E. (1983). Bureaucracy and Democracy: A Political Dilemma, Routledge

Rose, R. (ed.) (1980). Challenge to Governance; studies in overloaded politics, Sage

Sanders, W. (1986). Ph.D. unpublished Aborigines’ Access to Social Security Admin-

Schaffer, B. (1973). The Administrative Factor, Frank Cass, London. Schaffer, B. and Lamb, G. (1981). Can Equity Be Organized?, Gower, Farnborough. Self, P. (1982). Planning the Urban Region, George Allen & Unwin, London. Self, P. (1985). Political Theories of Modern Government, George Allen & Unwin, London.

Oxford.

& Kegan Paul, London.

Publications, London.

istration, Australian National University.

Documents

What's gone wrong with public administration?