Book Review: Donald F. Kettl, Politics of the Administrative Process

Abstract

The relationship between politics and administration probably constitutes the most long-standing issue within the intellectual history of public administration. The founding fathers of the U.S. public administration field like Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow strongly advocated the politics-administration dichotomy in the study of public administration. However, this orthodoxy didn’t last very long. The great expansion of government functions, with heavy involvement of political operations in the administrative process during World War II and the post-war period, forced scholars to disclaim the feasibility of the orthodoxy, yet the shadow of orthodox public administration persists. The government reform activities around the world since the late 1980s and 1990s have been enthusiastic about the introduction of business management practices to improve government performance, implying another triumph of managerialism in the administrative process over politics. Indeed, despite the paradigm changes in U.S. public administration over the last 100 years (Lu, 2013), the tension between politics and administration continues puzzling the research and practice of public administration and the search for new answers.