THE COMPARATIVE

APPROACH TO
PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION
EMERGENCE
•Comparative public administration emerged as a field of study
centered on the development and distribution of foreign aid.
•Overtime, the field has evolved in many directions ranging from the
study of administrative inefficiencies, policy implementation,
budgeting, systems analysis and fragmentation, culture and public
administration, and distributions of governmental power.
HISTORY LEGACY
1. The great organizations that do the work of modern states had their counterparts in
powerful Asian empires especially of China and the Ottoman Turks, African Kingdoms and
especially in the King's services in Prussia, England and other European states.
2. Modern comparisons are possible across the deepest divisions of system types: between
authoritarian and pluralist systems, industrialized and developing systems and secular and
religious regimes.
BAD REPUTATION
1. The profession’s faith went hand in hand with
the commitment of developed nations to
international development.
2. The fact that most developing nations have
failed to make the leap into the league of
developed nations and, many were being
considered as failed states, put into question
the professional practice of public
administrators.
SOME ASPECTS
▪Patterns of organization
▪Recruitment of bureaucrats
▪Certain common programs of governments
▪Capacities and performance
▪The perennial tensions between officials
▪Personal norms and the control of bureaucratic power
 These include ways in
COMPARATIVE
which administrators
PUBLIC interact with their
ADMINISTRATION
ISSUES political environment
and influence the
policy making process.
 Some administrative
COMPARATIVE decisions that may
PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION themselves become
ISSUES
contentious policy
issues
 In the last decade, critics of the public
service have argued that efficient
government is small government.
Privatization has been the order of the day.
SMALL
GOVERNMENT This model of development has been
exported overseas, especially to the less
developed and transitional states in Africa,
Asia, Eastern and Central Europe and Latin
America.
 Affirmative action and representative
bureaucracy
Budgetary decision making
COMPARATIVE
Government reorganization
PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION Decentralization

ISSUES Privatization and Contracting Out

Public sector reform.
 The control of
bureaucratic power,
Use of upon which
history
comparisons of
diverse bureaucracies
can be valid.
 The Use of History:
Historical Kingdoms
Use of in China,Asia, Africa
history
and Europe were
precursors to the
modern state system
 The politics-administration dichotomy

Environmental and cultural factors are

important. Ecology as an issue
COMPARATIVE
PUBLIC Bureaucracy as a Negative? Keep
ADMINISTRATION government out of people's lives
ISSUES
Systemic influence on the individual- role
definition, socialization and development of
organizations vs. institutions
 The relationship between politics and
administration is one of the oldest and most
Politics and controversial issues in public
Comparative administration. Woodrow Wilson in 1887 was
the first in America to call for the separation
Public of administration from politics. In Wilson's
Administration view, politics ought to be about policy
formulation and administration ought to be
about policy implementation
 ◦ Focus on the scientific efficiency of nation-
states; i.e., the economic efficiency of
government (this economically-driven
EFFICIENCY perspective also being termed the "new public
management" -- a minority viewpoint which
continually recurs from time to time and
essentially holds that the public sector ought to
be managed like the private sector)
 Almost every aspect of public
administration is contingent upon a political
context.
POLITICAL Administrative systems do not stand
CONTEXT alone. They require some embracing
organization, some kind of imposed
hierarchic order, something other than
anarchy or chaos.
 Being dependent upon politics presents
POLITICAL many challenges, not the least of which is
how to study perfection (which can be said
CONTEXT to be the quest of public administration)
under imperfect conditions .
 This distinction between policy-making and
POLICY policy-executing has been an ambiguous
one. The problem is that bureaucrats and
MAKING agency-level executives often make
AND discretionary choices and exercise
initiatives which are just as much the
EXECUTION development of policy as anything politicians
could do
 There is a tendency in CPA to strive toward
what are called "middle-range" theories
which only consider a few examples of
THEORIES administrative behavior at a time and only
promise to link concepts together better or
formulate hypotheses (rather than formally
test empirical hypotheses)
REFORM Comparative Public Administration (CPA) is
AND an applied, intercultural, interdisciplinary,
explanatory field of study which carries out
CAPACITY cross-cultural investigations in order to
provide solutions for management problems
BUILDING and develop management technologies .
REFORM It is no accident that the field focuses
AND upon growth, reform and capacity building
since CPA is in many ways about identifying
CAPACITY those "best practices" which promote the
most desirable organizational structures and
BUILDING processes
VESTED According to interest group theory the usual
pattern is for a "special relationship" to
INTERESTS develop between certain agencies and
certain private interests.
 Similar patterns involve government
agencies becoming quite insulated from the
VESTED public.
INTERESTS When an agency becomes "encapsulated"
by a private interest group, bureaucratic
capture is said to occur
 The study of bureaucracy or bureaucratic
politics often involves the study of the class
OSSIFICATION characteristics of public servants. One of
the most frequently used terms in those
areas of study is ossification.
 A bureaucracy becomes ossified, or set in
stone, by the way it goes about its
OSSIFICATION work. This may occur regardless of political
change or whether boundaries exist between
politics and administration
THANK YOU ☺