“ A significant motivation of comparative PA is to discover regularities

through the human experiences, irrespective of place and time.”

– Jreisat 2002, 5

Blue Team
‘Golden Oldies’
Woodrow Wilson (1887): administrative-politics dichotomy
 Administration is “government in action” (14); it is the executive, the
operative, the most visible part side of government (14)
 Who shall make law, and what shall that law be (politics)?
 How law should be administered (administration)?
 Administration lies “outside the sphere of politics” (20)
Politics is state activity “in things great and universal”
versus administration as“the activity of the state in
individual and small things”
General plans (politics) versus special means
(administration) (21)
‘Golden Oldies’
Max Weber (1922; Gerth/Mills translation 1946):
ideal type of bureaucracy
Principle of fixed and official jurisdictional areas
Office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority
Management based on written documents
Specialized office through expert training
‘Golden Oldies’
Kharasch
Develops three axioms that lead to his “institutional
imperative”
 Action by the institution constitutes the internal dynamics of the
institution
 Institution must function continuously if it is to stay in existence
 What the institution does is its purpose
Institutional imperative: “every action or decision of an
institution must be intended to keep the institutional
machinery working” (49)
‘Golden Oldies’
James Thurber
Cynical description of reality in politics through death
of an invented public hero
Depicting a completely acceptable character of the
“hero”; death of “the greatest man”
“Perilous heights of fame (126); “a accidental death of
its most illustrious and spectacular figure” (128)
Comparative Pubic Administration:
Towards a synthesis
Origins and development of the field
Conceptualizing comparative public administration
and methodology
Cross-cutting topics
Corruption
Culture
Implementation
Origins and development of field
Emergence of field of public administration
Politics - administration dichotomy (Wilson 1887)
“Ideal type” of bureaucracy (Weber 1922)
Comparative public administration: move away from
US-centered PA
Origins and development of field
1960s-early ‘70s: ‘New’ public administration
 Obligations of PA to society: activism, ethics, solution to
problems
Development administration
 The administration of development programs, to the methods used by
large scale organizations to implement policies and plans to meet their
development objectives (Riggs 1971)
 Away from Western-centered; unique challenges, contexts
 CAG; Ford Foundation; Riggs
Postmodernism: Movement away from rationality as answer
New Public Management
 ‘reinventing government’: decentralization, contracting, privatization,
performance-based evaluation
Governance
Conceptualization
What is CPA?
“comparative study of institutions, processes, and
behaviors in many contexts” (Jreisat , 2002)
Objective of CP
The discovery of patterns and regularities of
administrative action and behavior across cultures in
order to produce new knowledge and to affirm or refine
existing information (1)
Conceptualization
Why we compare?
Increasingly globalized, interdependent world
Expand our knowledge and understanding of
phenomena
What works: characteristics of
successful/unsuccessful administrative
performance; best practices
Insight for practitioners of various political
contexts and impact on administration
Comparative methodology
• A focus for comparison
• Bureaucracy as a focus
• Organizational setting
• The ecology of administration
Comparative methodology
• Functionalist
• Interest articulation, interest aggregation, rule-making,
rule application, rule adjudication, communication
• Neo-institutionalist
• Attention to structure
• Peters’ perspective
Cross-cutting topics
Corruption
 What is it? (Heidenheimer et al. 1990)
 Many different meanings, but in social sciences often focus on:
 Public-office centered, market-centered, and public interest-centered
 Friedrich: “behavior which deviates from the norm actually prevalent .

. . [and is] deviant behavior associated with . . . private gain at public

expense” (15)
 Why is it a problem?
 Challenges for developing countries
 “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption” (Warren 1946,

223, All the king’s men); “Brant seized the greatest man in the
world and pushed him out the window” (Thurber 1991, 138-146)
Cross-cutting topics
Culture
Riggs: “prismatic model pertaining to the
ecology of administration in a type of society”
(Heady 2001, 96)
Almond and Verba: civic culture, types of
political culture
Picard: historical, and contemporary political
(and bureaucratic) structures and processes (2);
authoritarian political culture (5); inherited
authoritarian patterns of government (6)
Cross-cutting topics
Implementation: intersection of public policy and
administration
Errors of third type (EIII) (Dunn 2007, 84)
Problem structuring in policy analysis (81)
 Wilson Weber
(Politics/PA) (Bureaucracy)

Development

Neo-
Functionalism Institutionalis Culture Corruption
m

Riggs
Almond/ Heady Developmen
Guy
Verba (CPA) Picard t (CAG)
Peters
Policy
Implementation
(Dunn)
References
 Wilson, Woodrow, “The study of administration,” in Shafritz, Jay M.,
and Albert C. Hyde. 2007. Classics of public administration. 6th ed.
Boston: Thomson Wadsworth.
 Weber, Max, “Bureaucracy,” in Shafritz, Jay M., and Albert C. Hyde.
2007. Classics of public administration. 6th ed. Boston: Thomson
Wadsworth.
 Thurber, James, “The greatest men in the world,” in Archer, Jeffrey,
and Simon Bainbridge. 1991. Fools, knaves, and heroes: great political
short stories. 1st American ed. New York: Norton.
 Kharasch, Robert N. 1973. The institutional imperative; how to
understand the United States Government and other bulky objects. New
York,: Charterhouse Books.
References
 Picard, Louis A. 2005. The state of the state: institutional
transformation, capacity and political change in South Africa.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
 Heady, Ferrel. 2001. Public administration: a comparative perspective.
6th ed. New York: Marcel Dekker.
 Jreisat, Jamil E. 2002. Comparative public administration and policy.
Boulder, Colo. Oxford: Westview.
 Baker, Randall. 1994. Comparative public management : putting U.S.
public policy and implementation in context. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
 Bekke, A. J. G. M., James L. Perry, and T. A. J. Toonen. 1996. Civil
service systems in comparative perspective. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press.