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Lecture Notes for Instructor Resource Kettl, Politics of the Administrative Process, 8e A|+
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Instructor ResourceKettl, Politics of the Administrative Process, 8e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
Lecture Notes for Instructor Resource Kettl, Politics of the
Administrative Process, 8e
Lecture Notes:
Chapter 1: Accountability
Learning Objectives
1.1 Understand the three intertwined themes of the book: politics, performance, and
accountability
1.2 Explore the history of the administrative process
1.3 Examine the central role of accountability in the administrative process
Chapter Outline
I. The Foundations of Public Administration
A. Is Private Administration Better Than Public?
i. Public administration is important because it is how we translate our ideals
into results.
ii. One reality is most important: public policies only gain their meaning in
the ways in which they are implemented.
iii. The big themes of public administration; performance, politics, and
accountability are both universal and inescapable.
iv. Bureaucracy is the centerpiece of distrust.
v. Nothing is more important to understanding the relationship between
citizens and their government than understanding how government delivers
what it promises.
B. The Problem of Trust in Government
i. The politics of the administrative process is the struggle to balance our
lofty expectations for government with our deep distrust of it.
ii. Nothing in government has any meaning until we administer it.
iii. Private problems became public problems.
C. Solving the Public‘s Demands on Government
, Instructor Resource
Kettl, Politics of the Administrative Process, 8e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
i. To a degree often not appreciated, government depends on public
administration as the connection between those who make policy and the
citizens who expect results.
ii. The big themes in public administration:
a. Many people often see administration as the business of the detail,
which cannot possibly be interesting. In reality, because no
decision—especially no political decision has any value except in
the way it is implemented, public administration inevitably shapes
and is shaped by politics.
b. Politics (and, therefore, public administration) is about the choices
among values, including which values get emphasis and which do
not.
c. The second theme is performance: Public administration exists to
get things done.
We expect public administration to work well, delivering
effectiveness (high-quality goods and services) and
efficiency (goods and services at the lowest cost to
taxpayers).
d. The third theme is accountability.
Accountability is a relationship.
It is about answerability to whom, for what.
II. Historical Roots
A. Introduction
i. Tensions and tradeoffs run throughout the American history.
ii. Determining the role of administrators in the new constitutional system,
however, proved difficult.
iii. American public administration was grounded in politics, the political
battle against the king, followed by the delicate political balance to get the
Constitution ratified.
III. The Meaning of Accountability
A. What Is Accountability?
i. Accountability is a relationship between people (who is accountable to
whom?) about actions (what are they accountable for?).
ii. It is the foundation of bureaucracy in a democracy, because accountability
depends on the ability of policymakers to control administrators‘ actions.
, Instructor Resource
Kettl, Politics of the Administrative Process, 8e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
iii. The principal focus of control is on discovering bureaucratic errors and
requiring their correction, a largely negative approach that tends to become
dominant for several reasons.
iv. Policymakers often like to keep some distance between the decisions they
make and the consequences that flow from them.
v. Even if elected officials actually wanted a clear chain of accountability, it
would create a ―gotcha‖ effect:
a. If administrators knew they would have to answer for every
problem, they would make sure no one could see any problems
they would have to answer for.
vi. The tensions between the requirements of responsibility or
‗accountability‘ and those of effective executive action can reasonably be
described as the classic dilemma of public administration.
vii. Accountability is a relationship and, like all relationships, it constantly
changes and is often full of tension.
viii. Administrators must exercise their own judgment.
a. On the other hand, if administrators each exercised their own
individual judgment as they went about their daily work,
coordination would evaporate, the work would not get done, and
there would be little meaning to accountability.
b. Over the years, we have had a very mixed view of whistleblowers,
individuals who take it upon themselves to disclose activities they
believe are wrong.
B. Approaches to Accountability
i. In the United States, the effort to resolve this dilemma has focused on three
big issues:
a. The search for legal boundaries to constrain and channel
administrative action, what we call the rule of law.
b. The political challenges that have surfaced when administrative
realities stretch those legal boundaries.
c. Evolving policy problems that increasingly confound the strategies
and tactics to hold governmental power accountable and to ensure
that administration serves the public interest.
ii. Legal Boundaries:
a. The problem of balancing governmental power with individual
freedom, it is nothing new.
b. When King John met England‘s nobles in Runnymede in 1215, they
pledged him fealty, but only after the king agreed to limits on his
power, which were captured in the Magna Carta, an important
, Instructor Resource
Kettl, Politics of the Administrative Process, 8e
SAGE Publishing, 2021
document that has since shaped the way we think about constraints
on governmental power.
c. The debate has been endless, but two things are clear.
One is that the uneasy pact forged at Runnymede helped
establish the basis for the modern state.
The other is that the rule of law emerged as the guide for
setting the balance between governmental power and
individual liberty.
iii. The rule of law thus became enshrined in English common law.
iv. The Role of Politics:
a. The Articles of Confederation, the principles that guided the nation
in the uneasy days between independence from the British crown
and the adoption of the 1787 Constitution, was a clumsy first
effort.
b. But, the Constitution that followed is a web of crosscutting
restraints on government and the basic strategy for administrative
accountability in American government: give the government
power but set legal bounds to limit the dangers of its use.
c. Alexander Hamilton‘s powerful argument for government‘s help in
promoting the economy repeatedly encountered a hurricane of
citizen opposition.
v. In tackling the problems of rising corporate power and the enormous
potential of the industrial age, the Progressives faced a dilemma.
a. They were convinced that stronger government, with new programs
and stronger agencies, was necessary to drive the country forward
and to constrain the giant private companies.
But, they also knew that citizens would be nervous about a
more powerful government, for the American Revolution
against King George III‘s tyranny remained in the
country‘s collective consciousness.
b. For the Progressives, the answer lay in the rule of law.
The early Progressives focused on creating strategies to make
government work better.
Only in subsequent decades did ―Progressive‖ come to be
associated with ―big government.‖
vi. Separating politics from administration is known as the politics-
administration dichotomy.
a. It was their strategy for an effective administrative state in a modern
democracy: politicians would determine policy, and administrators
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