LEE, Mordecai

Looking at the politics-administration dichotomy from the other direction : participant observation by a state senator - New York : Marcel Dekker, 2001

The politics-administration dichotomy has been a durable concept in political science and public administration. Many effective critiques of the doctrine, first suggested by Woodrow Wilson in 1887, have not diminished the longevity of the approach it suggest for policy making in government. Yet, most of the literature has been written from the point of view of either academic os public administration practiotioners. Little has been presented from the point of the view of the other participants in the dichotomy, the elected offcials. Based on participant observation in the Wisconsin Legislature from 1977 to 1989, the author reviews how the politicians with whom he served behaved regarding their relations with administratos. He suggest that elected officials make decisions based on political rationality rather than a comprehensive norm difining their reationship with administrators. The political decision making he observed implicitly viewd administrators as subordinate to politicians rather than equal partners, roughly comparable to the discredited original meaning of the politics-administration dichotomy