Comparative and Development Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Pay in the British civil service is fixed on the basis of the Priestley formula.

The Royal Commission on the Civil Service of 1953-55, chaired by Sir Raymond Priestley, laid down the principle of fair comparison: civil service pay should be set by comparison with the current pay of outside staff doing broadly comparable work. A Pay Research Unit was later set up to collect the outside data.

An index number system ties pay to prices, a productivity index ties it to output, and performance rating is about individual appraisal. None of these is the comparison rule that the Priestley Commission made the basis of British pay fixation.

Answer: B

It is the Office of Management and Budget, printed in the paper as Office of Management and Budgeting.

The OMB, which replaced the Bureau of the Budget in 1970, prepares the President's budget, clears agency proposals for legislation against the President's programme, and oversees management across the executive branch. That covers the fiscal, legislative and administrative management of the question.

The Executive Office of the President, created in 1939, is the umbrella that contains OMB and other units, not a single staff agency. The White House Office is the President's personal and political staff, and the Office of Administration supplies office services to the units of the Executive Office.

Answer: A

The odd one out is structural and function similarity.

Development administration differs from traditional administration in being goal-oriented and innovative, open to new techniques and new attitudes, and dependent on citizen participation, because its task is to bring about planned social and economic change rather than to maintain law and order and collect revenue.

Options B, C and D are therefore features that mark development administration off from the traditional kind. Similarity of structure and function to the old administration is the reverse of what distinguishes it, so option A does not belong with the other three.

Answer: B

The concept came into use after the Second World War.

After 1945 many countries of Asia and Africa became independent and set out on planned economic and social development, often with foreign aid. Their administrations had to carry out development programmes, and the term development administration, coined by the Indian scholar U.L. Goswami in 1955, was taken up by Weidner, Riggs and the Comparative Administration Group in the 1950s and 1960s.

The First World War is too early, since the colonial administrations of that period were concerned with order and revenue. Riggs was one of the scholars who developed the concept after the war, so his work is not the point after which it came into use, and there is no Mayo's Resolution in this history.

Answer: C

It was F.W. Riggs.

Riggs defined development in terms of two processes: differentiation, in which structures become specialised for particular functions, and integration, in which those specialised parts are co-ordinated. His prismatic model describes a society in which differentiation has run ahead of integration, so the two elements are central to his ecological theory of administration.

V.A. Pai Panandikar wrote on Indian development administration and bureaucracy, but the differentiation-integration model is not his. The other names in the options are not associated with this formulation.

Answer: A

Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).

Development administration is used in two senses. The administration of development is the carrying out of development plans and programmes. The development of administration, or administrative development, is building up the administration's own capacity to do that work.

The two are interrelated because each depends on the other: programmes cannot be carried out by an administration that has not been developed, and administration develops through the tasks of development. That interdependence, stated in (R), is why the concept is said to have two interrelated senses, so (R) explains (A). Options C and D are wrong because both statements are true.

Answer: B

The key gives Dwight Waldo.

Textbooks of administrative thought record that Waldo regarded Weber's ideal-type bureaucracy as the dominant paradigm of public administration: the model against which other theories, and especially comparative studies of administration, were framed and tested. Weber's model was the reference point for the discipline through the middle of the twentieth century.

Michel Crozier used the Weberian model as a foil, showing in The Bureaucratic Phenomenon how French bureaucracy departed from it. Herbert Simon built his own decision-making framework and criticised the classical theories. Mary Parker Follett wrote on conflict, coordination and the 'law of the situation' and did not present Weber's model as the paradigm.

Answer: A

The answer is Robert Presthus and Michael Crozier.

Robert Presthus studied bureaucratic behaviour across cultures, notably in Turkey, and wrote on how organisational behaviour differs with the social setting (Behavior and Bureaucracy in Many Cultures, 1959). Michel Crozier's The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1964) was an empirical study of French administrative agencies that tied bureaucratic behaviour to French culture. Both are standard examples of empirical, cross-cultural research on bureaucracy.

Pfiffner and Presthus are known together as authors of a general textbook of public administration. Peter Blau studied bureaucracy in American agencies, and Warren Bennis wrote on organisational change. Miller and Rice wrote on organisations as systems from the Tavistock tradition. None of these pairs is the cross-cultural pair the question wants.

Answer: A

All three are problems, so the answer is (1), (2) and (3).

Reviews of contemporary comparative public administration make all three complaints. The research agenda has been dominated by administrative reform and accountability, following the spread of New Public Management. The field is criticised for lacking a unifying theory and for weak, often descriptive, methods. And much of the work rests on secondary sources such as official documents and earlier studies, rather than on fresh field data collected across countries.

Because each statement describes a recognised weakness, any code that leaves one of them out (only (2), only (1) and (2), or only (3)) is incomplete.

Answer: A

The answer is the USA.

In the United States, the top policy-making posts in the executive (secretaries, deputy and assistant secretaries, heads of agencies) are filled by political appointees chosen by each new President. Several thousand such posts change hands with an administration, and their holders come from business, law, universities and politics and return there afterwards. At the policy level the American bureaucracy is therefore, to a remarkable extent, neither permanent nor professional.

In the UK, France and Japan the senior civil service is a permanent career service recruited on merit: Whitehall's permanent secretaries, the French grands corps trained at the ENA, and the Japanese elite ministries recruited by examination. Policy advice there comes largely from professional officials who stay when governments change.