Public Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The words are Marshall E. Dimock's.

Dimock, an American scholar of public administration, argued in A Philosophy of Administration (1958) that administration touches so much of modern life that thinking about how it should be run becomes a way of thinking about how people should live. He stressed values, vitality and the human side of administration rather than technique alone.

Herbert Simon is known for the decision-making approach and his call for a value-free science of administration, L.D. White wrote the first American textbook of public administration (1926), and Vincent Ostrom is associated with the public choice approach and democratic administration. None of them is the author of this line.

Answer: D

Delegation is a transfer of authority for routine work.

When a superior delegates, he passes to a subordinate the authority to decide and act on the day-to-day, recurring matters of the organisation, so that his own time is freed for larger questions. Delegation does not mean abdication: the superior remains accountable for what the subordinate does.

Planning, policy making and overall control are the functions the superior keeps for himself. They are what the time saved by delegation is meant for, and handing them down would amount to giving up the office rather than delegating within it.

Answer: D

The key gives Operational freedom as the item that is not a factor of internal coordination.

Internal coordination is the fitting together of the work of the units and people inside one organisation. It depends on the ability of the superior to lead and integrate, on the skill of subordinates in doing their part, and above all on singleness of purpose, a common goal that every unit works towards.

Operational freedom works the other way: the more each unit is left free to run its own operations, the more it pursues its own line. It is a matter of autonomy and decentralisation rather than a factor that produces coordination, which is why the first three options are the factors and this one is not.

Answer: B

The statement is Paul Appleby's.

Paul H. Appleby, in Big Democracy (1945) and Policy and Administration (1949), attacked the politics-administration dichotomy. Because a public administrator must answer to the public interest and to elected authority, he argued, administration is itself a political process, and policy is made at every level of it.

Woodrow Wilson is the opposite pole: his 1887 essay The Study of Administration set administration apart from politics. Dwight Waldo also criticised the dichotomy, but the line quoted is Appleby's, and Edward Weidner is known for development administration rather than for this debate.

Answer: C

New Public Administration emphasises participatory processes.

The movement grew out of the Minnowbrook Conference of 1968, sponsored by Dwight Waldo. Its themes were relevance, social equity, values, change and client focus, and it called for citizens and lower-level employees to take part in decision-making instead of leaving it to the top of the hierarchy.

The other options are what it rejected. It turned away from the classical stress on formal structure and from bureaucratic authority, and it explicitly denied that administration could be value-free, insisting that administrators must be committed to equity.

Answer: A

The code is a-3, b-1, c-4, d-2.

• New Public Administration is linked with Dwight Waldo, who sponsored the 1968 Minnowbrook Conference where it took shape.
• Development administration is linked with Edward Weidner, who did much to define it as administration oriented to development goals.
• Comparative administration is linked with F.W. Riggs, who chaired the Comparative Administration Group from 1960.

Option A is the only code that puts Waldo against New Public Administration, so the remaining pair, Robert Dahl with administrative development, follows. Options B, C and D give New Public Administration to Riggs, Weidner or Dahl, which is wrong.

Answer: C

What is not common to the two is scope and complexity.

Writers such as Fayol and Urwick held that administration is one, because the same techniques are used wherever work is organised. Filing, accounting and managerial techniques are therefore shared by government offices and private firms.

The difference lies in breadth. Paul Appleby stressed that government has a far wider scope, touches every citizen, and works under public accountability and political direction, so its work is larger and more complex than any private enterprise. The three other options are among the common features, so they are not the answer.

Answer: D

The integral view does not include mechanical activities.

The integral view of public administration holds that administration is the sum of all the activities carried out to achieve the purpose of an organisation: managerial, technical, clerical and manual work alike. Writers such as L. D. White took this view, as against the managerial view of Simon, Smithburg and Thompson, which limits administration to the managerial work of planning, organising, directing and controlling.

Managerial, technical and clerical activities are all named in the standard statement of the integral view, so they are included. The textbook list ends with manual activities; mechanical activities is not one of the categories it names, which is why the key marks it as the odd one out.

Answer: B

Both statements are true but the Reason is not the correct explanation, so the answer is Both (A) and (R) are true but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).

The Assertion is the usual comparison: public administration is wider in scope and impact than private administration because it covers the whole range of state activity, touches every citizen and serves public purposes. The Reason is also true: the state regulates private business through laws on companies, labour, taxation, pollution and so on.

But regulation is only one of the many functions that make public administration comprehensive. Its breadth comes from its public character and the range of services it provides, not from the fact that it regulates private firms, so (R) does not explain (A). Options saying either statement is false are wrong because both are accepted.

Answer: B

Decentralisation results from delegation.

Delegation is the act of a superior entrusting part of his authority to a subordinate. When authority is delegated systematically and widely down the levels of an organisation, the result is decentralisation; when it is kept at the top, the organisation is centralised. Decentralisation is therefore the extension of delegation to the organisation as a whole.

Span of control is the number of subordinates one superior can supervise; it affects the shape of the hierarchy but does not itself pass authority down. Coordination is the integration of effort, and leadership is the influence a superior exerts. Neither transfers decision-making authority, so neither produces decentralisation.