Comparative and Development Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The Cabinet in the USA is an extra-statutory and extra-constitutional body.

The US Constitution vests executive power in the President alone and mentions only 'the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments', whose written opinion the President may require. It does not create a cabinet, and no Act of Congress set it up. The Cabinet grew out of the practice of George Washington, who met his department heads as a group, and it survives as a convention.

So it is neither constitutional nor statutory, and 'semi-constitutional' is not a recognised category. The President is not even bound by its advice, unlike a parliamentary cabinet.

Answer: C

The President must get the consent of the Senate.

Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution says the President shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate shall appoint, judges of the Supreme Court and other officers. The Senate Judiciary Committee holds hearings, and the full Senate confirms by a simple majority.

The House of Representatives has no part in judicial appointments, so 'Congress' as a whole is also wrong: only one chamber gives consent. An outgoing judge has no say in choosing a successor.

Answer: A

The UK Parliamentary Commissioner can investigate cases of Departments.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration, the British ombudsman created by the Parliamentary Commissioner Act 1967, investigates complaints of injustice caused by maladministration in central government departments and listed public bodies. Complaints reach him through a Member of Parliament.

Local authorities were left to separate Local Government Ombudsmen, set up in 1974. Nationalised industries were outside his remit, and private companies are not part of government at all, so none of them was within his jurisdiction.

Answer: D

The definition is Edward Weidner's.

Edward W. Weidner, who coined and popularised the term development administration, defined it as an action-oriented, goal-oriented administrative system: administration directed at achieving progressive political, economic and social objectives, rather than at maintaining order and collecting revenue.

John D. Montgomery described development administration as carrying out planned change in the economy and social services, Albert Waterston wrote on development planning, and Irving Swerdlow on administration in poor countries, where government has to take a larger developmental role. The quoted phrase is Weidner's.

Answer: B

Revenue Administration is not an example of development administration.

Development administration is administration directed at planned change: building local democratic institutions, delivering services and carrying out development programmes. Revenue administration is the classic 'law and order and revenue' function of the colonial state, which existed long before planned development and is regulatory and maintenance-oriented in nature.

Panchayati Raj institutions, urban administration and Nagar Panchayats are bodies of local self-government entrusted with planning and executing development schemes, so they are examples of it.

Answer: C

Territorially the largest unit of local government in the USA is the County.

Almost every US state is divided into counties (called parishes in Louisiana and boroughs in Alaska), and the county is the largest local unit by area. It administers state laws locally, runs courts, records, roads and elections, and contains the smaller units within it.

City municipalities and towns govern a single settlement or a small area within a county, and special districts are single-purpose bodies such as school or water districts, usually covering only part of a county.

Answer: B

A highly co-ordinated, centralised administrative system is attributed to the UK.

Britain is a unitary state. Authority rests with the Cabinet and Parliament at Westminster, the departments are bound together by the Cabinet Office and Treasury control of expenditure, and the Home Civil Service is one unified service. That makes its administration both centralised and closely co-ordinated.

The United States is the opposite case: a federal system with separation of powers and many independent agencies and commissions, so its administration is notably fragmented. India is a federation in which the states run most field administration through their own services, so neither India alone nor 'UK and India' fits the description.

Answer: A

The last stage is the neo-prismatic.

F.W. Riggs described societies as fused, prismatic or diffracted. In his later revision of the model he divided the prismatic stage itself into three: the eo-prismatic (the early stage, close to the fused end), the ortho-prismatic (the middle, typical stage) and the neo-prismatic (the late stage, approaching the diffracted end).

The prefixes give the order: eo- means dawn or early, ortho- means straight or standard, and neo- means new or late. So eo-prismatic comes first, not last, and ortho-prismatic is in the middle. Bio-prismatic is not one of Riggs's stages.

Answer: A

The remark is Lytton Strachey's, printed in the paper as Litton Strechy.

In his biography Queen Victoria (1921), Strachey described the English constitution as a living thing that had grown up over centuries and called it the child of wisdom and chance. The phrase is quoted in political science texts to stress that the British constitution is unwritten and evolved, made partly by design and partly by accident.

Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill were Prime Ministers, not the source of this phrase. The constitutional lawyer was A.V. Dicey, best known for the rule of law and the sovereignty of Parliament, and the line is not his.

Answer: C

It is the assumption of ecological theory.

The ecological approach of F.W. Riggs studies administration in its social setting. In it, development means growing differentiation, the separation of specialised structures for specialised functions, matched by integration, the ability to co-ordinate those structures. A society that differentiates without integrating becomes prismatic, which is why both elements are treated as the key to development.

Classical theory is about principles of formal organisation, neo-classical theory about human relations within the organisation, and incremental theory, Lindblom's, about how policy is made by small steps. None of them builds development out of differentiation and integration.