Comparative and Development Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The definition that development administration is concerned with maximising innovation for development is by Edward Weidner.

Weidner is the writer who defined development administration as the administration of development programmes and as the capacity of an administrative system to innovate. His wording stresses innovation as the central quality.

John Montgomery, F.W. Riggs and Han Been Lee are all associated with development administration, but the key does not give them this particular statement.

Answer: B

The statement on the effectiveness of development administration is credited by the key to Merle Fainsod.

Fainsod wrote on the structure of development administration, and the passage links its effectiveness to the quality and training of the public servants who run it and to a social and political environment that frees their energies. The key therefore names him.

J.N. Khosla, Irving Swerdlow and F.W. Riggs are also writers on administration in developing countries, but this wording is not assigned to any of them by the key, so those options are not marked.

Answer: A

The key credits the concept of 'A New Comparative Public Administration' to Keith M. Henderson. The other names offered belong to other contributions to the field.

Dwight Waldo is better known for his studies of the field's identity and for The Administrative State, Ira Sharkansky for work on public policy and expenditure, and Robert Biller for writing on development and administrative change. None of them is credited with this phrase in the key, and the choice rests on the key's attribution.

Answer: C

The words about the extended meaning of comparison, 'the generalized or global framework of thinking about problems', are credited to Fred W. Riggs, the leading figure of the comparative public administration movement and the author of the ecological approach and the prismatic model.

John Montgomery wrote on development administration, Jack Plano is known for a dictionary of political analysis, and Talcott Parsons was a sociologist. The statement fits Riggs's broad framework best.

Answer: A

Golembiewski's three themes of comparative public administration are the significance of focal concerns, the magnitude of the resulting effort and the motivation for the approach (i, ii and iii). They describe why comparison is worth doing, how much work it involves and what moves scholars to do it.

Stress on values is not one of the three. Options containing (iv) are wrong, and since each of the other three belongs to his set, a code that omits any of them is incomplete.

Answer: D

All four are features of the bazaar-canteen economy described by Riggs for the prismatic society: price indeterminacy, agglomeration of values, intrusive access to the elites and pariah entrepreneurship.

Prices are not fixed by the market but by bargaining, and economic dealings are tied up with social and political considerations. The minority groups acting as entrepreneurs are called pariah entrepreneurs. Since each is a feature, a code with fewer items is incomplete.

Answer: C

The merit system of recruiting by competitive examination was introduced first in China, where examinations for officials existed under the Han and were developed in the Sui and Tang dynasties.

Great Britain adopted open competition in the 1850s after the Northcote-Trevelyan report. India's ICS opened to examination in 1855 on the British pattern, and the United States set up a merit system with the Pendleton Act of 1883. All three came after China.

Answer: D

In descending order of size, the institutions of French local government are the Department, the Arrondissement, the Canton and the Commune (ii, iv, i and iii).

The Department is the main unit, the Arrondissement a sub-division of it, the Canton a smaller electoral and judicial unit, and the Commune the basic and smallest unit, which is also the oldest. Any order that puts the Commune above the Department reverses the ranks.

Answer: B

In the key, the metropolitan county is the top tier of local government in the U.K. Under the 1972 Act, the large urban areas, such as Greater Manchester and West Midlands, had a metropolitan county council above the metropolitan districts.

The metropolitan district is the lower tier within it. A parish is the smallest rural unit. 'Shire' is a general word for the rural counties and is not listed here as a tier of its own.

Answer: B

The Hatch Act of 1939 in the U.S.A. dealt with the political activities of civil servants. It prohibited federal employees from taking an active part in partisan political campaigns and from using their official position to affect elections, to keep the service neutral.

It does not concern the right to strike, the right of association or the machinery for negotiation, which are matters of other laws and rules on federal labour relations.