Comparative and Development Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The keyed answer is W.S. Sayre.

The key credits Sayre with the description of the British bureaucracy as orderly, symmetrical, prudent, articulate and cohesive. I could not find the quotation in any source I could check, so the attribution rests on the key.

Of the other names, Herman Finer wrote on British government and the civil service and J.D. Kingsley wrote Representative Bureaucracy (1944), a study of the British civil service as an expression of middle-class values. The question is a recall of an attribution, which elimination alone does not settle.

Answer: B

Local government in Japan consists of prefectures and municipalities.

Japan has a two-tier system of local public entities under the Local Autonomy Law. The upper tier is the 47 prefectures (to, do, fu and ken, such as Tokyo, Hokkaido, Osaka and Kyoto). The lower tier is the municipalities: cities, towns and villages, with designated cities and core cities as larger categories of city.

Communes are the basic local units of France and Italy, and counties are found in the United States and the United Kingdom. Neither is a type of local government in Japan, so the codes that include them are wrong.

Answer: D

These four types of city exist in Japan.

Under Japan's Local Autonomy Law, cities are graded by population and responsibilities: designated cities (seirei shitei toshi), with populations above about 500,000 and many prefectural powers; core cities (chukaku-shi); special cities (tokurei-shi), a category that was folded into core cities in 2015; and ordinary cities.

The United States, the United Kingdom and France organise urban local government quite differently, through municipalities and counties, boroughs and districts, and communes respectively, and do not use this four-way classification.

Answer: D

The keyed answer is (a)-(3), (b)-(1), (c)-(2), (d)-(4).

The key matches the statement that development can never be defined to universal satisfaction with the Brandt Commission Report, development as the transformation of society with T.N. Chaturvedi, development as change plus growth with Colm and Geiger, and the remark that development is one of the most depreciated terms in the social science literature with Uphoff and Ilchman.

Codes A, B and C each pair at least one statement with a different author from the key. I could not find any of the four statements in sources I could check, so the match is a recall of the keyed attributions and cannot be worked out from the content of the statements.

Answer: B

Droit administratif is related to administrative law.

Droit administratif is the French system of administrative law. Disputes between citizens and the administration are decided by separate administrative courts, headed by the Conseil d'Etat, applying a distinct body of law, rather than by the ordinary courts. A.V. Dicey contrasted it with the English rule of law, under which officials are subject to the ordinary law and courts.

Good governance, the New Public Service and New Public Management are later frameworks for reforming public administration and have nothing to do with the French legal concept.

Answer: C

The term 'soft state' was used by Gunnar Myrdal.

In Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968), the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal described South Asian countries, including India, as 'soft states'. Governments passed laws and plans but lacked the will or capacity to enforce them, and social discipline was weak: corruption, evasion of obligations and collusion between officials and powerful interests undermined development.

U.L. Goswami is credited with first using the term 'development administration' (1955), Edward Weidner developed that concept, and Donald Stone wrote on administration for development; none of them introduced the idea of the soft state.

Answer: D

Comparative administrative studies are basically cross-cultural.

Comparative Public Administration studies administrative systems across countries and cultures, to discover what is general and what is particular to each setting. Its pioneers, Fred Riggs among them, argued that administration cannot be understood apart from its environment (the ecological approach), so comparison across cultures is its defining method and purpose.

Organisational, functional and structural analysis are tools that comparative studies may use, but they are not what makes the field comparative. A study of one country's organisations or structures is not comparative at all; comparing across cultures is.

Answer: C

The prime methodology is model building.

Comparative Public Administration relies heavily on constructing models and typologies to compare very different administrative systems. Fred Riggs's agraria-industria and fused-prismatic-diffracted models, and the bureaucratic model drawn from Max Weber, are the best-known examples. A model simplifies reality so that systems from different cultures can be described in common terms and compared.

Philosophical and historical approaches belong to the older, normative and institutional study of administration, and controlled experiments are rarely possible when the units are whole national administrations.

Answer: B

The anthropologists were Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown.

Structural-functional analysis began in social anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski explained social institutions by the needs they serve (functionalism), and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown by the part they play in maintaining the social structure. Sociologists such as Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton developed it further, and Fred Riggs and Gabriel Almond carried it into comparative administration and politics.

Merton and Blau were sociologists, not the anthropologists who founded the approach. Anthony Downs and Gordon Tullock are public choice theorists, and Miller and Rice wrote on organisations as open socio-technical systems.

Answer: B

The tasks are divided between the Office of Personnel Management and Merit Systems Protection Board.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 abolished the US Civil Service Commission and split its functions. The Office of Personnel Management took over the management functions: recruitment, examinations, pay and personnel policy. The Merit Systems Protection Board took over the quasi-judicial function of protecting the merit system, hearing appeals from employees against adverse actions. (Labour relations went to a third body, the Federal Labor Relations Authority.)

The Office of Management and Budget and the Treasury deal with budget and finance, and the Office of Policy Development and the Office of Administration are units of the Executive Office of the President.