Introduction to Public Administration Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The remark that the separation of politics and administration had become an 'outworn credo' is credited in the key to Dwight Waldo, so the answer is B.

Waldo, in The Administrative State (1948), attacked the old politics-administration dichotomy and argued that administration is itself part of the political process and cannot be a purely neutral technique.

Woodrow Wilson (A) and Frank Goodnow (C) are the thinkers who set up the dichotomy, so they are the targets of the remark and not its author. Herbert Simon (D) separated fact from value in decision making, which is a different line of criticism.

Answer: D

The key gives Critical Theory, Phenomenology and Structural Theory as the trilogy of post-behavioural tenets on which post-modern public administration rests, so the answer is D.

Post-modern public administration draws on continental social theory: the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, phenomenology (the study of subjective meaning in experience) and structural theory. These are the intellectual sources of the movement that questions the positivism of the behavioural period.

The other options mix in new public administration, new public management, public choice or the new left, which are movements within the public administration of the same period but are not the trilogy named in the key.

Answer: B

Benn and Gaus describe publicness and privateness in terms of agency, interest and access, so the answer is B.

In Public and Private in Social Life (1983) they argue that the public-private contrast has several dimensions. Agency asks who acts, whether a public body or a private individual. Interest asks whose interest is served, the community's or the individual's. Access asks who may use or enter the thing in question, everyone or only chosen persons.

Institution and person (options A, C and D) are not among the three dimensions in this account.

Answer: D

The view that public management is a merger of the normative orientation of traditional public administration and the instrumental orientation of general management is credited to Perry and Kramer, so the answer is D.

James Perry and Kenneth Kraemer, in their work on public management, set the concern of public administration for accountability, public interest and values beside the concern of management for efficiency and results, and described public management as the joining of the two.

Christopher Hood (A) is associated with the label of new public management, and Tullock (B) with public choice, so neither made this statement.

Answer: A

A. V. Dicey gave the classical exposition of the Rule of Law in his Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885), where he set out three meanings of the rule of law: supremacy of regular law over arbitrary power, equality before the law, and the constitution as the result of individual rights. The other three titles are not by Dicey, and Public Administration: A Comparative Perspective is a later work on administration.

Answer: B

Both statements are true, but the reason does not explain the assertion. It is true that the tasks of public institutions are decided by the politicians and carried out by administrators, which is the politics-administration division of work. It is also true that public institutions perform better when decentralised. But decentralisation is not the cause of the division of tasks between politicians and administrators, so (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). That is option B.

Answer: B

The evolution of the discipline of Public Administration passed through the politics-administration dichotomy (the first phase, from Wilson's 1887 essay), then the era of principles of administration, then a crisis of identity as the earlier assumptions were challenged, and finally a focus on inter-disciplinary studies. So the sequence is (ii), (iii), (i), (iv). The first option begins with the crisis of identity, and the third and fourth put the principles or the inter-disciplinary phase in the wrong place.

Answer: B

The statement that administration is the most obvious part of government was made by Woodrow Wilson, in his essay The Study of Administration (1887), where he added that it is government in action, the executive, the operative side of government.

Kautilya wrote on statecraft in the Arthashastra but not in these words. L. D. White wrote the first textbook on public administration (1926), and Frank J. Goodnow wrote Politics and Administration (1900). The phrase and the essay belong to Wilson.

Answer: C

The official key credits Carl J. Friedrich with the statement that the politics-administration dichotomy is a misleading distinction that has become a fetish and a stereotype. I could not trace the quotation to a source, so the key is followed. Friedrich is known for arguing that policy making and administration are interwoven.

Herbert Simon, Paul Appleby and Dwight Waldo also criticised the dichotomy, and the options are therefore tempting, but the key does not credit them with this sentence.

Answer: C

The statement that public administration is the art and science of management applied to the affairs of the State is attributed to Dwight Waldo, the American scholar of the field. His definition stresses that the subject is both a practical art of running government and a body of organised knowledge about management.

Herbert Simon is known for the decision-making approach, L.D. White for his 'Introduction to the Study of Public Administration', and F.M. Marx for 'The Elements of Public Administration', so they are the authors of other well-known works and definitions. The third option, Dwight Waldo, is the keyed answer.