The Limits of Administrative Discretion
Two other questions are closely related to the efficiency responsiveness issues the limits of administrative discretion and avenues for public participation in administrative decision making. We have noted that administrators take their primary cues from the actions of legislatures that initiate programs and from executives who are charged with carrying out the programs. If you are hired to manage a new agency, one of your first priorities will be to familiarize yourself with the legislation that created the agency and with an executive orders or other directives outlining the agency’s responsibilities. But if your situation is typical, you will find that neither the legislation nor the directions you receive fom the executive are sufficiently detailed to answer all the questions your work raises. There will be a need to develop policies regarding these isues; policies that are, in effect, merely more detailed pieces of “legislation”. In addition, as you get into the work, you may find it necessary to ask the legislature or the thief executive to make certain changes in the rules and regulations under which you operate.
The problem, of course, is to make sure that your policies or recommendations for change are consistent with the wishes of the citizenry. In most jurisdictions, of course, the legislature and the chief executive are popularly elected, and their reelection depends on their response to the public’s perceived needs and interests. For them, the electoral process assures responsiveness, at least in theory. As long as you are acting in a way that is clearly consistent with legislative intent, you are likely to be considered appropriately responsive. But because most situation aren’t that clear, the question becomes, “How can we assure that the administrator is exercising discretion in a way consistent with the will of the people, whether expressed in the Constitution, the laws of the land, or the preferences of citizens?
Historically, two answers have been posed to this question. In an important debate in the pages of the public administration review and other journals some forty years ago. Herman Finer argued that, to maintain responsiveness to the public, managers in public organizations should be subjected to strict and rigid controls by the legislature. His question was straightforward ( though perhaps overdrawn) : “Are the servants of the public to decide their own course, or is their course of action to be decide by a body outside themselves?” ( Finer,1972,p.328). His answer was equally direct: only through specific and detailed legislation carefully limiting of the work of public managers could responsiveness to the legislature be maintained. This interpretion of how to assure responsiveness is often called objective responsibility, depending as it does on objective external controls.
Carl Friedrich, on the other hand, argued that the increasing complexity of modern society made, such detailed legislation difficult, if not impossible: consequently, Friedrich felt that the administrator’s own concern for the public interest was often the only real assurance that his or her actions would be responsive to the electorate. Fortunately, wrote Friedrich, the growing number of professionals in government increase the likelihood that a sense of democratic responsibility will be a part of the administrator’s make-up ( Friedrich, 1972 ).
Others, following Friedrich’s lead, noted the growing number of governemental officials receiving training in schools of public affairs and public administration. These schools take quite seriously the need to expose students to the ethical issues they may encounter in public organizations and to ways these issues might be resolved. This way of assuring responsiveness is often called subjective responsibility, depending as it does on the subjective nature of the individual.
One approach to assuring responsiveness that cuts across the objective/subjective distinction is representative bureaucracy the idea that public agencies whose employees reflect certain demographic characteristics of the population as a whole are likely to operate more in line with the policy preferences of the general citizenry. According to this view, an agency with a substantial number of women and minorities employees is more likely to take into account the views of women and minorities in the population than would an agency of white males. Experience with representative bureaucracy has produced mixed results. Whereas we might indeed expect greater responsiveness with respect to race and gender in the example, there is no reason to think that such an agency would be more or less representative on other types of issues. Moreover, there is no real assurance that a person from one particular group would necessarily or always reflect that group’s policy preferences. Those preferences might well be displaced by the professional or bureaucratic norms that person adopts.
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