Reconceptualizing the Politics-Administration Dichotomy to Better Understand Public Leadership in the Twenty-First Century: A Multilateral Actors Model

Introduction

The long-standing challenges framed by the politics-administration dichotomy remain relevant in contemporary public administration as at any time in the past. Though wrongly credited to Woodrow Wilson (Rosenbloom, 2008), the significant changing context and persistence of the discussion on the practice of the politics-administration dichotomy calls for addressing what Overeem (2012, p. 178) observes as the “…poor job describing the highly complex relations and interactions between politicians and administrators.” In the United States, the persistence and relevance of the politics-administration dichotomy in practice are seen at each level of government—national, state, and local. At the federal level, the contemporary discussion pertains to the emergence of calls for the political appointment of current United States federal civil service positions described as Schedule F (Moynihan, 2022).

In state and local government, the turnover of elected officials through increases in term limits at the state and local levels raises questions regarding the policy-making experience of newly elected officials relative to other actors in the policy-making process. Furthermore, the emergence of collaborative forms of governance to address societal “wicked problems” (Stout & Love, 2019) invites deepening our understanding of the practices underpinning the politics-administration dichotomy in the context of integrative approaches across sectors and levels of government. The shift in contemporary expectations that the public bureaucracy be demographically representative of the larger society in the United States (Riccucci & Van Ryzin, 2016) and other nations (Althaus & O’Faircheallaigh, 2022), not only technically competent administrators, necessitates a reconceptualization of the relationship between elected and unelected actors in the policy-making process.

Two implicit assumptions drive the continued relevance of the discussion of political-administrative interactions. First, the discussion matters because the actors in question fulfill various public leadership roles. Hartley (2018, p. 203) defines public leadership as “mobilizing individuals, organizations, and networks to formulate and/or enact purposes, values, and actions which aim or claim to create valued outcomes for the public sphere.” Public leadership, therefore, is not restricted to politicians; it can emerge in state institutions as exhibited by career administrators and political appointees, markets and/or civil society and typically involves a multiplicity of actors. Accordingly, ‘t Hart and Tummers (2019) offer a three-fold typology of public leadership as political (elected politicians), administrative (unelected career officials and appointees), and civic (among others, non-profit leaders, celebrity activists, and even private business leaders if they are providing leadership related to the creation of public value). In each instance, those actors can lead in different directions (upwards, downwards, and outwards) depending on the target of their influence efforts. It is the downward leadership of the politicians over administrative leaders or the latter group's ability to exert upward leadership over their political masters that are most germane to the enduring legacy of the politics-administration dichotomy, which we discuss further below.

Concerning the persistence of the politics-administration dichotomy, even as a “useful myth” (Overeem, 2012, pp. 168–170), “it relates to public leaders as those who ‘set the table’ for success by shaping key mediating variables, making their overall influence easy to miss” (Moynihan et al. 2012). As Riccucci (2020, p. 244) noted, “effective leadership is perhaps the key element in rebuilding trust in government.” With the emergence of collaborative or non-hierarchical governance, the interaction of political and administrative actors is a pivotal question of public leadership to address “… organizing consensus and enabling joint action between interdependent actors rather than about showing the way to underlings and followers” (‘t Hart & Tummers, 2019, p. 71). The political-administrative relationship is central in this range of interactions between politicians, appointees, and administrators as key actors in the governance process.

Second, the political-administrative dialogue matters to questions of constitutionalism, values of representative government, and facilitating institutions of democracy (Box, 2022; Newland, 2022). Moynihan notes, “To counter populist arguments, the field of public administration must do more, revisiting and providing stronger evidence for its underlying assumptions about the value of bureaucratic independence and expertise, and the risks posed by politicization” (Moynihan, 2022, p.177; see also, Peters & Pierre, 2004). An aspect of the relationship between administrators, elected officials and appointees can be described as “how public managers uphold what they deem is an appropriate arm's-length relationship with politicians that gives the managers autonomy to act” (Brorstrom & Norback, 2020, p. 659), in “organizations in specific political contexts” (Hill & Lynn, 2016, p. 357), and that the exercise of this autonomy is used to engage in “…different sorts of institution building and strategies” (Bertelli, 2010, p. S308).

In this article, we explore the fundamental question of how politics works in administration, which, as Bertelli (2021, p. 3) persuasively outlines, “… should be more prevalent in public administration scholarship than it has been in recent decades.” We offer a model of public managers’ engagement in the “how” of politics that moves beyond a relationship between politicians and administrators as a dichotomy. This framework explicitly outlines the range of relationships—more chaotic and on a continuum—that underpin the work of elected politicians, political appointees, and career administrators as they provide public leadership. A practical consequence of the limits of current understanding is found in the struggle of career officials in a changing political context that questions—or even denies—the value of professional expertise and public service (Box, 2022). From a research perspective, one of the consequences is the lack of explication of the connection between political leadership and theory (Crosby & Bryson, 2018).

Rather than a model of elected officials interacting with bureaucratic officials, often assumed to be subordinate to their political masters, we draw on empirical research to outline the current reality of at least five significant types of actors, often working collaboratively in multilateral relationships. The proposed model better explains the most salient feature of contemporary elected officials’ interactions with administrators and other relevant actors in the policy-making process, recognizing that public leadership extends beyond the purview of elected politicians.

The first section of the article discusses the genesis and implications of the politics-administration dichotomy. It then proceeds to establish its persistence over time, followed by an explanation of the logic of our approach, with several short examples illustrating the limits of the politics-administration dichotomy. Next, the article demonstrates the analytic advantage of a continuum model across five categories of actors within the governance process, each possessing the potential for public leadership, showing how this model illustrates paths for addressing the problem we have identified. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposed model for future research design and practice.

Genesis and Limits of the Politics-Administration Dichotomy

In the late nineteenth century, Woodrow Wilson (1887, p. 200) famously articulated the need to establish a science of administration because, in his view, “it is getting harder to run a constitution than to frame one.” In doing so, he was mistakenly credited for originating the concept of the so-called politics-administration dichotomy (Rosenbloom, 2008; Svara, 2001 ), whereby there should be a complete separation of politics from administration. Attributing the dichotomy to Wilson and as a description of the practice of administration has been noted by long-standing scholars in the field as “…difficult to shed” (Rosenbloom, 2008, p. 60). Over 40 years ago, Newland (1980, p. 135) wrote, “In practice, the dogma of separation has been abandoned, but the church erected upon it has yet to crumble.” Moreover, this separation still “… survives in a sociological and political sense because it justifies practitioners trained and socialized in one or the other communities who value the security or status of a circumscribed role” (Lynn, 2001, p. 3). In short, the politics-administration dichotomy became a foundational principle of public administration, and it continues to offer a frame for understanding and analyzing the relationship between elected officials, appointees, and administrators—across a continuum of different professional positions (Overeem, 2012).

In addition, while very much an American-focused discussion, the politics-administration dichotomy raises important public leadership questions beyond American borders. Internationally, the current relevancy of understanding the politics-administration dichotomy can be found in examples of empirical research across a wide range of nations and levels of government—for example, in Brazil (Story et al., 2023) in the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Alford et al., 2017), at the local level in Sweden (Brorstrom & Norback, 2020) and in regional government in Belgium (Meyfroodt & Desmidt, 2022). The dichotomy can provide an analytic framework to study constitutional (Overeem, 2012), political (Sager & Rosser, 2022), and leadership complexity (Svara, 2020) and to advance public leadership research (Hartley, 2018).

While the term “politics-administration dichotomy” was not used until the 1940s, the reformers pushing for the Pendleton Act of 1883 previously promoted the dichotomy “As a strategic tool for bringing about fundamental change in the nation's political leadership (Rosenbloom, 2008, p. 58). Wilson, however, popularized the term in his article when he wrote: “…administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions. Although politics sets the administration tasks, it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices” (Wilson, 1887, p. 210). This notion of the distinctiveness of politics and administration was the first aspect of the theory of public administration—which Wallace Sayre interpreted and promulgated as a founding theory of the discipline in the 1950s (Svara, 2001)—known as the politics-administration dichotomy. However, Wilson's essay of 1887 had little actual influence on the founding of America's administrative state or development of public administration thought. His essay remained largely neglected until historians “rediscovered it in the 1940s. By then, the administrative state was a fact of life in America” (Stillman, 1999, p. 57). Furthermore, early democratic theorists Hamilton and Madison each had a “coherent theory of public administration” (Lynn, 2001, 25). However, the dichotomy description continued to distinguish between policy formulation, a political function, and the administration of those policies, which was thought to be best realized through the neutral bureaucratic expertise of career administrators.

Other scholars further refined the ideas that Wilson expressed so that there also came to be an ongoing response to Wilson related to the dichotomy. In 1900, for example, Frank Goodnow wrote of the need for a superior-subordinate relationship between politicians and administrators. As he wrote:

Either the executing authority must be subordinate to the expressing authority, or the expressing authority must be subordinate to the control of the executing authority. Only in this way will there be harmony in government…popular government requires that it is the executing authority that shall be subordinated to the expressing authority since the latter, in the nature of things, can be made much more representative of the people than can the executing authority (Goodnow, 2012, p. 31).

In short, as Goodnow went on to say, “politics must have a certain control over administration.” In other words, in the public administration vernacular, appointees and administrators were to be on tap (subject to political control), not on top (able to exert a modicum of professional independence), a belief that was dominant in the US in the 1920s and 1930s (Svara, 2001) and largely went unchallenged until the mid-1940s (Demir & Nyhan, 2008). Yet, the reality of the dichotomy continued to be questioned. For example, in research on federal executives and city managers, Newland (1980, p. 1) discovered over 40 years ago that “Many public sector executives function where politics and administration merge or are one.”

Although the politics-administration dichotomy did not explicitly address the issue of leadership, if we were to interpret the dichotomy using that lens, it had clear implications regarding the rightful place for leadership in the public sector. While the dichotomy would not have precluded bureaucratic officials from legitimately providing downward leadership (‘t Hart & Tummers, 2019), that is to say, the typical oversight and direction provided by superior to subordinate actors in hierarchically structured organizations, even that type of administrative leadership was mostly neglected by public administration scholars until the late 1990s (Van Wart, 2003). The same could not be said for attempts by appointees and administrators to exert either upward leadership (whereby these unelected officials would use their power to influence the thoughts and actions of the elected politicians) or outward leadership (whereby those appointees and administrators would exert influence over various civil society actors; ‘t Hart & Tummers, 2019). These latter manifestations of public leadership would represent a clear breach of the superior-subordinate relationship inherent in the politics-administration dichotomy between elected politicians, appointees, and administrators.

With respect to the policy-making process, the elected politicians were to provide policy leadership. At the same time, appointees and administrators assumed a followership role by faithfully and loyally implementing the policy preferences of their political masters. However, Rosenbloom notes that when “…the dichotomy was broadened to include partisan politics over public policy rather than limited to partisan politics… it became intellectually untenable” (Rosenbloom, 2008, pp. 59–60).

Persistence of the Politics-Administration Dichotomy

As Georgiou (2014) has revealed with his analysis of the dichotomy literature spanning the period from 1887 to 2010, many scholars have written about this topic, taking a variety of approaches from historical research to empirical observations to outlining new models of interaction between politicians, appointees, and administrators. Many researchers questioned the relevance and applicability of the dichotomy on both normative and empirical grounds (Demir, 2009; Demir & Nyhan, 2008; Lynn, 2001; Svara, 2006, 2001).

One example was the “complementarity” perspective articulated by James Svara, who has been characterized as the “…fiercest critic of the dichotomy” (Overeem, 2005, p. 312). Svara drew on empirical research on the city manager form of local government (2001, p. 180), finding that the politics-administration dichotomy was artificial and did not adequately reflect the complementarity of politics and administration, namely that “elected officials and administrators…need and help each other in a partnership for governance.” Svara (1999, 2001, p. 180) asserted that most interactions between these two actors are complementary, involving “…ongoing interaction, reciprocal influence, and mutual deference….”

The complementarity view, however, has not been without its criticisms, including the fact that it is a vague concept with limited empirical validation (Demir, 2009). Therefore, despite its limitations, the reality is that the politics-administration dichotomy has persisted (Overeem, 2012) as a primary framework that public administration scholars use to conceptualize the relationship between politicians, appointees, and administrators. One recent study describes the persistence of these characterizations of the inferior, subordinate role of administrative officials: “Public servants, it is assumed, only make small administrative decisions, leaving the big political decisions based on ideology, interests, and visions to elected politicians, special advisors, and lobbyists” (Peters et al., 2022, p. 962). Another study describes the dichotomy of a typical government organization in Western democracies as information sharing in “…a dual governance structure whereby a governing board populated by politicians and an administrative management team led by a CAO share the responsibility for organizational success” (Meyfroodt & Desmidt, 2022 p. 1), in the context of “… the politics-administration relationship considered central to the study of public management” (p. 44). Empirical research on city managers continues to stress “the relationship between politicians and administration, is navigated by managers in collaborative settings [and] is therefore of particular interest” (Brorstrom & Norback, 2020, p. 660).

One of the main reasons the dichotomy has persisted has been the lack of an alternative model (Svara, 2001), particularly one that appeals to practitioners and academics (Demir & Nyhan, 2008). The next section extends the long-standing critique of the limitation of the politics-administration dichotomy. Then it proposes what we hope will prove to be an alternative framework for understanding and analyzing the complexity of public leadership roles in the public sector. It should resonate with practitioners since it is a more nuanced and expanded depiction of the work and interactions characteristic of modern public service—and one that explicitly recognizes it is not simply the politicians who provide public leadership.

Moving Beyond the Politics-Administration Dichotomy for Studying Public Leadership

Various scholars have examined the relationship between elected politicians and career officials, noting how political principals grant or restrict bureaucratic autonomy (Bersch & Fukuyama, 2023), with a persistent view that “autonomous bureaucracies exist because different political constituencies demand inconsistent things of government, and elected officials resort to symbolic responses and vague generalizations that bureaucracies must interpret” (Miller & Whitford, 2016, p. 235). Other research distinguished a range of interactions between these two sets of actors from political dominance at one extreme to administrative dominance at the other end of the spectrum, with a convergence of political and administrative values and objectives in between (Aberbach & Rockman, 2006; Peters, 2004; Rosenbloom, 2008, Svara, 2006).

Roberts (1995, p. 294) finds in an extensive review of research that “Scholars in the field of public management have done an effective job of establishing that senior public managers are actively engaged in political work and that they often enjoy wide discretion in deciding what goals they shall pursue.” The design of new federal agencies can reflect the skill of senior administrators, particularly since “…long-term political uncertainty places a premium on trying to anticipate future contingencies prior to available information” (Shepsle & Weingast, 1995, p. 23). The interplay between elected officials in Congress with oversight roles recognizing the capacity of senior administrators to shape policy and strategic decision-making is implicitly acknowledged in the dynamic that “the precarious nature of majority rule creates incentives for the current majority to insulate newly formed agencies from subsequent politics, limiting their responsiveness to future majorities” (McCubbins, Noll & Weingast, 1989, p. 443). The research on the design of new federal agencies recognizes that the political stakes are high because, once designed, the administrators have a structure for significant influence and decision-making that elected officials would prefer to retain control over and that administrators can potentially insulate themselves from effective political control (Moe, 1990).

Where these attempts to reconceptualize the relationship between politicians, appointees, and administrators fall short, as Hartley (2018, p. 209) aptly observes, is that these studies have been “largely couched in terms of roles rather than leadership as such.” In other words, the previous literature pertaining to the dichotomy or political-administrative relations does not explicitly research the leadership dynamic in the public sector. Having said that, several decades of empirical research by Svara (2020) find a “comprehensive role” for administrators, suggesting a strong tie into the research on public leadership. The study of political leadership advances the study of the political-administrative relationships as public leadership “…is about constitutional and political roles of leaders in a democratic polity; about how we want to be governed…” (Rhodes & ‘t Hart, 2014, p. 19). Moreover, the political context offers leaders both “… obstacles and opportunities for public servants to successfully lead in government during turbulent technological, social, and economic times” (Riccucci, 2020, p. 243).

From our perspective, connecting the research in public leadership with the discussion of the politics-administration dichotomy is a significant opportunity for illustrating the actual work that occurs in the political-administrative interactions by public leaders who are elected officials, political appointees, career administrators, and indeed other societal actors, who, at times, also fulfill a public leadership function. Furthermore, research that supports a framework for understanding and analyzing the relationship between elected politicians, appointees, and administrators must view public leadership not as the exclusive domain of the political class as is implied by the dichotomy—at least with respect to political-administrative interactions—but rather a dynamic process of interaction that a multiplicity of actors can exhibit. As Behn (1998) so compellingly argued, public managers need a rightful place to lead.

The connection of public leadership and the politics-administration dichotomy engages the values of constitutionalism and questions of how public value is created. The connection facilitates exploring the “…dichotomy as a constitutional principle that demands a continuous effort to keep politics and administration apart in our system of government to preserve not only administrative (or bureaucratic) and political (or democratic) but, above all, constitutional values” (Overeem, 2012, p. 184).

The question posed by Roberts (1995, p. 294) is, “Why is it right that public managers should wield the power which it is observed that they do, in fact, wield?” Scholars have addressed the question of “why it is right” for administrators to engage in the exercise of power by outlining the myriad ways that appointees and administrators are required to lead: they must be stewards of the missions and values of their public service organizations (Terry, 1995); they lead public sector innovations (Borins, 2002); they have a huge impact on follower satisfaction (Trottier et al., 2008); and they contribute to the meaningfulness of their colleagues, which has positive outcomes for both the public sector organizations and the employees themselves (Tummers & Knies, 2013).

Therefore, while it was once commonplace to view the administrative leadership of appointees and administrators as an oxymoron, very few scholars would make that argument today. There is widespread and growing recognition of the professional capacities and technical ability of appointees and administrators, not just in the senior executive service (Halligan, 2012) but also at all levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy, to create public value (Moore, 1995). Administrators also lead up by influencing the elected politicians they serve and lead out through their influence over citizens, lobbyists, public interest groups, non-profit organizations, their counterparts in other levels of government, and other civil society actors (‘t Hart & Tummers, 2019). This has profound implications regarding the practical understanding of the politics-administration dichotomy with the changing nature of public leadership.

Research on political and administrative public leaders can often focus on one individual imbued with tremendous power and influence to inspire and direct the actions of their followers. For example, Caro's (1975) study on the exercise of public leadership focuses on the power accumulated by one administrator, Robert Moses, as “the power broker” in building New York City's infrastructure. Similarly, in explaining the power of elected officials, Caro's (2012) award-winning research focuses on the career of one elected official, Lyndon B. Johnson, as a U.S. congressman, Senate majority leader, and then president. These case studies are valuable but do not generate a framework applicable to various cases.

However, the public leadership literature has transitioned to an era of post-heroic leadership (Alimo-Metcalfe & Alban-Metcalfe, 2006; Hartley, 2018) to findings that leadership in the public sector is often distributed or shared among a group of actors managing and leading collaborative inter-organizational networks (Agranoff, 2012; Bryson et al., 2006; Crosby & Bryson, 2010; Hsieh & Liou, 2018; Ospina, 2016). In advising leaders to think politically, Heifitz and Linsky (2002, p. 75) advise to find partners.

The public sector has a distinctive set of complex societal challenges that call for collaboration across sectors and integration of solutions from varied disciplines (Stout & Love, 2019). Furthermore, with a shift from clear lines of hierarchical leadership roles to more “distributed forms of leadership [that] depends on the activities of a broad range of actors, the question emerges as to under what conditions will organizational members contribute to this shared task by exercising leadership behaviour” (van der Hoek & Kuipers, 2022, p. 2).

The current realities of elected officials, which include interacting with appointees and administrators, recognize how much of the work of government is a function of horizontal management (Bakvis & Juillet, 2004; Peters, 2015) or network governance (Agranoff, 2012; Sørensen & Torfing, 2007), where appointees and administrators work in conjunction with their counterparts in other levels of government or other jurisdictions, or carried out through contracting with private or non-profit sector service delivery providers. Therefore, limiting the focus of public leadership research to the dyadic relationship between a singular political leader and a group of administrative followers fails to capture the new reality of public sector employment.

What has emerged as the key issue is public leaders’ “use of their discretionary authority in ways that are both representative of public wants and effective in a practical sense [as] the fundamental problem of public administration” (Bertelli, 2021, pp. 85–86). Typically, there are at least five obvious sets of actors that are germane to public leadership: (a) elected officials; (b) appointed officials; (c) career public administrators; (d) non-profit or nongovernmental administrators funded by public agencies; and (e) community leaders not employed in publicly funded organizations who are nonetheless contributing to the creation of public value. This last category comprises a wide range of potential civic leaders, including celebrity activists, environmentalists, public intellectuals, social entrepreneurs, other community leaders, and even private sector business leaders if they promote public value. The politics-administration dichotomy currently calls for mapping out the contemporary exercise of sovereign power that occurs through the interaction of elected politicians with appointees and administrators in a multilateral reality.

The formal governmental structure for public leaders has significantly changed since the early writings of Wilson and Goodnow on the politics-administration dichotomy. At the local level, the progressive reform movement led to the city manager form of government. In addition, there is increasing variety with elected community councils, business improvement districts, and community land trusts (Musso, 2022, p. 108), all of which add to the complexity of the governance process and manifestations of public leadership. At the other end of the governmental spectrum, the federal structure of the American government has fundamentally shifted since Wilson and others wrote about the dichotomy, with the emergence of intergovernmental systems, whereby elected politicians, appointees, and administrators work vertically at the local, regional, state and federal levels to provide a range of services, including transportation, environmental, public health, and human services, and address various emerging societal problems. In addition, special-purpose districts have emerged as the fastest growing unit of government in the United States (Foster, 1999). These special districts, designed around geography and policy, can be small districts for vector control of mosquito abatement to vast districts for building bridges, tunnels, rail, and roads across multiple political jurisdictions.

This complexity associated with various levels and forms of government is what Getha-Taylor et al. (2011, pp. i90, i91, emphasis in original) refer to as the “boundaries or jurisdiction of public leadership,” noting that it is now “both intra- and inter-organizational (or rather, within and across jurisdictions).” The reality of political and administrative leadership includes the political and administrative exercise of power in the leadership of teams, organizations, communities, and institutional design (Callahan, 2018).

A Proposed Multilateral Actor Model for Analyzing Public Leadership

A tension exists in explaining political and administrative leadership between an emphasis on structure, for example, Moe's (1990) politics of structural choice, to the personal, as exemplified by Caro's (2012) description of President Johnson's relationships with senators as the key to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the national level, Allison (1971) recognizes the strengths and limits of any one frames in shifting from the structural (bureaucratic) to the personal (political) frame for developing a deeper understanding of decision-making at the intersection of elected and appointed officials’ relationships. The Allison research finds that simply locating an individual's position in the administrative structure, namely the notion that “where you stand on an issue, depends on where you sit,” does not fully explain the interactions of elected and administrative actors. For instance, in local government, the relationships of an elected official with a range of elected members, staff, appointees, administrators, and community actors better explain policy and structural change. In the case study of a local elected official in a county of eight million residents (Callahan, 2020), the varied relationships, rather than political oversight, account for significant policy changes and development of new administrative structures addressing various issues, such as reduction of gang violence, AIDS/HIV education and prevention, neo-natal drug exposure prevention, children's services, homelessness service coordination, and gang violence reduction through regional and intergovernmental coordination of law enforcement.

The current realities of public leadership include the exercise of discretion across a complex and iterative set of interactions with varied actors and sectors (Bertelli, 2021) and within the public sector. These actions are more on a continuum with blurred distinctions that are not dichotomous, referred to as the purple zone, where the red color of politics intersects with the blue color of the administrative realm (Alford et al., 2017). Research has distinguished three types of politics. First, political is defined at the start as “partisan patronage and electoral politics” Rosenbloom (2008, p. 57), with the politicization of the civil service as “the substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria in the selection, retention, promotion, rewards, and disciplining of members of the public service” (Peters & Pierre, 2004, p. 2). This is played out in the tension between political responsiveness and administrative neutrality (Peters, 2004, p. 126).

Second, research has developed evaluating policy making and implementation as distinctive and outside of partisan politics. The exercises of administrative discretion have been seen as central to policy formulation and implementation (Rosenbloom et al., 2010, pp. 31–32). This discretion is a reality in federal and city administrators because of broad goals stated by elected officials, as well as the need to be responsive to elected officials, but also share with elected officials and the public “Informed perspectives about alternatives, resources, relationships, scope, history, and prospects” (Newland, 1980, p. 18). There is an additional expectation of professionalism “governed by standards and codes of their disciplines and fields” (Newland, 1980, p. 25).

Third, the research on organizational behavior has identified politics as intrinsic but not partisan. Long-standing research finds that “… politics is the realistic process of making decisions and allocating resources in a context of scarcity and divergent interests” (Bolman & Deal, 2013, p. 184). This is coupled with organizational politics of agenda setting, mapping, networking, coalition building, and negotiating, with the conclusion that “the question is not whether organizations will have politics but rather what kind of politics they will have” (Bolman & Deal, 2013, p. 203).

The range of these relationships invites a model that illustrates a shift from the elected officials as the center of the interactions of the politics-administration dichotomy to a wider focus on the range of interactions between elected politicians, appointees, and administrators, in addition to various nongovernmental, and community actors. Such a model can account for different locations and varied relationships that engage elected officials with various actors contributing to creating public value. In recent research on “great policy successes,” eminent public leadership researchers draw on a framework that explains success across four dimensions: program, process, political, and endurance. Their work sees the public administrator as intrinsically engaged in “… building political coalitions and other political requirements for success (Compton & ‘t Hart, 2019, p. 5).

A multilateral model that can illustrate the “how” of the current realities of political-administrative interactions is depicted below in Figure 1. It models a range of multilateral actors engaged in political-administrative interactions, both inside and outside government. The politics-administration dichotomy is modeled as the exercise of political authority in democratic governance with five distinct types of actors, including:

elected officials and their political staff and with other elected politicians at varied levels of government,

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Multilateral model of political-administrative relationships.

The model maps out a range of concurrent and simultaneous relationships that run parallel to other political-administrative engagements. The model accounts for the more traditional set of relationships between elected officials and public administrators, but also shows the equal importance of other roles—ones that have become more pervasive and important to governing in recent decades.

The exercise of political power is modeled as more contested rather than a linear relationship of elected officials directly delegating to appointed or career administrators. The multilateral model shows the potential for varied alliances across actors rather than limited to bilateral relationships between politicians and administrators. The exercise of political power is not limited to an elected official and, by proxy, their key political staff in overseeing administrators within government agencies. Rather, the model illustrates a wider range of engagements beyond oversight, with the potential to initiate programs or avenues to insulate programs from politics.

To apply the metaphor of the mapping to the “four corners of the earth,” this model, outlined in Figure 1, maps political and administrative relationships to the four corners of each of the five significant actors. The model displays the points of connected relationships. The thickness of the bi-directional arrows suggests varying intensity levels regarding the interactions between the different actors. For example, one of the thickest arrows connects elected politicians and their staff to career administrators to recognize the primacy of those interactions in terms of public leadership, but the elected politicians are not simply providing downward leadership to career administrators working in various state institutions; those individuals are also leading upwards by influencing how politicians view and respond to different management issues and challenges and public policies.

While the model attempts to depict the differing intensities of the interactions between these five distinct groups of actors, the nature and intensity of those interactions will vary from one issue to another, necessitating a careful contextual analysis of those relationships in each instance by public leadership researchers. Conversely, when a connection is absent, it illustrates a design to insulate a new agency from political engagement described by Moe (1990) as the politics of structural choice. The model does not make a normative claim that non-elected officials should engage in political negotiations and coalition building, but rather describes the empirical reality that has emerged from research in American government at the local, regional, state, and federal levels. The exercise of power in politics is through relationships.

For elected officials, the actual person is often the unit of analysis. However, a wide range of research in political science (e.g., Neustadt & May, 1986) notes the pivotal roles of short-term political appointees. The power of appointees can be seen domestically in the case study of Donna Shalala in her eight years of leadership as the longest-serving Secretary of the US Department of Human Services (Radin, 2002), while the role of the staff of elected officials is illustrated vividly by Richard Reeves (1985) in the 1960s in domestic policy for President Kennedy and by Samantha Power, 2019 in her study on international policy for President Obama. These two biographies vividly illustrate the role of staff or appointees of elected officials to meet and negotiate with members of Congress, chairs of relevant oversight committees, and other appointees or staff, along with other levels of the U.S. government and internationally. An additional case study illustrates the significant role of elected officials’ staff. Ed Deseve, lead staff member for then Vice President Biden, shows the politics-administration dichotomy as a rich set of relationships. As Callahan and his colleagues noted (2012), Ed Deseve served as a catalyst, communicator, and overseer to design and implement the expenditures for the $870 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act working with over 20 different federal departments and with numerous officials in various states in 2010.

This model lays the foundation to map the relationships between local governments and non-profit organizations more clearly and explicitly. For example, county government administrator Chet Hewitt designed political-administrative relationships with and between the five actors: elected politicians, appointees, administrators, nongovernmental organizations, and community members (Parks, 2009). Hewitt cultivated relationships with the faith-based community to develop support for moving children from the nongovernmental organizations of group homes, to gain the support of the five elected county supervisors, and to change the lives of children in protective services for the better by placing them with family relatives. The dynamics of the multilateral relations highlighted by the model specifically include the expansive cross-sectoral reality of the non-profit sector (Salamon, 2012) with non-profit or nongovernmental services provided through contracts under the direction of public managers with the approval of elected officials.

This model illustrates the range of interactions that can be structured into the design of new public policies and administrative structures, rather than a default position of administrators reporting directly to elected officials. The model recognizes that from the administrators’ perspective, managing in the public sector is to manage and provide leadership in networks (Agranoff, 2012). Furthermore, the model maps out what Svara (2001, p.180) describes as complementary roles with “…ongoing interaction, reciprocal influence, and mutual deference….” A case study for building a $1.8 billion-dollar regional rail project illustrates the “great policy success” of administrators taking the initiative (Callahan, 2019). To explore the potential to address goods movement congestion in the second busiest ports in the United States, namely those of Los Angeles and Long Beach, two administrators, Mark Pisano and Gil Hicks, initiated discussions, then a task force, and finally a formal Joint Powers Authority, involving elected officials from four counties and over 76 cities, as well as the private sector railroads, and community-based organizations, to privately finance a project to reduce rail and road congestion, improve air and water quality, and create community-based job training.

This research includes but is not limited to public value, community leadership and civic engagement, public networks, and collaboration. More specifically, the model captures the varied relationships and space needed to create public value (Moore, 1995) through new strategy development initiated by public managers in discussions with other administrators in different capacities and different types of organizations. The research on community leadership (Ospina, 2016) and civic engagement (Emerson and Nabatchi, 2016) are modeled by the inclusion of the role of civic leaders. The inter-organizational networks in the public sector identified in research pioneered by Provan and Milward (1995) are illustrated in the multiple roles of administrators and elected officials interacting with various non-profit leaders. The insight into the potential and reality of leadership as collaboration and not necessarily driven by elected officials or top-down hierarchies (Bryson, Crosby & Stone, 2006) is also illustrated in this model.

This model addresses the critique of Roberts (1995, 304) on the failure of public management research to engage directly “… those political actors likely to challenge the claims put forward by public managers means that progress in refining new rhetorical strategies is likely to be slow and unnecessarily painful on the research in public management.” These case studies illustrate a model that can more effectively describe the actual practice of career administrators in public leadership positions.

The approach of Wilson and others advocating for the politics-administration dichotomy can too narrowly frame administrative work as technical work that does not involve the politics of relationships and negotiations. The framing offered by our model is that to accomplish the technical work of public administration, administrators regularly leave their office or cubicle to meet with the other four actors in the multilateral model of political-administrative relationships, rather than waiting for direction through oversight, post hoc, or policy direction ex ante. The current reality of political-administrative interactions is that they regularly involve initiation by administrators and engagement across all five actors to create public value.

The model addresses the underdeveloped field of political management (Lees-Marshment, 2021, pp. 2–3) across the key aspects, including the full scope and scale of complex projects needed for effective political management. In addition, the model outlines the expectation of political management skills needed for successfully navigating these various relationships and additional skills needed to make transparent each of the actors and perspectives involved. Furthermore, the model's transparency and accountability in the multilateral relations in the political-administrative interactions begin to address the challenges of what Lees-Marshment (2021) describes as a “problematic workplace culture.”

This model can be operationalized to quantitatively test the types and intensity of interactions at different levels of government. The model can serve as a basis for illustrating differences and similarities in how public leaders spend their time. For example, do city managers spend more time with city councils, than federal executives with congressional oversight? Do county-level government agency directors spend more time with community and civic engagement than state-level government directors? The “how” of political-administrative relationships can be more readily tested for variables correlated with “great policy successes” (Callahan, 2019). The model provides a descriptive approach for qualitative research to compare across cases. In addition, the model can test in public leadership the differences in how leaders “set the table” (Moynihan et al., 2012) at the federal, state, regional, and local levels.

The model offers a path to measure the “how” in the intergovernmental system with the different political-administrative exchanges at each level of government. A multilateral model can better explain the dynamics of trade-offs, political gains, and the “problematics of attention” (March & Olsen, 1983) for presidents and other elected officials in contrast with those additional critical actors in the governance process—appointees, administrators, those working in nongovernmental organizations, or members of the community.

This multilateral model of political and administrative interactions shifts research from bilateral relations to a more inclusive model. The model suggests a wide range of future research opportunities reflecting contemporary realities of public administrators engaging with political oversight. This has important implications with respect to accountability, not just in relation to the oversight provided by the elected politicians over the public service, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in terms of how accountability is shared—if that is even possible—when public leadership is distributed amongst a multiplicity of actors both within and outside of government. As Thomas (2009, pp. 244–245) noted, “Leadership involves responsibility, which leads to accountability.” As leadership becomes more “dispersed and more networked in character,” it makes sense that “accountability will become complicated and blurred.” The model also incorporates avenues for the wide range of in-depth research on politics and administration that has been developed. Rather than fostering concurrent but separate conversations, this model brings together interdisciplinary research on networks, collaboration, civic engagement, community engagement, elected officials, and public administrators.

For leadership research and practices, the model outlines the varied channels that public leaders navigate and negotiate in their work. Rather than being constrained to a dichotomy, leadership research can systematically explore the skills and best practices in each set of relationships and compare and contrast across the different types of relationships. The model provides a mapping of the types of leadership and relationships in the public sector, more effectively illustrating the complexity and dynamics of public leadership than is possible by using the politics-administration dichotomy. At that same time, it is crucial to remember, that “Conflict and contest lie at the heart of public leadership” (Hartley, 2018, p. 206). Therefore, the multilateral model we are proposing will ultimately accentuate the extent of this contestation and conflict because it explicitly recognizes that public leaders are “work[ing] with, and negotiat[ing] with, many different stakeholders who have divergent values, goals, ideologies and interests” (Hartley, 2018, p. 207).

The model's illustration of expected interactions of administrators, elected officials, nongovernmental actors, and community members makes transparent the wide-ranging roles of the administrator. From a practical perspective, mapping the actual role of administrators, as opposed to relying on a descriptive “myth” of the politics-administration dichotomy, facilitates a deeper understanding of the actual work of administrators in policymaking and drawing on various relationships. Also, this model's illustration of the multiple roles played by administrators can facilitate appreciation and deepen the understanding of the costs of valuable knowledge and objective assessments when that role is attacked. In addition, the emergence of term limits for elected officials highlights the need to be more transparent to the public and elected officials about the contributions and expertise of administrators.

The model also offers the potential to apply to future research across levels of government to deepen the understanding and explain more effectively the intergovernmental dynamics that are central in the US, as well as the collaborative and integrative leadership (Stout & Love, 2019) needed for addressing significant societal challenges such as responses to pandemics, climate adaptation, homelessness, and economic inequity. Moreover, for international studies, this model offers the opportunity to identify similarities and differences in democratic governance in different states by examining the interactions of politics and administration across the dimensions illustrated.

Finally, the model offers implications for training public administrators. A consistent refrain in public administration education is that technical skills can be readily taught at the workplace when hiring new graduates. Still, relationship skills need to be learned to be successful. This model illustrates the expectations for administrators to develop four sets of relationships as part of the political-administrative exchanges. The model implies the need for different skills when interacting with different audiences. The model outlines the need for the interdisciplinary skill sets inherent in public administration (Raadschelders, 2012), including political acumen (Hartley, 2018; Neustadt & May, 1986). Another implication is training in political management skills (Lees-Marshment, 2021) that addresses the scope and complexity of societal problems.

Conclusion

Dwight Waldo, one of the most pre-eminent modern public administration scholars, may have been partially correct in his assertion that the politics-administration dichotomy is here to stay (Overeem, 2006). However, the dichotomy remains more of a discussion point than the reality of contemporary practice. The exercise of authority in the public sector is accomplished through the realities of career administrators engaged in political dialogue with not only elected officials but also those appointed to public leadership positions and those in community and non-profit leadership positions. The interdisciplinary skill set of administrative leaders includes political acumen as an expectation, not an aberration. The reality of contemporary research in the public sector finds administrative leaders working across networks and sectors to create collaborations and public value to address the most complex of societal challenges.

The model illustrates public leadership as “not a given but socially constructed” (Rhodes, 2014, p. 112). Mapping the range of political engagements allows public leadership research to move forward by explicitly researching the varied relationships outlined in our multilateral model of political-administrative relationships. The interdisciplinary research (Raadschelders, 2012) called for by the complexity of social challenges confronting public administration, public leadership, political science, and other fields provides different approaches to describe the wide range of multilateral relationships in the contemporary landscape. The capacity to engage in these multilateral relationships has the potential for significant impact. In a case study of reducing African American infant mortality in Sacramento County (Hewitt, 2017), the public leadership skill set of the foundation director to engage with elected county supervisors, county administrators, non-profit organizations, and community leaders saved lives.

The tendency of the politics-administration dichotomy discussion to focus on the single lens of political oversight does not fully capture the current reality. Multiple lenses are needed to view, understand, and explain the multilateral roles and relationships found in contemporary democratic governance. We suspect that earlier scholars and contemporary researchers would welcome this newer model as reflecting the empirical reality and the normative practices needed to sustain the vibrancy of democratic governance. Moreover, a map of the reality of public administrators engaged in a network of political actors better confronts the potential for an increased dystopian reality that Box (2022) describes in the contemporary movement toward a more authoritarian American government. A multilateral model of public leadership offers a map of constructive political engagement explaining the “how” of the participation of public administrators in the democratic process (Bertelli, 2021). Advancing a deeper understanding of the current reality of political and administrative interactions offers the potential to address the current movement toward authoritarian political rule.