Public administration and executive politics: perennial questions in changing contexts

What is executive politics?

As noted, executive politics is about the systematic study of the political factor within administrative or bureaucratic arrangements, and about the administrative factor in political life. Such a focus allows for a concentration on a field of study that includes the politics of political–administrative relations and the role of governmental and non-governmental organisations in the formulation and execution of political programmes. This focus is not merely interested in the formal arrangements and explicit practices that characterise these relationships within the executive of the state. It is also about the often implicit and informal understandings that shape the relationship between elected and non-elected public officials at all levels of government (including the transnational and supranational level). It also does not mean that executive politics is solely about state-based actors. Instead, the execution of public administration and policy, as scholars interested in ‘governance’ emphasise, involves non-state actors and executive politics cannot afford to ignore the considerable extent to which authority is being exercised in areas that are outside of the state, narrowly defined.

Before exploring three of the perennial questions that are at the heart of executive politics, it is worth considering the two distinct research traditions that broadly inform executive politics. The first tradition is that of ‘comparative government’ (a term that arguably has witnessed considerable decline, despite the classic textbook by Hague and Harrop, 2010). The interest here is in the ‘government’, using the b-word. Particular interest has been paid to the role of prime ministers and presidents, the role of cabinets and legislatures and how these elected arms of the state interrelate with other parts of the state and other actors (such as interest groups; Elgie, 1997; Heclo, 1977). This is the tradition of presidential studies, namely the study how presidents (and prime ministers) are able to shape the agenda, dominate (or not) cabinets, control agencies through appointments, patronage (see Aberbach and Rockman, 2000; Bäck et al., 2009; Clinton and Lewis, 2008; Krause, 2009; McCarty, 2000; Meyer-Sahling, 2008, 2011) and other means, and how decisions ‘at the heart of government’ are being made. This also includes an interest in the making and breaking of coalitions (Laver and Shepsle, 1996). A particular interest here has been the study of ‘control over bureaucracy’, as part of a wider focus on the ‘politics of bureaucracy’ (note the importance of the b-word; Hood, 1996). One key field of interest has been whether presidential or congressional control over agencies was possible. A second interest has been the power of political appointment, or ‘politicisation’ (Lewis, 2007, 2008; Kopecky and Spirova, 2011). A third interest has been an interest in budgetary politics (Wildavsky, 1988; Wehner, 2010). In the British context, a specific contribution to the field has been the interest in the ‘core executive’ and the concerted attempt to move away from earlier discussions regarding ‘cabinet government’ (Rhodes, 1995; Dunleavy and Rhodes, 1990; Elgie, 2011).

Whereas the comparative government tradition is interested in the executive branch (and the role of bureaucracy within it), the second key intellectual influence on executive politics is comparative public administration, using the a-word. To some extent, the a-word has also given way to the m(anagement)-word, in a move to reflect the growing usage of ‘public management’ (although the word ‘management’ has featured in journal articles throughout the 20th century; the first ‘management’ in an article title of the newly founded Public Administration was in 1930 (its eighth volume), and related to internal management; Clarke, 1930, see also Bunbury, 1928). This influence’s key interest has been in comparing civil services, oversight of public utilities, local government organisations, the role of centre-local relations and other intergovernmental (federal) relationships. A long-standing theme has been a concern with reform of administrative arrangements (at the domain- and the whole of government-wide level). Particular interest over the past two decades or so has not just been on the ‘performance’ or particular administrative arrangements (in particular in the context of the explosion of performance measurement in England; see James, 2011a; Dowding and John, 2011), but also in the acceptance of administrative reform doctrines in different national contexts. This fascination with organisational reform in the name of the so-called ‘New Public Management’ (NPM; time for the inevitable reference to Hood, 1991) has encouraged considerable interest in comparing and assessing reform experiences, discovering institutional traditions and/or sources of diversity in due course.

The various doctrines that were associated with NPM (or managerialism) and, more recently, post-NPM, have given rise to the study of select areas, such as the study of the ‘fragmentation’ of the state apparatus under the name of ‘agencification’, the study of ‘coordination’ and the study of administrative leadership and performance (Lodge and Gill, 2011). Similarly, those interested in the ‘rise of the regulatory state’ have been interested in the proliferation of regulatory agencies and the changing nature of political life (Moran, 2003). As a consequence of this latest interest in ‘reform’, there has been a growing attention to tensions, such as the implications of the rise of ‘autonomy’ (for executive and regulatory agencies) for ‘accountability’, the contradictory pressures on enforcement that call for consistency and discretionary responsiveness, or the attention paid to unintended consequences and ‘rude surprises’ in crisis management which contrast with the development of ever-more elaborate manuals to avoid crisis.

So what are the overlapping areas of concern between these two broad fields of study? Without seeking to offer an exhaustive account, three broad areas of interest can be established. These represent, as noted, perennial questions in the study of bureaucracy and administration.

Why executive politics?

So far, so agreeable. In this section, attention turns to the deficits in the existing literature. What does a focus on executive politics add to our understanding of existing accounts? This section looks in particular at contributions from the public administration side. We do so for reasons of space. We do not wish to pick on individual authors or criticise particular analytical concerns. We also do not intend to imply that those using the a-word are particularly prone to ignore key aspects stressed by an executive politics perspective. Instead, we suggest that particular seminal contributions can be used as a springboard to point to the potential ‘value added’ of an executive politics angle.

As noted, one key industry in public administration over the past two decades or so has been the exploration of public management reform (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). Different waves of interest exist, starting from the early explorers who sought to systematise and classify the various reform ideas and pointed to the existence of mega-trends. The second wave investigated various national reform attempts, ranging from single-case to comparative case studies (Kickert, 2011; Alba and Navarro, 2011), noting patterns that pointed (according to the particular observer’s taste) to some degree of commonality, continued diversity or different reform trajectories. A third wave has moved to the study of side-effects and the discovery of ‘new’ administrative doctrines (Hood and Peters, 2004). Reform trajectories are seen as a result not just of the historically grown political institutional framework (ie, federalism, constitutional anchoring of administrative patterns, reform pressure due to economic recession), but because of reluctance on the part of politicians and or bureaucracies. A key problem of such accounts is the implicit assumption that administrative reform is some form of race, with jurisdictions involved in the same competition at the same time. Unsurprisingly, different institutional settings, ‘veto players’ or the reluctance of bureaucracies and politicians (usually due to their institutional setting) emerge as the key factor in explaining different reform trajectories and race performances. A similar phenomenon is prominent in the comparative study of reform ‘objects’, especially the comparison of so-called executive agencies and other aspects of non-ministerial administration.

Broad classifications of reform trajectories based on macro-institutional criteria certainly have their place in the exploration of particular phenomena. However, starting conditions for reforms are widely different; the timing of and overlap with different reforms is critical and coincides with other (national and regional) events, and different politicians and bureaucrats may have different needs. Put differently, in our attempt to systematically assess the acceptance and performance of different reform doctrines across countries, the existing literature has not paid sufficient attention to the inherent specificities and tensions of reform developments within particular jurisdictions. Politicians and bureaucrats do not read academic journals and accept consultancy advice on the basis of persuasive doctrines alone, but because of particular needs. (In addition, consultancy advice usually consists of edited scripts, reflecting a partial account of a particular reform episode elsewhere that then gets translated into a particular context to generate support for adoption; see Sahlin-Andersson, 2001). Little is known (especially in comparative context) about such mechanisms of political choices: why do politicians engage in some reform activities, but are disinterested in or actively opposed to others? The literature needs to pay somewhat more attention to these needs as well as to the substance of particular reforms. It is not particularly interesting to learn that particular reform packages were implemented and others were frustrated if one has no idea as to the administrative prerequisites of or the political rationale for particular reform packages.

The key contribution executive politics can make to the public management reform literature is to move beyond a simple view of ‘politicians as reformers’ and ‘bureaucracies as entrenched/reluctant opponents of reformers’ (see Knill, 1999). We all know that there are considerable tensions that shape any social and institutional setting, and the literature on resistance of change has also noted the considerable potential for reform within organisations (Feldman, 2004). The question therefore should rather be why particular doctrines for reform were accepted at a particular time, whilst others were discarded. Similarly, the b-word oriented field of study has challenged the simple view of ‘politicians as reformers’ (see also Lewis, 2008). Different implications for organisational reform and behaviour emerge if the assumptions of blame-avoidance (Hood, 2011b; Weaver, 1986) or reputation and signalling (Carpenter, 2010; Maor, 2011) are introduced. Furthermore, understanding the impact of various reform packages on Public Service Bargains similarly highlights the importance of both formal and informal understandings and the ways these understandings interact with the substance of reform packages. In sum, therefore, an executive politics–oriented account towards public management reform points to the importance of political and administrative logics that drive the dynamics of reform initiatives.

A second key industry has concerned itself with particular administrative tools, for example performance management and regulatory impact assessments. Similar to the broader literature on public management reform, these accounts have appeared in different waves. The early literature was mainly interested in the design of performance indicators or performance management systems. Later accounts have explored various aspects of the emerging performance mindset (Radin, 2006), such as the use (and widespread non-use) of performance information (van Dooren and van de Walle, 2008) or the difficulty of working with performance regimes under conditions of the hollowed-out state (Frederickson and Frederickson, 2006). The (English) interest in developing target regimes for health care and local government performance has offered much potential for extensive studies in the political consequences of performance management and its unintended consequences, in particular through the discovery of gaming of performance targets and other responses of ‘living systems’ to the machine like use of targets (Bevan and Hood, 2006; Hood, 2006; James, 2011b). It is, however, far less clear why politicians would wish to put themselves into a position where performance management tools might illustrate the lack of success of their programmes.

Similarly, the field of ‘better regulation’ has offered insights into the attractions of tools such as regulatory impact assessment and standard cost models (among others). Diffusion-based explanations have been used to account for the spread of these tools (Wegrich, 2009), and, increasingly, concern has been paid to the (mix of) motivations that have guided the attraction of such tools, highlighting in particular the interest in ‘tying the hands’ of politicians and bureaucrats, the interest in facilitating co-ordination across systems of executive government, and, arguably, also an interest in encouraging learning. Similarly to performance management, these tools have also seen considerable attempts at manipulation and gaming which cannot simply be understood as exercises in political and/or bureaucratic resistance to change (Wegrich, 2011).

In other words, the politics of defining ‘(good) performance’ (and ‘good regulation’) and not just the politics of gaming and manipulation are at the heart of an executive politics approach towards performance management and ‘better regulation’. Similar to the work on cross-national public management reform, we know a great deal about the chronology of reforms (the policy cycle of reform) and about distinct decision-stages, but we know less about the particular motives and opportunities that have shaped decision-making across political and administrative actors at particular points in time. Little attention has so far been paid to the question whether the adoption of tools changes executive politics. An ‘econocrat’ language and the related rationale of ‘enhanced rationality’ have dominated the better regulation field (for a review, see Radaelli and de Francesco, 2010). Lines of investigation follow economic institutionalist accounts of regulation, building on ideas of ‘credible commitment’ (as noted above) and other functional explanations that link the nature of the state with the state of economic life. This contrasts with broader accounts of the regulatory state (Moran, 2003) that suggest that the development of regulation (and arguably also of performance management) emerges in a particular context of hyper-innovative politics in which politicians and bureaucrats utilised tools that promised synoptic and regularised control to adopt to wider changes of an internationalized economy and heterogenised elite.

A third industry has pointed to the importance of ‘governance’ in contemporary governing. British public administration has arguably always pointed to the inherently political nature of the hollowed out state (Rhodes, 1996b; also Goetz, 2008; McGuire and Agranoff, 2011; Ferlie et al., 2011). However, the wider literature that considers governance in pure network terms where all hierarchical power is diminished, and the literature on collaborative management, are a largely politics-free zone. Instead, accounts point to the importance of participation, mediation and negotiation, whilst not paying much attention to the involvement of the state or the implications for public administration, namely in terms of setting the frame for these mediation events to take place, or in terms of the kind of competencies that are required of public servants and the rewards they receive. Overall, there is a disconnect between accounts that stress the collaborative nature of modern governing (especially at the implementation stage) and the managerialist tendencies that are said to be engrained in contemporary governing. Furthermore, collaborative accounts have a tendency to see bureaucracy or public administration (ie, using both b- and a-words) as a device that hinders collaboration. As noted above, more needs to be said about why bureaucratic rationality and political accountability seem to be incompatible with collaborative management. Indeed, it might be said that much of the ‘governance as negotiation’ literature not only misses out on other, more political accounts of governance that highlight the importance of indirect exercises of state power (through steering, for example) or of the simple fragmentation of sources of political powers due to supranationalisation or transnationalisation effects.

In many ways, British public administration has successfully responded to the challenges of changed statehood in the last 20 or 30 years. The British literature (especially inspired by Rhodes, 1996b) has both continued its interest in the machinery of government, and it has also seen the hollowing out and ‘networkised’ nature of contemporary policy-making in a more political light. German scholarship has similarly enthusiastically embraced the ‘governance turn’. However, this embrace has taken on a somewhat different character, largely focusing on mediation and negotiation among network participants. Such accounts pay little attention to the political or administrative factor. This particular variation on the governance theme can be related to the specific features of the German polity: in a setting that is about co-operation, negotiation and fragmentation, the study of ‘new governance’ is mostly about diagnosing accentuated existing patterns that do not represent a fundamental challenge to assumptions of a unitary state. The presence of ‘para-public’ institutions in Germany (in contrast to the ‘ungrounded statist’ UK context, Dunleavy, 1989) has also facilitated a stronger interest in the steering capacity of societal actors (Mayntz and Scharpf, 1995).

We may be accused of a partial reading of the field. A second accusation against our concern with the politics and substance of particular measures might be that we are opposed to comparative research and seeking to return to a world of N = 1 research. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are merely suggesting that the study of the substantive concerns of executive politics needs to be aware of these biases and some correction towards bringing the political factor (ie, the importance of considering explicitly political logics of action) into the three broad literatures above would add considerable value.

The neglect of the political factor is no oversight or a product of neglect. It is arguably a salient feature that lies at the heart of the public administration field. The launch issue of Public Administration (in 1923, as the Journal of Public Administration) noted that the journal would be concerned with the science of ‘machinery of government’ questions and not with the why and how of particular political decisions and choices. Originating in concerns about patronage and ‘machine politics’, the idea of a separation between the ‘dirty’ world of politics and the ‘technocratic and apolitical’ world of administration was also at the heart of the foundation of American public administration (Roberts, 1994) and led to the discovery of Woodrow Wilson’s much earlier advocacy of strengthening public administration (Wilson, 1887). The ‘apolitical’ nature of public administration was also prominent in the post-1945 world, especially in the field of development administration (Gulrajani and Moloney, 2012; Subramaniam, 2000).

It is therefore not surprising that the literature in the early 21st century again tends to downplay the ‘political’ as new related movements interested in public administration come and go (such as public management). Arguably, the attraction of Master of Public Administration (MPA) and short executive programmes in strategic management and such like all offer the customer the promise of a technical quick-fix rather than an introduction into the political choices and trade-offs that are inherent in public administration. Such concerns have more recently emerged in the context of debates about the role of values in public administration (West and Davis, 2011), as well as the potential political implications of Mark Moore’s ‘public value’ idea (Moore, 1995; Rhodes and Wanna, 2007; Williams and Shearer, 2011). We are not suggesting that all public administration should be housed in political science departments and should be published in such journals. However, by being a social science, public administration should not forget that it is inherently about the exercise of power and human relationships.

The context of executive politics

So far, we have defined the broad field of executive politics and noted how it can add value to some of the literature. We have noted that executive politics’ core questions have been central to those asked by students of comparative government/politics of bureaucracy and comparative public administration. However, a turn towards executive politics is not just about emphasis and tone. Arguably, we can also distinguish a particular new setting in which the executive and the execution of policy are situated. First, we can point to the fundamental challenges that are facing contemporary policy-making: apart from the pressures of the financial crisis, these include demographic changes and climate change. These three types of pressure are likely to fundamentally affect the relationship between state and citizen, especially the way in which services are being run and can be financed (see Lodge and Hood, 2012; Raudla, forthcoming). Second, there is also a ‘new politics’ of executive politics. One of the initial explanations for the rise of NPM was the rise of a ‘new machine politics’ (Hood, 1990) and it might be argued that the age of spin and cut-back is likely to accentuate a trend in which politicians distance themselves from traditional sources of civil service advice and increasingly rely on closed circles of trusted advisors. In addition, as government turnover in recent elections suggests, the decline in partisan alignment in Europe has made party government more volatile (for Germany, see Dalton, 2011). In the US, in contrast, there has been a return to the ‘new partisan voter’, with distinct implications for party competition (Bafumi and Shapiro, 2009).

Societal change arguably also drives change in the instruments of governing. For example, Power (1997) has noted how the ‘audit revolution’ was driven not just by those financially or otherwise benefitting from adopting audit-type technologies in ever more domains. This demand for ‘audit’ was fuelled by societal change. Societies are said to have become increasingly distrustful regarding exercises of authority and discretionary power. Accordingly, this demand for verification has been met by (questionable) technologies of control, such as the language of audit and accounting. This (qualitatively different) landscape also points to the rise of blame and risk as key organising principles in public administration. On the one hand, risk is about a growing interest in assessing and measuring different probable events. On the other hand, risk also points to a growing occupation with potential negative effects which in itself has stimulated a growing demand for protocolisation and risk assessment. Such tools are hardly about more informed decision-making, but mostly about the pushing away of responsibility and blame, should things go wrong. In other words, if we are indeed living in an age of risk obsession, then we are also living in an age of risk aversion, with all the negative consequences of ‘passing the buck’ and non-decision-making that this implies.

And finally, there is also a change in the administrative factor, in a number of ways. As many observers have noted, the social demographics of the governmental machineries have changed (Greer and Jarman, 2010), with bureaucracies becoming not just more diverse, but arguably also older as spending cuts feed themselves through by non-replacement of staff. An interest in the ‘recruitment interface’ (Subramaniam, 2000: 564) highlights how bureaucracies are challenged in terms of representativeness, competency and loyalty understandings. We should therefore expect a changing quality of public administration, when long-term career patterns and associated rewards are no longer available or even desired, expectations regarding skills and competencies change, and understandings about appropriate relationships and status become contested. In sum, executive politics is also about acknowledging the changing landscape in which the executive operates and in which execution takes place.

Executive politics and British public administration

This article is part of a general discussion of the future direction of public administration as a field of study. Over two decades ago, Rhodes (1991: 536) suggested that British public administration scholarship had been atheoretical, lacked rigour and was not cumulative. Over fifteen years earlier, William Robson had similarly pointed to the lack of theoretical interests, but noted that the institutional focus and the aim to maintain a ‘close relation between the world of thought and the world of action’ had been a core strength of the British ‘tradition’ (Robson, 1975: 530). This lack of theoretical ambition, blamed by Fry on an initial ‘Fabian socialist earnestness’ (Fry, 1999: 530), however has increasingly given way to a more professionalised and theory-informed approach towards the study of public administration (see Dunsire, 1995; Hood, 1995; Dunleavy, 1982; O’Leary, 1985).

Looking into the teens of the 21st century, public administration scholarship could derive substantial benefit from paying more attention to executive politics. Executive politics is about a particular substantive set of interests, about an emphasis on the political factor in the study of administration, and about exploring the administrative factor in the study of politics (see also Mackenzie, 1975: 1–3). British public administration (as a set of scholars operating in the British Isles and/or carrying passports and/or being active in academic conferences associated with British associations) is arguably well placed to explore executive politics–oriented questions. One reason to be cheerful is that public administration and policy work is mostly conducted within political science departments and other social science departments rather than in separate public affairs or public administration departments. A further reason to be cheerful is the considerable contribution that various scholars have made to the key fields of comparative bureaucracy/public administration, public policy, regulation and governance. As the bibliography suggests, older and contemporary writings feature strongly in the core aspects of executive politics, whether this relates to issues of executive politicians interacting with other parts of the political systems; whether it is about the politics of machinery and tools of government reform; the relationship of public servants (at different levels) with the wider political system (Page, forthcoming; Page and Jenkins, 2005; Hood and Lodge, 2006); and the way in which the execution of particular policy approaches affect both citizens and politicians (Smith et al., 2011).

This contribution therefore does not claim that British public administration is under threat. Instead, it is a call to exploit existing strengths to build on existing work and approaches to develop a stronger emphasis on executive politics to contribute to political science and public administration, while also ensuring that political science (using the b-word) and public administration (using the a-word) do not drift further away. Doing so does not require a sole focus on ‘British’ public administration (although Britain and its devolved jurisdictions offer a good research site). The best contribution British public administration can make is to act as a facilitator and a hub to ensure that the conversations in the study of political science and public administration continue to focus on executive politics by considering perennial questions and the change in underlying conditions that shape contemporary governing.