Politics and Administration

The question of how public administration fits into the governance process of a democratic society has been of great concern to scholars and practitioners since the emergence of public administration as an academic field of study in the late 1880s. The politics-administration relationship is considered of pivotal importance, as the issue bears important implications for both the disciplinary identity (and autonomy) and the institutional development of public administration. Despite a voluminous literature on the subject, the question remains unanswered. Scholarly inquiry to this date identifies two major positions, one separation and the other its opposite, political. Unlike prior conceptualizations, this article distills the literature into three major schools of thought as separation, political, and interaction. The article then examines the state of the research that has followed three strands as historical, conceptual, and empirical. The author makes an overall evaluation of the past research and lays out a different approach in studying this important question.