Public Administration Dichotomy Analysis

For years, two of the greatest ideologies of American government have constantly intersected with each other. The separation of powers formed the foundation of the American Constitution. While the politics/administration dichotomy was the instrument that scholars used to solve the complex issues created by the law of the land. Laurence J. O 'Toole, Jr. (1987) is his article, Doctrines and Developments: Separation of Powers, the Politics-Administration Dichotomy, and the Rise of the Administrative State, contends that the development of the American administrative state was an amalgamation of the politics/administration dichotomy and the constitutional principle of separation of powers. He argues against early American administration reformers’ idea of dichotomy over separation and reinforces his argument by revealing the connection in one prominent American …show more content…
Here they write that administrators in the Old Public Administration, although reluctantly, significantly influenced public policy albeit through a vail of neutrality (Denhardt et al, 2015, p 92). This vail of neutrality was the Orthodox Administration’s method of maintaining the illusion of dichotomy. However, the mere presence of administrators in the policy making process rendered the idea of dichotomy obsolete. Donald F. Kettle in his book The Transformation of Governance talks about how the Institutional-Choice approach, devised in the new pubic management, eliminated the dichotomy by placing the bureaucracy at the core of the political environment (Kettle, 2015, p 102). This approach replaces the traditional view of bureaucracy as an independent variable with a new view of bureaucracy as a dependent variable (Kettle, 2015, p 102). No longer did the administrator have to work under a vail of neutrality. They were now worked as an “agent of political forces” (Kettle, 2015, p