Reorganization and Regime in the United States and Britain

The relationship between administration and politics is a central concern of American students of public administration. For Woodrow Wilson and his progressive era successors, administration and politics were properly separate.' In the post-World War II era, scholars challenged the Wilsonian administration-politics dichotomy, substituting a conception of administration permeated by policy formulation and its attendant interest group politics.2 While perspectives on the relationship of administration and politics may shift, the problem of determining that relationship lies at the heart of academic study of public administration.3 But, despite concerns with the relationship of administration and politics, students of administration too infrequently ask: what is the relationship between a governmental regime and its mode of public administration?4 This article pursues a tentative, partial answer to that question by comparing cases of structural administrative reform in the United States and Great Britain during this century. The United States Constitution creates a regime of dispersed powers and overlapping responsibilities among the President, Congress, and the judiciary. The British constitution is one of central power and sufficient responsibility lodged in Parliament and exercised by the cabinet acting in the executive capacity. In the context of different political regimes, administrative government developed in both America and Britain. In each society, problems of efficiency and change were raised by the growing scale of the administrative apparatus. This article argues that how each society developed its approach to administrative reorganization reveals ways in which administration responds to the characteristics of the regime within which it operates.5 This argument, in turn, is based on an interpretation of an irony in the history of administrative reform in the United States and Britain. Executive reorganization, properly speaking, began in each society within the same decade and through quite similar planning commissions guided by similar theories of administrative organization. Yet, afterwards, reorganization of planning in both societies diverged greatly in both conception and method. My contention is that to explain this divergence one must refer to the intertwining of regime characteristics and administrative form. In the United States the characteristic arena for executive reorganization planning has been the ad hoc commission, committee, or task force. Characteristically supported behind the scenes by the Bureau of the Budget (OMB), these bodies invoked the progressive * Twentieth century reorganization planning practices in the United States and Great Britain are compared for the purpose of examining the relationship between administration and governmental regime. Beginning in the century's second decade, reorganization planning in both societies took similar forms and was guided by the same concepts of administration. Yet, subsequent experience with reform planning in both societies have taken very different forms. Comparing the President's Commission on Economy and Efficiency and the Machinery of Government Committee and contrasting the practices of reorganization planning which follow upon these cases, marked differences in the organization offundamental authority in these governmental systems are used to explain the observed variance in reorganization planning in the United States and Britain

History of the United States · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Political Systems and Governance · Public Administration

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