Questioning the Constitutional Order: A Comparison of the French and the U.S. Politics–Administration Dichotomy Controversies After World War II

Abstract

By comparing the French and the U.S. controversies on the appropriate position of public administration within the constitutional order of the state after World War II, this article aims to contribute to the historical clarification of the politics-administration dichotomy as one of the key ideas of administrative research and theory. The article underscores that the same phenomenon-the rejection of the dichotomy-has led to different conclusions among administrative scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the dichotomy was rejected in favor of a reinforcement of the legislature and the judiciary as well as a more representative administration to preserve the plurality of interests of American society. In contrast, the French rejection was aimed toward strengthening the executive and the administrative elite as guardians of the general interest. The article illustrates how ideas and values about public administration change according to different spatiotemporal contexts. If these contexts are disregarded, understanding remains fragmentary at best, if not misleading.

Senkt New Public Management die Verwaltungsausgaben in den Schweizer Kantonen? Eine empirische Analyse über zwei Dekaden

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Limiting the executive power after the Second World War: the invention of administrative science

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Policy evaluation and democracy: Do they fit?

“…Cuff (1978: 241) states of Wilson: "Creation, not control was the central issue; private, not public power, the chief threat to liberty." Rosser and Mavrot (2016) show for the US and France how these normative and quite rigourous institutional ideas travelled in time and context. In post-WWII political theory, the notion of a strict P-A Dichotomy was rejected in the USA in order to strengthen the input side of the political system and shift more weight in the balance of powers to the legislature and representative bureaucracy.…”