Public administration-politics dichotomy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Public administration-politics dichotomy - Essay Example His intension was to protect administration from political interference. He further indicated that administrations and politics are two distinct disciplines. His main concern was the influence that politics had on administration (Wilson, 1887). He argued that the plans of the government are not administrative and so the two should be kept apart. He later realized that the two cannot be kept apart and embraced dichotomy and agreed that they should be used to improve policies. Public administration dichotomy means that public administrators should be involved in policy processes and politicians should also be involved in administrative processes (Wilson, 1966). Other authors of public administration like (Yang and Hozler, 2005) agreed that administration should be used to protect politics and democracy from its own excesses. Another public administration proponent of the separation of public administration and politics was Goodnow who was of the opinion that politics had a strong effec t on public administration. Separating politics and public administration has not been achievable and the debate to keep the two apart continues. However the reality is that they influence each other. According to (Overeem, 2005), the dichotomy between public administration and politics mean that public administrators be politically neutral. Public administration should be impartial and not get involved in politics and its controversies. The insistence on the separation of public administration and politics lays emphasis on specialization and order in policy making and government administration. Since public administration and politics cannot be kept apart, they can be dichotomized in five ways; there has to be a distinction between policy and management, extend it from the inner workings of the government to the political body, keeping administration from political control, call for