Comparative Public Administration

• Author: Keith M. Henderson
• Published date: 01 May 1969
• Date: 01 May 1969
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/009539976900100105
• Subject Matter: Articles

COMPARATIVE PUBLIC
ADMINISTRATION:
The Identity Crisis
Keith M. Henderson
KEITH M. HENDERSON is currently Associate Professor at the Graduate
School of Public Administration of New York University. His field is
administration, particularly personnel and comparative public administra-
tion. He is the author of a number of books and articles in these fields,
most recently, Emerging Synthesis in American Public Administration, and
the forthcoming "Evolution of Administration in the Middle
"
East.
THE APPOINTED task of this paper is to undertake &dquo;a critical evaluation
of what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong in the study of comparative
and perhaps development administration, with a look into the future.&dquo;
Such a formidable assignment-particularly the mandate to be a futurist-is
appropriately entered into only with considerable humility and with the
saving thought that &dquo;state of the art&dquo; literature on comparative public
administration has been developed to a high level of proficiency.’
1
In the myriad in-house treatments of comparative public administra-
tion, only Dwight Waldo (1964) has seriously attempted to relate the
movement to a broader concern with American public administration.
Caldwell and others have alluded to possible spillover effects on the
broader study, but these are only incidental comments.
This article seeks to interpret the past, present and future of compara-
tive public administration (and development administration) as a field of
study from the standpoint of &dquo;noncomparative U.S. culture&dquo; public
administration. The essential questions to be posed are the following:
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This paper was originally prepared for delivery at &dquo;The New
Public Administration&dquo; Conference, Minnowbrook Conference Center, September
8-12, 1968.

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[66]
What has comparative public administration been?
What is it now (i.e., in the Comparative Administration Group)?
What will it become?
What should it become?
NON-RIGGSIAN COMPARATIVE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
It is sometimes forgotten that several years elapsed between the first
flowerings of American interest in public administration in the developing
countries after World War II and Fred Riggs’ capture of the movement in
the late 1950’s.
When the Public Administration Clearing House sponsored a Confer-
ence on Comparative Administration at Princeton in 1952, the outcome
was a continuing committee intended to develop &dquo;criteria of relevance&dquo;
and a design for field studies in foreign countries. The Conference
approached the American Political Science Association, which approved
the creation of a subcommittee on Comparative Administration under
Wallace Sayre’s Committee on Public Administration.
Members of this subcommittee, only three of whom are now members
of CAG, were as follows: .
Professor Walter R. Sharp, Chairman, Yale University
Professor Miller Hillhouse, Cornell University
Professor Herbert Kaufman, Yale University
Professor Albert Lepawsky, University of Alabama
,
Professor Roscoe C. Martin, Syracuse University
Mr. Arnold Miles, U.S. Bureau of the Budget
Professor Robert Presthus, Michigan State College
Dr. Fred W. Riggs, Public Administration Clearing House
Professor Herman M. Somers, Haverford College
Interest was not confined to the American political science establish-
ment. In Paris, June 1953, the International Political Science Association
sponsored a panel on Comparative Public Administration, chaired by
Charles S. Ascher. Under the auspices of the International Institute of
Administrative Sciences, Brussels, additional studies were prepared on
comparative experience in various European countries.
In a lesson which has probably been lost on us, those efforts directly
affiliated with political science as a discipline failed to attract sufficient
support to survive.

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[67]
F. W. RIGGS AND THE FORD FOUNDATION
Blessed by the Ford Foundation, the Comparative Administration
Group of the American Society for Public Administration, under Fred
Riggs’ leadership,2 was able to prosper where others had failed. Papers in
the early 1960’s by Riggs set the intellectual tone for &dquo;comparative&dquo;
study.
In a 1962 article, Riggs identified three trends in the comparative study
of public administration, one fairly clear and the other two emerging. The
first was labeled a movement from normative toward more empirical
approaches; the second from idiographic to nomothetic; and the third
from nonecological to ecological modes of thought. Both the broad field
of public administration and its subfield of comparative studies had, in
Riggs’ view, gradually developed a minimal awareness of the difference
between empirical and normative work and begun increasingly to stress
empirical description and explanation. Under the rubric &dquo;empirical,&dquo; it
will be recalled, Riggs distinguishes unique case studies, historical or con-
temporary, from approaches which seek generalizations, laws, or hypoth-
eses. The case studies, of course, are idiographic; the generalizations are
nomothetic. Finally, there is a dimly discernible trend from nonecological
studies, in which administrative institutions are abstracted from their
environments, to ecological approaches (accolades to John Gaus) in which
politics and administration are dealt with as aspects of a total system.
Truly comparative studies, of course, are those which are empirical, nomo-
thetic, and ecological.
Early products issued under the aegis of the CAG were, implicitly, if
not explicitly, severe in their indictments of traditional public administra-
tion thinking. The raison d’être was to correct the inadequacies of
parochial, unsystematic, noncomparative study. American public adminis-
tration eschewed theory; comparative administration wallowed in it.
American public administration was culture-bound; comparative public
administration sought systematic cross-cultural and cross-national insights.
American public administration was oriented towards the practitioner;
comparative public administration pursued understanding for understand-
ing’s sake. On most points, comparative public administration, as reflected
in the Comparative Administration Group, was antithetical to &dquo;U.S.
culture&dquo; public administration study. This may not have been the Ford-
Foundation’s vision, but this was the fact.

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[68]
EARLY CAG EFFORTS
Writing in 1962, Ferrel Heady, then Director of the Institute of Public
Administration and Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan,
identified five &dquo;motivating concerns&dquo; in comparative studies in administra-
tion :
(1) The search for theory
(2) The urge for practical application
(3) The incidental contribution to comparative administration of
advances in the study of comparative politics generally
(4) The recent interest of scholars trained in the continental adminis-
trative law tradition, and
(5) The intensified analaysis on a comparative basis of perennial
problems of public administration
These present as good a framework as any for discussing what comparative
public administration has been.
In the early 1960’s, the first of these concerns was clearly dominant in
the literature, marking something of a shift away from the case study
approach of Siffin’s 1957 volume, Toward the Comparative Study of
Public Administration, yet realizing the hopes expressed in Fred W. Riggs’
essay in that volume, his first significant theoretical contribution.
The Comparative Administration Group described its subject in the
following manner: &dquo;theory of public administration as applied to diverse
cultures and national settings&dquo; and &dquo;the body of factual data, by which it
can be expanded and tested&dquo; (Heady and Stokes, 1962: 4). In addition,
some attention was given to development administration, which was too
elusive to define precisely but related to an &dquo;action-oriented, goal-oriented
administrative system&dquo; (Weidner, 1962: 98), or &dquo;major societal transfor-
mation, a change in system states&dquo; (Esman, 1966: 59) in the developing
areas. Development administration seemed, at least in its early formula-
tions, to have a heavier normative content than comparative public
administration.
The intellectual roots of comparative public administration theory lie
deep in American behavioral science but the foremost mentor, through his
translated works, was clearly Max Weber, the German sociologist. Raphaeli
(1967: 7) is perhaps overly sanguine in his assessment of the impact of
Max Weber on public administration generally, but he would usually be
judged correct regarding comparative public administration: &dquo;The ’ideal’
model of bureaucracy, constructed by Max Weber, has been the single

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[69]
most influential item in the literature of public administration and, sub-
sequently, of comparative public administration.&dquo;
In fact, prior to 1946 and 1947 few American scholars of administra-
tion had heard of Max Weber. His influence grew as sociological contri-
butions made an impact after World War II and the &dquo;ideal-typical&dquo; model
of bureaucracy was found to express what public administration structura-
lists had been saying all along. As undergraduate and graduate students
prefaced their eternally idiographic studies with the vocabulary of Weber
and Riggs-and not a few scholars did the same-the nomenclature become
familiar to all but the most parochial.
Although the vocabulary was extant, the empirical testing of theory in
systematic fashion was never realized. Neither...