ABSTRACT
In an immediate sense, however, the responsibility is divided. General responsibility for policy, together with responsibility for what is usually called political actions, falls to the chosen representatives of the public, lastly in the battle for reelection. Administrative responsibility—under disciplinary authority—must be borne by the appointed public servants. In acting as the meticulous custodian of the means for accomplishing policy ends, the career man may well feel that he is safeguarding not only effective administration but also representative government, even the historic tenets of constitutional rule. Inflexibility, narrowness, specialization—these generate the kind of behavior that to the policy-maker will seem typically bureaucratic. They are influences that rise within the administrative setting, at work everywhere, as part of the occupational "facts of life." The more the career man, as the spokesman of administrative impartiality, succeeds in bringing into the open all of the angles of an issue, the less it is likely that the policy-maker will be entrapped by special pleaders.
