ABSTRACT
Different conceptualizations of the role of public administration in the United States precede the Constitution itself. Although they focused on political structures, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and other designers of the Constitution clearly understood the implications of political structure for administrative practice. Their discussions and debates about the power of the federal government relative to that of the states and the people, and about the appropriate areas of governmental involvement still apply today. Out of these discussions, a paradigm of the rightful place and functions of public administration did emerge, a paradigm whose philosophy has certainly evolved with changing historical epochs. Since the Progressives and reformers placed their strong stamp on public administration at the end of the nineteenth century, the dominant paradigm has tended to emphasize the electoral decisionmaking process, the mandate of elected officials, and the subservience of hierarchically ordered administrators, all in a clean chain of command. Emmette Redford called this paradigm the overhead democracy model. 1 As Larry Lane explains, “The doctrine of overhead democracy asserts that democratic control runs from the elective representatives of the people down through a hierarchy of authority and command, reaching from the chief executive down through the units of government ‘to the fingertips of administration.’” 2 However, that paradigm, perhaps best symbolized by Woodrow Wilson's famous 1887 essay on the division of politics and administration, is severely under attack—both in theory and in practice. 3
