ABSTRACT
The logic of the Discretionary Tradition is Hamiltonianism in extreme, seeking "to improve the capacity of the administrative machine while downplaying the importance of politics". Despite the reservations of others, the Traditions framework challenges limited meanings of the term entrepreneurial, broadening it to mean an autonomous, discretionary, and consequential approach to public administration. The Traditions framework argues that both technical and normative approaches to discretionary responsibility share the same logic of legitimacy. The Discretionary empowerment of all and focus on utilitarian desirable outcomes require a very different allocation of political authority and legitimate scope of administrative action. Efficiency became a stand-in for legitimacy based on a syllogistic logic in which political corruption results in inefficiency; therefore, efficiency results in legitimacy. Virtue-based expertise is more controversial than technical expertise because it can be more easily perceived as usurping the political authority of elected statesmen.
