ABSTRACT
On the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of “Public Administrative Theory and the Separation of Powers”, the American Review of Public Administration published my invited essay, “Reflections on ‘Public Administrative Theory and the Separation of Powers’” (Rosenbloom, 2013). In reflecting again here, I will review the main points I made there and add some additional thoughts. First, the article should have defined “politics” more clearly. The term is
intended in the Lasswellian sense of “who gets what, when, how” (Lasswell, 1950) as well as policymaking as treated in much of the bureaucratic politics and policy cycle literature. “Politics” in the article was not meant to focus attention on elections, electoral campaigns, partisanship, or intra-office and inter-agency turf and power contests. Second, the most surprising feature of the original article has been its
international impact. The article was conceived as a potentially relevant framework for connecting different approaches to U.S. public administrative theory and practice to the constitutional framework for the separation of powers. I then believed, as I do now, that the separation of powers is among the defining aspects of U.S. public administration. It gives three branches of government separate, yet overlapping, responsibilities for federal administration. As Lewis Meriam noted in 1939, “Under our system of divided powers, the executive branch of the national government is not exclusively controlled by the President, by the Congress, or by the courts. All three have a hand in controlling it, each from a different angle and each in a different way” (p. 131). The separation of powers also contributes to the difficulty of integrating or retrofitting the administrative state into the constitutional regime because the entire federal administrative component combines what the Constitution separates: legislation (e.g., agency rulemaking), execution, and adjudication. This combination of powers also exists in many individual agencies. Despite Alexander Hamilton’s observation that public administration “comprehends all the operations of the body politic, whether legislative, executive, or judiciary” (Carey and McClellan, 2001, p. 374), the “collapsing” of the separation of powers into the executive branch and individual agencies presents a recurring challenge to legitimization of the
functions and the history of separation of powers systems elsewhere, as in Latin America, is typically very different from our own. Nevertheless, the article’s “three lenses” or “three perspectives” framework as further developed in the book-length version, Public Administration: Understanding Management, Politics, and Law in the Public Sector, is used and cited worldwide (Rosenbloom, 1986; Rosenbloom, Kravchuk & Clerkin, 2015). The book itself is a core text in Master of Public Administration programs not only in the U.S., but also throughout China and perhaps elsewhere.1
