ABSTRACT
Ever since Karl Bosworth opined that “The City Manager Is a Politician” (Bosworth 1958), many local government administrators and scholars have embraced that job description, suggested that Woodrow Wilson’s politics-administration dichotomy was invalid, and predicted a growing political-policy role for city and county managers in the future (Frederickson 1989; Stillman 1974; Loveridge 1971; Sherwood 1976; Newland 1979; Graves 1982; Mikulecky 1980; Gaebler 1983). Even the best contemporary discussions of the city management profession1 have reiterated this evolutionary process: Ammons and Newell (1989) recently noted that the “politics-administration dichotomy . . . continues to erode in practice . . . in the constant quest for the leadership necessary to solve the problems of the nation’s cities” (170), and Svara (1990) predicted that “a continuing shift toward the policy and political roles (for city managers) is likely since younger and professionally trained managers are likely to devote more time to them and less to the management role” (181).
