The Administrative State

The Administrative State is Dwight Waldo's classic public administration text based on a dissertation written at Yale. Here Waldo argues that democratic states are underpinned by professional and political bureaucracies and that scientific management and efficiency is not the core idea of government bureaucracy, but rather it is service to the public. The work has contributed to the structure and theory of government bureaucracies the world over and is one of the defining works of public administration and political science written in the last 75 years.

Published in 1948 and later reissued in a second edition with an extensively revised introduction by Waldo.

Though the phrase “the Administrative State” was coined by Dwight Waldo in 1948, the concept of administrative powers and responsibilities has been the subject of debate for as long as the structure of democratic government has been implemented. Where the current debate begins is with the United States Constitution, and argues over the powers to govern under the presets of said constitution. Basically, the debate is over whether or not nonelected agencies of the government have the power to legislate as well as enforce. The argument for the power is that all federal agencies/ officials are subject to the President of the United States, who is elected accommodating the new power democratically so that it does not need to be voted on directly by the public; where the counter is that “agencies remain inefficient, ineffective, and undemocratic;” attempting to justify that the public’s inability to vote for the policy that the agency adopts is undemocratic/unconstitutional (Harvard Law Review).

Dr. Michael Greve, a law professor at George Mason University School of Law, defines the current implemented administrative state of the United States as, “a power once known as 'prerogative'—that is, the power to make binding rules without law, outside the law, or against the law, exercised by someone other than an elected legislature” (Greve). He then goes on to say, in his opinion, that this is the opposite intention of the “founders” (Greve). Basically Greve is saying all government entities (agencies) are power hungry and that Americans should stick to the US Constitution that set up safeguards against the despotism that agencies will ultimately strive for if left to their own whims, instead of acting in the best interest of the country. “The presidential control model of the administrative state, perhaps most definitively expounded by now-Justice Elena Kagan, suggests that top-down accountability affords agencies measure of democratic accountability and assures effective administration” (Harvard Law Review). Basically, the Harvard Law Review is summarizing Kagan as saying that agency implemented policy/ law is subject to democracy by the citizens being able to hold the elected official at the head of the relevant chain of government responsible. I.e., the question is whether the trickledown effect of responsibility is efficient enough for democracy, or whether the government agencies will become power hungry, and not act in the best interest of the people.

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