Reconceptualizing the Politics-Administration Dichotomy to Better Understand Public Leadership in the Twenty-First Century: A Multilateral Actors Model

The long-standing discussion of the politics-administration dichotomy is as relevant in contemporary public administration as at any time in the past. The significant changing context and persistence of the discussion on the practice of the politics-administration dichotomy calls for addressing what Overeem observes as the need to better describe the highly complex relations between politicians and administrators. Two implicit assumptions drive the continued relevance of the discussion of political-administrative interactions. First, the discussion matters because the actors in question fulfill various public leadership roles. Second, the political-administrative dialogue matters to questions of constitutionalism, values of representative government, and facilitating institutions of democracy. In this article, we offer a model of public managers’ engagement in the “how” with a framework that explicitly outlines the range of relationships. We draw on empirical research to outline the current reality of at least five significant types of actors, often working collaboratively in multilateral relationships. The first section of the article discusses the genesis and implications of the politics-administration dichotomy. It then proceeds to establish its persistence over time, followed by an explanation of the logic of our approach. Next, the discussion shifts to the analytic advantage of a continuum model across five categories of actors within the governance process, each possessing the potential for public leadership, showing how this model illustrates paths for addressing the problem we have identified. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposed model for future research design and practice.