More contemporary advocates of representative bureaucracy reject patronage or spoils systems as an appropriate model for a representative bureaucracy for exactly these reasons. Instead, most accept the need for organizational arrangements as prescribed by administrative orthodoxy, namely, public agencies based on the Weberian rational-legal bureaucracy (Selden 1997). In contrast to the spoils system, the latter is seen as conferring various benefits, among them efficiency, making merit the basis of public-sector employment, and strengthening the role of technical expertise in decision making (Meier 1993). Although this means accepting arguments from orthodox administrative theory, advocates of representative bureaucracy reject the notion of a politics-administration dichotomy. The theoretical and empirical lessons from the likes of Gaus, Waldo, Allison, Seidman, Wilson, and numerous others simply make it impossible to ignore or assume away the political role of the bureaucracy.