Paradigm 3: Public Administration as Political
Science, 1950-1970
In any event, as a result of these concerns
public administrationists remained in political science
departments. The result was a renewed
definition of locus-the governmental bureaucracy-but
a corresponding loss of focus. Should
the mechanics of budgets and personnel procedures
be studied exclusively? Or should public
administrationists consider the grand philosophic
schemata of the "administrative Platonists," as one
political scientist called them, such as Paul
Appleby? 6 Or should they explore quite new
fields of inquiry, as urged by Simon, as they
related to the analysis of organizations and decision
making? In brief, this third phase of definition
was largely an exercise in reestablishing the
linkages between public administration and political
science. But the consequences of this exercise
was to "define away" the field, at least in terms of
its analytical focus, its essential "expertise." Thus,
writings on public administration in the 1950s
spoke of the field as an "emphasis," an "area of
interest," or even as a "synonym" of political
science.1 7 Public administration, as an identifiable
field of study, began a long, downhill spiral.
Things got relatively nasty by the end of the
decade and, for that matter, well into the 1960s.
In 1962, public administration was not included as
a subfield of political science in the report of the
Committee on Political Science as a Discipline of
the American Political Science Association. In
1964 a major survey of political scientists indicated
that the Public Administration Review was
slipping in prestige among political scientists relative
to other journals, and signalled a decline of
faculty interest in public administration generally.
8 In 1967, public administration disappeared
as an organizing category in the program of the
annual meeting of the American Political Science
Association. Waldo wrote in 1968 that, "The truth