Chapter 4: COMPARATIVE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION

Importance of Comparative Public Administration [CPA]

1. Study of public administration on a comparative basis.
   
2. Explain factors responsible for cross national or cultural differences in bureaucratic behavior.
   
3. Study of public administration by making rigorous cross cultural comparisons of the structures and processes involved in the activity of administering public affairs.
   
4. Study of public administration applied to diverse cultures and national settings.
   
5. Learn distinctive features of a system or a group of systems.
   
6. Examine success or failures of a particular administrative features in particular ecological settings.
   
7. Understand strategies for administrative reforms.

Factors and trends in CPA:

1. Revisionist movement in comparative politics due to dissatisfaction with traditional approaches.
   
2. Traditional public administration was culture bound.
   
3. Post World War II, the US scholars were exposed to third world countries.
   
4. Rise of behavioral approach.

Trends in public administration:

1. Shift from normative i.e. "What public administration ought to be" to empiral i.e. "What public administration is?".
   
2. Ideographic i.e. suitable for a particular setting to nomothetic i.e. universal.
3. Non ecological i.e. administration isolated from environment to ecological i.e. administration as related to external environment.

Focus of Comparative public administration is to study:

1. Environment of administrative system.
2. Whole administrative system
3. Formal, informal structures of administrative systems.
4. Performance of administrative systems.
5. Roles of individuals.
6. Interaction between personalities of individuals in organization.
7. Communication system.
8. Policy and decision systems.

Conceptual approaches in CPA:

1. Bureaucratic: Focus is on rationality and efficiency. The weber's model of hierarchy, specialization, role specificity.
2. Behavioral: Analyses human behavior in administrative setting.
3. General systems: Analyses interaction between administrative systems and their environment.
4. Ecological: Impact of political, social, economic, cultural subsystems on administrative subsystem.
5. Structural functional:Prismatic society has growing degree of structural differentiation but not matched by equal degree of integration.