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Although the politics-administration dichotomy model has frequently been presented as historically important but conceptually and empirically faulty, the criticisms have missed two fundamental points. First, it is not-as commonly presumed-the founding theory of public administration in the United States but rather a poorly grounded characterization of the early literature that took hold in the late 1950s. The term dichotomy was rarely used before that time and never used by the "founders" of the field who were supposed to have invented the model. Second, there is an alternative model of complementarity that has been present in the literature from Wilson onward. It stresses interdependency, reciprocal influence, and extensive interaction between elected officials and administrators along with recognition of the need for distinct roles and political supremacy. The politics-administration complementarity model-elaborated here with references to the "old" public administration literature prior to 1960-offers a strong foundation on which we can build.
The relationship of administration to the political process is the key issue in defining the scope and nature of public administration. There is ample but commonly ignored evidence that our common view about the development of the field in the United States is a creation myth-"in the beginning was dichotomy." The myth is not the dichotomy per se but that it was the founding theory of public administration.
A careful reading of commentaries on the development of the field indicates that we should know that the founders of the field did not advocate a dichotomy. There is reversion to this discredited intellectual history, in part because of scholarly laxness but also because of the absence of an alternative interpretation of the themes emphasized in the "first" half century and the second quarter century of public administration literature in the United States. In the beginning were efforts-incomplete, imprecise, and inconsistent to be sure-but serious efforts to define how a potentially powerful corps of administrative officials would constitute itself and interact with elected officials and the public. From the beginning there were attempts to reconcile the inherent tensions of administration in a democratic society-independence and control, honesty and obedience, influence and deference, responsibility and compliance-rather than an approach that emphasized only the second half of each pair. From the 1880s through the 1950s, there is a persistent...