Comparative Public Administration Methodology

Solution Preview

Using the Comparative Public Administration method, I need help in analyzing two countries of your choice and compare how the two differ in terms of executive-legislative power vis-à-vis the government bureaucracy.
Comparative public administration is a complex method of trying to evaluate and compare different administrative systems within countries that have substantially different cultures and political orientations. Much like comparative politics or comparative management, researchers using this method will try to apply the same logic in determining and comparing government functions. However, the difficulties in understanding the complexities and differences between cultures, customs, and political partisanship needs to be understood by the evaluator making the determination and the comparisons or the data will be skewed (Terman, 2011).
Often, observers using this system may be inclined to try and ignore the administrative processes of countries when they do not share the same level of development. This has often led to a misunderstanding of Third World countries and less sufficient countries as the study of public administration and has traditionally been a Western endeavor. However, during the 1960s and 70s, scholars and researchers began to focus on the emergence of the Third World countries and this spurred a new interest in understanding the administrative processes within the non-Western setting (Kampen, 2006).

One of the major aspects of political administrations that have been focused on by scholars evaluating countries outside of the Western realm has been to focus on policy implementation between countries of similar social and economic developmental statuses. This is a different focus as compared to previous decades where scholars primarily would focus on the differences between cultures economic and political statuses when there was a clear and distinct difference between the two nations and their standings in the world. This new comparative study of political administrations that have similar statuses is driving a new understanding through the comparative method.

Historically, the idea that administrative behavior is a function of political conditions within states has been the norm. In Max Weber's the Theory of Social and Economic Organization from 1947, political conditions being determined by the state was an implicit argument he made. Additionally scholars such as John Gaus asserted the political environment was a key variable in the determination of bureaucracies and their conduct (Terman, 2011).

Gaus is largely credited with generating tremendous momentum around studying the ecology of public administrations. These works revealed many theories which focused on the environmental impacts surrounding specific nations and how these factors led to specific administrative practices. This was especially useful in helping to understand non-Western politics and government structures (Terman, 2011).

The comparative method looks at the relationships between a nation's political leaders, its administrators, public and private influential groups, government negotiations and transactions, and developmental activities. Once these factors are understood and evaluated, one can begin to get a comparison ...