Is there symmetry between women and men in public management in terms of opportunity, power, and numbers? Mary Guy examines two decades of affirmativ… - Mary E. Guy

A century ago two fields, political science and public administration, were one. At the 1939 meeting of the American Political Science Association, public administration created its own professional organization, and the two fields’ paths have since diverged.

When Woodrow Wilson wrote his essay “The Study of Administration” in 1887, he attempted to square the needs of a complex industrial nation with the demands of a democratic political culture (Felker 1993). With a vision of administration untouched by politics, he prescribed their separation. Frank Goodnow’s book Politics and Administration (1900) elaborated on this dichotomy, and Leonard White’s (1926) work made the separation of politics and administration an article of faith in the first textbook on the subject. This is emblematic of a turn public administration made at its inception, a decision paralleled by political science as it embraced the “god” of science and ignored the truth of context, history, values, and, messiest of all, unforeseen, unpredictable exigencies.

The man instrumental in the creation of the Brookings Institution, Charles E. Merriam, sought to move toward a “science of politics.” In his presidential address to APSA in 1921, he spoke of what he called a pressing problem, the reconstruction of the methods of political study (Merriam 1921, 174). Thus began a trend that placed increasing emphasis on the development of theories and testable hypotheses.