What public administration is: its definitions, its approaches and how the field grew

What this chapter is for

This chapter answers the first question of the subject, which is what public administration actually is. You will meet it twice over, once as the daily work of government that a district officer or a secretary does, and once as the field of study that tries to explain that work. By the end you should be able to define public administration in the words of the scholars who shaped it, explain its main approaches, and tell the story of how the field grew from one essay in 1887 into the subject you are now studying.

The chapter is long, so here is its map. The first six sections are about the idea itself: what the term means, the activity and the discipline, how much of government it covers, the three lenses through which it can be seen, whether it is an art or a science, and the normative and empirical approaches. The next four tell the story of the field, ending with Woodrow Wilson’s own part in it. The last four bring the definitions to Pakistan, give the critics, say where the field stands today and clear up the common confusions.

This is one of the most asked topics in the paper. Something from this chapter’s territory appeared in five of the eleven papers from 2016 to 2026, from a plain “Define Public Administration” in 2019 to a short note on its evolution in 2026.¹

Before you start

The words

• Administration. The work of carrying out decisions and running an organisation so that its aims are met. The word comes from the Latin ad (to) and ministrare (to serve).
• Public. Belonging to the state and done in the name of all the people, paid for by public money and answerable to them.
• Discipline. A field of study with its own questions, books, journals and teachers, such as economics or law. Public administration is a discipline as well as an activity.
• Definition. A short statement of what a thing is. In this subject a definition is always given with the name of the scholar who wrote it and the year.
• Approach. A way of looking at a subject that decides which questions you ask about it. The legal approach asks whether an action is lawful. The management approach asks whether it is done well and cheaply.
• Dichotomy. A division into two parts that are kept apart, such as the old idea that politics and administration could be separated.
• Paradigm. A whole way of thinking about a subject that most scholars share for a time, until a better one replaces it.
• Normative. Concerned with what ought to be done, with values and duties.
• Empirical. Concerned with what actually happens, found by observation and evidence.
• Executive. The branch of government that carries out the laws. In Pakistan it is the Prime Minister and the federal ministers at the centre, and the Chief Minister and provincial ministers in a province, with the civil service under them.

The places

• The United States. Where the study of public administration as a separate field began, in the 1880s, and where most of its early books were written.
• The federal secretariat in Islamabad. The ministries and divisions of the Government of Pakistan, each headed by a secretary. It is the clearest example of public administration in Pakistan.
• Minnowbrook. A conference centre of Syracuse University in New York State, where young scholars met in 1968 to question the field. The meeting gave its name to the “New Public Administration”.

The story in plain words

1. Every government needs people to carry out its decisions, collect its taxes and run its services. That work is public administration.
2. For a long time nobody studied it as a subject of its own. In 1887 an American professor, Woodrow Wilson, argued that it should be studied, so that government could be run well.
3. The first scholars tried to keep it apart from politics and to find fixed rules for running any office.
4. After the Second World War other scholars showed that those rules did not always work, and that officials take part in politics whether they mean to or not.
5. Since the 1970s the field has stood as a subject of its own, borrowing from politics, management and law, and arguing about how far government should be run like a business.
6. In Pakistan, public administration is the work of the civil service, the ministries, the provincial departments and the district administration, carried out under the Constitution and the law.

1. What public administration is, in plain words

Start with something you can see. A poor family in a village in Sindh receives a regular cash payment from the government. Behind that payment is a long chain of work. Parliament passed a law. Officials wrote rules about who should be paid. Surveyors visited homes and recorded what families owned. Clerks checked identity cards. An accountant released the money and an auditor later checked that it was spent as the law allowed. None of those officials made the law. All of them carried it out. That carrying out, from the rule book to the money in the family’s hand, is public administration.

The definition most often quoted first is Woodrow Wilson’s, from an essay of 1887 that is still the starting point of the field. “Public administration,” he wrote, “is detailed and systematic execution of public law. Every particular application of general law is an act of administration.”⁴ Notice the two adjectives. “Detailed” means administration deals with the particular case, this family and this payment, while the law deals with families in general. “Systematic” means it follows an order and a method, so that two families in the same position are treated alike.

Leonard White, whose book of 1926 is usually called the first textbook of the field, put the stress somewhere else. “Public administration is the management of men and materials in the accomplishment of the purposes of the state,” he wrote, and added that his definition “emphasizes the managerial phase of administration and minimizes its legalistic and formal aspect.”⁵ Wilson looked at administration from the side of the law it carries out. White looked at it from the side of the people, money and things it has to organise. Both are right, and a good answer gives both.

Later writers widened the definition further. Marshall Dimock called public administration “law in action” and “the executive side of government”, which keeps Wilson’s link with the law.⁷ Felix Nigro gave one of the fullest definitions, in six parts. Public administration is cooperative group effort in a public setting. It covers all three branches of government, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, and the relations between them. It has an important part in making public policy, and so is part of the political process. It is more important than private administration and differs from it in significant ways. As a field of study and practice it has been much influenced by the human relations approach. It is closely tied to the many private groups and individuals who provide services to the community.⁷ Nigro’s definition is worth learning because nearly every one of its parts opens a later chapter of this subject.

Put the definitions side by side and three ideas run through all of them. Public administration carries out decisions that someone else, usually an elected body, has made. It does so with organised people, money and rules. It does it in public, for the public and under the public’s control, which is what makes it different from running a factory or a shop. If you remember those three ideas, you can write your own definition in the hall and then support it with the words of Wilson, White and Nigro.

2. The activity and the discipline

The words “public administration” are used in two senses, and confusing them is one of the commonest faults in this paper. In the first sense it is an activity, the work that officials do every day. In the second it is a discipline, the study of that work in universities, books and training colleges. You can mark the difference in your own answers by writing the discipline with capitals, Public Administration, and the activity in small letters.

The activity is as old as government. The Mauryan kings had officials who collected land revenue and kept records. The Mughal emperors ran their provinces through a graded hierarchy of officers. The British ran India through the district officer, who collected revenue, kept order and judged minor cases. Wherever a state has had to turn its decisions into action, there has been public administration. In that sense the activity did not need Wilson’s essay to exist. The chapter on the historical roots of public administration in Pakistan tells that long story.

The discipline, by contrast, is young. It began when scholars asked whether the work of government could be done better if it were studied carefully, as engineers study bridges. Wilson’s essay set out that purpose. “It is the object of administrative study to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or of energy.”⁴ The first question in that sentence, what government should do, belongs to politics and public policy. The second, how to do it well, is the heart of administration. The discipline has asked both ever since.

The difference matters in the hall. When a question asks you to “trace the evolution of public administration”, it nearly always means the discipline, its ideas and its schools. When it asks about “the problems of public administration in Pakistan”, it means the activity, the way the government actually works. Read the question for which sense it uses. An answer on the evolution that describes the Mughal mansabdari system in detail has answered a different question.

3. Broad and narrow: how much of government counts as administration

Once you know what administration is, the next question is how much of government it covers. Two answers have been given since the beginning of the field, and both are still in use.

W. F. Willoughby set them out clearly in his Principles of Public Administration of 1927. In its broadest sense, he wrote, administration “denotes the work involved in the actual conduct of governmental affairs, regardless of the particular branch of government concerned”. So there is administration in parliament, which has its own staff, budget and records, and in the courts, which have registrars, clerks and case files, as well as in the ministries. “In its narrowest sense, it denotes the operations of the administrative branch only.”⁶ Willoughby chose the narrow sense for his book, and most writers on public administration have done the same.

A second argument about scope looks not at which branch but at which people. On one view, often called the integral view, administration is the sum of all the activities done to carry out a public purpose, so it includes the work of the clerk, the peon and the typist as much as the work of the secretary. On the other view, the managerial view, administration is only the work of those who plan, organise, direct and control, the managers, while the clerk and the peon are doing the operating work that administration directs. The textbooks used in Pakistan and India place Leonard White in the integral view, and Luther Gulick, Herbert Simon, Donald Smithburg and Victor Thompson in the managerial view.⁸ White’s fuller definition shows why: public administration “consists of all those operations having for their purpose the fulfilment or enforcement of public policy”, and all those operations takes in the clerk’s work as much as the secretary’s.⁷ Wilson’s definition, the execution of public law, fits the same view, since every application of the law counts. Do not be thrown by White’s earlier remark, quoted in the first section, that his 1926 definition stressed “the managerial phase”. There he was setting management against the study of law, not the managers against the clerks.

Neither view is wrong, and the examiner does not expect you to choose one for ever. Use the broad sense when a question is about government as a whole, for example the relationship between the executive, parliament and the courts. Use the narrow sense when it is about the civil service and the ministries. Say which sense you are using in one sentence, and the examiner will know you understand that there is a choice.

4. Three lenses on one field, management, politics and law

The most useful modern way of holding all these definitions together comes from David Rosenbloom, the author of one of the textbooks FPSC suggests. In an article of 1983 he argued that public administration is best understood by looking at it through three lenses, management, politics and law. Each lens, he later explained, “is anchored in a function of government”, execution, legislation and adjudication respectively, and each is housed mainly in one branch, the executive, the legislature and the courts.¹⁹

Look at the same event through each lens and you see a different thing. Take the transfer of a district officer. Through the management lens you ask whether the transfer helps the district run well. Was the officer good at the job, and will the new one be better, or will the district lose a year while the newcomer learns? Through the political lens you ask whether the transfer answers to the people’s representatives or to a narrow interest, and whether the elected government has a right to choose its officers. Through the legal lens you ask whether the transfer followed the rules, whether the officer had a fair hearing if it was a punishment, and whether a court could set it aside.

The three lenses often give different answers. The management lens wants speed and low cost. The political lens wants the government to follow the wishes of the people, even when those wishes are expensive. The legal lens wants every person treated fairly and by the rules, even when that is slow. A government that looks only through one lens makes mistakes the other two would have caught. That is why, in Rosenbloom’s view, the field cannot be reduced to any one of them.¹⁹

The lenses also give you a ready structure for many questions. Asked to define public administration, give Wilson and White, then say that later writers saw the field through three lenses, and name them. Asked whether a reform is a good idea, judge it through each lens in turn, one paragraph each, and then weigh them. Rosenbloom’s own textbook carries the three lenses in its title, Public Administration: Understanding Management, Politics and Law, so naming it in your answer shows you know the literature FPSC recommends.³

5. Is public administration an art or a science?

Students are often asked whether public administration is an art or a science, and the question is older than most of the field. The honest answer is that it is both, and the interesting part is why scholars have argued about it.

The early writers hoped it was a science, because a science has rules that can be learned and applied anywhere. Willoughby took that position plainly. “In administration,” he wrote, “there are certain fundamental principles of general application analogous to those characterizing any science which must be observed if the end of administration, efficiency in operation, is to be secured.”⁶ If that were true, a good administrator could run a ministry in Islamabad or a city council in London by the same principles, and the principles could be taught in a classroom.

Others saw administration as an art, a skill learned by practice and judgment, like medicine before it became scientific or like leadership. Even White, who hoped for a science, wrote in 1926 that his book assumed “that administration is still primarily an art but attaches importance to the significant tendency to transform it into a science”.⁵ An experienced deputy commissioner handling a flood or a riot draws on judgment that no rule book holds. That judgment is the art.

Public administration is a science in the sense that it can be studied carefully, with evidence, and that some findings hold across many countries. It is an art in the sense that applying those findings to a real office, with real people and real politics, needs judgment. Herbert Simon later showed that the early “principles” often contradicted each other, which weakened the claim to a science of fixed rules, and the section on the critics returns to this.¹² In the hall, give both cases, each with its author, and conclude that the field is a social science, which studies human behaviour with evidence but cannot predict it as physics predicts a falling stone.

6. The normative and the empirical approaches

Every study of administration asks one of two kinds of question. One kind asks what actually happens. How long does a file take to move through a ministry? How many officers are transferred each year? Do citizens trust the police? Those are empirical questions, answered by observation, counting and evidence. The other kind asks what ought to happen. Should officers be transferred at all before three years? Should a citizen have the right to see the file on their case? Should the poor be served first? Those are normative questions, answered by values, law and argument.

The table sets the two approaches side by side.

The difference became a central argument of the field after the Second World War. Herbert Simon argued that a science of administration had to separate facts from values and study the facts, which pushed the field towards the empirical approach.¹² Robert Dahl replied in 1947 that this could not be done neatly. In “The Science of Public Administration: Three Problems”, he named the three obstacles: administration cannot escape questions of value, it deals with human beings whose behaviour is not mechanical, and it is shaped by the social setting of each country.¹³ Dwight Waldo argued in The Administrative State (1948) that the founders’ own writings were full of political values they had not admitted.¹⁴ So the normative approach never left.

Pakistan’s administration needs both, and its own Constitution shows the normative side clearly. Article 29 says that the Principles of Policy, such as promoting local government institutions and the social and economic well-being of the people, are “the responsibility of each organ and authority of the State, and of each person performing functions on behalf of an organ or authority of the State”.²³ That is a normative duty laid on every administrator. The empirical side is where the most room for improvement lies, because a goal written in the Constitution can only be judged by evidence of what has actually been done, and the chapter on programme evaluation shows how that evidence is gathered. A good answer on Pakistan argues that the normative goals are written down already, and that the next task is to gather the evidence that shows whether they are being met.

7. How the field grew: from Wilson’s essay to the principles, 1887 to 1937

The discipline has a history of little more than a century, and knowing its turning points lets you place any idea in the subject in one sentence. One clear way of telling that history comes from Nicholas Henry, whose textbook FPSC suggests. In an article of 1975 and in later editions of his book, Henry described the field as a series of paradigms, each defined by where public administration is done (its locus) and what it is expert in (its focus).¹⁶ The dates below are his. They overlap in places, because one way of thinking does not stop on the day another starts.

The first paradigm rested on Wilson’s essay and on Frank Goodnow’s book Politics and Administration (1900). Goodnow divided government into “two primary or ultimate functions”, “the expression of the will of the state and the execution of that will”.⁹ Politics decided, administration carried out. The point of the division was practical. In the United States of the time, government jobs were handed out as rewards to party workers, and the reformers wanted a permanent service hired on merit and kept out of party fights. The locus of public administration, in Henry’s terms, was the government’s own bureaucracy.

The second paradigm took the next step. If administration was separate from politics, perhaps it obeyed principles of its own that held in any organisation. Frederick Taylor’s scientific management had already looked for the one best way to do each job in a factory (1911).¹⁰ Willoughby’s Principles of Public Administration (1927) and Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick’s Papers on the Science of Administration (1937) wrote down such principles for government.^{6 11} Gulick summed up the work of the chief executive in the letters POSDCORB, which stand for planning, organising, staffing, directing, co-ordinating, reporting and budgeting. In this paradigm the focus was the principles themselves, and the locus could be anywhere, since the principles were said to hold in every organisation.

The first stage gave the field its confidence and its first textbooks, and it built the merit-based civil services that most countries, Pakistan included, still have. Its weakness was the confidence itself. It assumed that administration could be kept clean of politics and that one set of principles fitted every case. The next stage attacked both assumptions.

8. How the field grew: the attack and the search for a home, 1938 to 1970

The second stage began with a challenge and ended with a field unsure where it belonged. Henry calls the years from 1938 to 1950 a time of challenge, and the decades after them a long search for an identity.^{16 17}

The attack came from two directions. Practitioners who had run government during the Depression and the Second World War knew that senior officials make policy all the time. Paul Appleby, who had served in the United States government, argued in Policy and Administration (1949) that administration is part of the political process, not separate from it. Herbert Simon attacked the principles directly. In an article of 1946 titled “The Proverbs of Administration”, he showed that the principles came in pairs that contradicted each other. One principle said a manager should supervise only a few people, another said there should be as few levels of hierarchy as possible, and obeying one meant breaking the other. In Administrative Behavior (1947) he turned the field towards the study of how decisions are actually made.¹²

With its principles in doubt, the field went back to political science, where it had been born. In this third paradigm the locus was again the government, but the focus was lost, because political scientists treated public administration as a minor part of their own subject. Many teachers of the field felt it had become a poor relation.¹⁶

At the same time another group took the field towards management and business schools. In this fourth paradigm the focus was the techniques of management, such as organisation theory and the study of decisions, and the locus did not matter, since the same techniques were applied to firms and to governments. Henry dates it from the founding of the journal Administrative Science Quarterly in 1956.¹⁷ The overlap with the third paradigm in Figure 4 is the picture of a field pulled two ways.

In 1968, a year of protest and upheaval in the United States, young scholars met at Minnowbrook to ask whether the field had anything to say about the problems of its own time.¹⁸ Their answer, which came to be called the New Public Administration, was that administration could not be neutral. It had to care about fairness to the poor and the excluded, about change and about the people it served, not only about efficiency. The chapter on traditional public administration sets out their four themes. For the story of the field, Minnowbrook matters because it put values back at the centre and prepared the ground for the field to stand on its own.

9. How the field grew: a field of its own, the market and governance, 1970 to the present

The third stage is the one you live in. Henry dates the fifth paradigm, public administration as public administration, from about 1970, when the field set up its own schools, degrees and professional bodies, separate from both political science and business.^{16 17} Its locus is the public interest and public affairs, and its focus is the body of knowledge built up since Wilson, drawn from politics, management and law together.

From the late 1970s governments in Britain, New Zealand, the United States and elsewhere tried to make the state smaller and to run what remained like a business. In 1991 Christopher Hood described this movement in an article that named its doctrines, and the name he used, New Public Management, stuck.²⁰ David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s Reinventing Government (1992), one of the books FPSC suggests, carried the same ideas to a wide public, arguing that government should “steer” by setting goals and let others “row” by delivering services.²¹ The chapter on New Public Management teaches its doctrines and its record.

The reply came from Robert and Janet Denhardt, whose New Public Service (2000) argued that citizens are not customers and that the public servant’s first duty is to help citizens meet their shared interests, not to steer them.²² Alongside both, the idea of governance spread. It sees the government as one partner among many, working with the private sector, voluntary organisations and international bodies to solve problems no one of them could solve alone. Henry’s later editions add governance as a sixth paradigm running beside the fifth from about 1990.¹⁷ The chapters on the New Public Service and on the governance approach teach both in full.

If you have only a minute, remember the story this way. From 1887 to the 1930s the field tried to be a science of administration kept apart from politics. From the late 1940s to 1970 that science was attacked and the field searched for a home. Since 1970 it has stood on its own, divided over how far government should behave like a market and increasingly seeing government as one partner among many.

10. What Woodrow Wilson gave the field

FPSC set a short note on “Woodrow Wilson’s contribution to Public Administration” in 2022, and his name appears in Part-I too, as in the 2024 question on who first gave the rationale for public administration as an academic discipline.¹ So his essay deserves a section of its own.

Woodrow Wilson was a young professor when he wrote “The Study of Administration”, published in the Political Science Quarterly in June 1887. He later became President of the United States. The essay was short, about twenty-five pages, but it made five claims that shaped the field.

First, administration deserved study because government had become too complex to run by habit. “It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one,” he wrote.⁴ The great constitutional questions had been settled, and the practical question now was how to make government work. Second, the study had a double object, to find out “what government can properly and successfully do” and how it could do those things “with the utmost possible efficiency”.⁴ Third, administration was a field of business. “The field of administration is a field of business. It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics.”⁴ Fourth, and most famously, “administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics. Administrative questions are not political questions.”⁴ Fifth, America could learn administrative methods from other countries, even from monarchies, without taking over their politics. “If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly,” he wrote, “I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it.”⁴

The essay gave the discipline its starting date, its first purpose and its first big idea, the separation of politics and administration. It also began comparative administration, the study of how other countries govern, which later became central to the study of developing countries like Pakistan. Its limit is the separation itself. Wilson himself wrote that “politics sets the tasks for administration”, so even he did not imagine a wall between them, and later writers showed how much policy officials make.⁴ In a short note, give the date and the journal, the five claims in one line each with one quotation, and a two-line judgment that the essay founded the field but that its separation of politics and administration has been heavily qualified. The chapter on politics and administration takes that debate further.

11. Public administration in Pakistan, seen through the definitions

The definitions are easy to learn and easy to forget. They stick when you see them at work in Pakistan’s own laws and institutions, so this section takes each of the main ideas of the chapter and shows where it appears.

Begin with Wilson’s idea of administration as the execution of law. The chain in Figure 1 is real. Parliament passed the Benazir Income Support Programme Act, which received the President’s assent on 12 August 2010 and was published as Act No. XVIII of 2010.²⁵ Its preamble says that it is desirable “to provide financial assistance and other social protection and safety net measures to economically distressed persons and families”, and it grounds that aim in the Principles of Policy of the Constitution. The Act decides the purpose. Everything that follows, from the rules on who qualifies to the survey of households and the payment of each instalment, is the “detailed and systematic execution of public law” that Wilson described.⁴ When the payments go astray or the survey misses the poorest families, that is a failure of administration, not of the law.

The line between politics and administration appears in the Constitution itself, in its definitions. Article 260 defines the “service of Pakistan” as “any service, post or office in connection with the affairs of the Federation or of a Province”, including the armed forces and the All-Pakistan Services. It then lists who is not in that service: the President, the Speaker and Deputy Speaker, the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Senate, the Prime Minister, federal and provincial ministers, the Chief Ministers, advisers and special assistants, members of the assemblies, the Attorney-General and the Advocate-Generals, Parliamentary Secretaries, and the chairmen and members of the Law Commission and the Council of Islamic Ideology.²³ Most of the people on the second list hold political office, while the people in the service of Pakistan do administration. That is the line this chapter has been drawing. The President was added to that list of exclusions by the 27th Amendment of 2025, which is a reminder that these boundaries are drawn by law and can be redrawn.

The narrow sense of administration, the executive’s own machinery, is set out in the Rules of Business 1973. They divide the federal government into divisions, each with a Secretary who is “the official head of the Division” and responsible for “the due execution of the sanctioned policy”, while the Minister is “responsible for policy concerning his Division”.²⁴ Policy is the minister’s, execution is the secretary’s, and the secretary’s division is the narrow-sense public administration that Willoughby chose to study.

The discipline is present in Pakistan too, and you are part of it. FPSC sets Public Administration as an optional paper for the federal civil service, and its list of suggested books places Pakistani and South Asian writers beside the American founders. It includes Ralph Braibanti’s Evolution of Pakistan’s Administration System, as FPSC lists it, Charles Kennedy’s Bureaucracy in Pakistan, Jameelur Rehman Khan’s Government and Administration in Pakistan, Sultan Khan’s Public Administration with special reference to Pakistan and Mahbub ul Haq’s work on human development in South Asia.³ The field you are studying is the one Wilson founded, applied to a state that inherited its administrative machinery from British India and has spent its life adapting it.

12. The critics, and the question whether there can be a science of administration

Every definition in this chapter has its critics, and the strongest criticisms are about whether public administration can be the kind of science its founders hoped for.

Herbert Simon’s criticism was the most damaging to the early field. He showed that its principles came in contradictory pairs, like proverbs. “Look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” are both proverbs, and both are sometimes true, which means neither tells you what to do. In the same way, the principle of a narrow span of control (each manager should supervise only a few people) and the principle of few levels of hierarchy cannot both be followed at once.¹² Simon did not conclude that administration could not be studied. He concluded that it had to be studied more carefully, by looking at how decisions are actually made.

Robert Dahl went further. In his article of 1947 he argued that a science of public administration faced three problems. It could not avoid questions of value. It dealt with human beings, whose behaviour is not as regular as the behaviour of machines. It was shaped by the history and culture of each country, so that findings in one country might not hold in another.¹³ The third problem matters most for Pakistan. Theories built on the American or British experience do not always fit a country with a different society and history, a point the chapter on development administration develops through Fred Riggs’s idea of the prismatic society.

Dwight Waldo’s The Administrative State (1948) argued that the founders’ supposedly neutral science of administration was full of political ideas, about efficiency, about experts and about how a democracy should be run, that they had never examined.¹⁴ A generation later, Vincent Ostrom wrote of The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration (1973), arguing that the field had lost confidence in its own foundations.¹⁵ Both criticisms are part of the reason Henry described the field as moving from one paradigm to another rather than building steadily on one.

The critics did not destroy the field. They changed it. After them, few scholars claim that one set of principles fits every organisation in every country, and most accept that administration involves values and politics. What survives is the conviction that government can be studied with evidence and run better because of it, which was Wilson’s purpose in the first place. In an answer, give the critics their full force and then say what survives. That is the critical analysis the examiners ask for.

13. Where the field stands now

Public administration today is a broad field with no single dominant paradigm. The traditional model, New Public Management, the New Public Service and the governance approach all have supporters, and most governments, Pakistan’s included, mix features of all of them.

The field now draws openly on political science, economics, law, management, sociology and psychology. It studies how governments work with private firms and voluntary bodies, how technology changes the delivery of services, and how citizens can take part in decisions. The chapter on the role and scope of public administration sets out its links with each neighbouring discipline. The old question whether public administration belongs to politics or to management has mostly been answered by saying that it needs both, which is Rosenbloom’s point in another form.

In Pakistan the activity is carried out by the federal and provincial governments and the district administration under the Constitution of 1973, the Rules of Business and the civil service laws. The discipline is taught in universities and in the government’s own training institutions, and it is examined, as you know, by FPSC. The chapters on the civil service, on provincial and local government and on administrative reform describe how the activity is organised today and what is being done to improve it.

Definitions can feel like a dull start to a subject, but they decide everything that follows. If public administration is only the execution of law, its first duty is legality. If it is the management of men and materials, its first duty is efficiency. If it is part of the political process, its first duty is responsiveness to the people. The chapter on the core values of public administration shows how these duties are balanced, and much of the rest of the subject is the working out of that balance.

14. What students mix up

• The activity and the discipline. The activity is as old as government. The discipline began in 1887. A question on “evolution” usually means the discipline.
• Public administration and public policy. Policy is the decision about what to do, and administration is carrying it out. The two overlap, since officials help make policy, but they are not the same thing.
• Administration and management. Management is the general skill of running any organisation, public or private. Public administration is management in a public setting, under law and public control, so it adds the political and legal lenses to the managerial one.
• Wilson’s dichotomy as a wall. Wilson wrote that politics “sets the tasks for administration”, so he never meant that the two had no contact. The dichotomy is about different roles, not about officials never touching policy.
• Goodnow and Wilson. Wilson wrote the essay of 1887 that founded the field. Goodnow wrote the book of 1900 that divided government into the expression and the execution of the will of the state. Do not swap them.
• Henry’s dates as exact. Henry’s paradigms overlap and are approximate. Give them as Henry’s own way of dividing the history, not as fixed dates.
• Normative and empirical as rivals. They answer different questions, and a good study uses both. Saying one is right and the other wrong misses the point.

15. What FPSC has asked

The papers from 2016 to 2026 asked these questions in this chapter’s territory.¹

• 2018, Q.7. “Discuss why it may be in the best interest of both the public and government for administrators to have public administration background rather than having degree in the area of economics, political science or business studies?” (Taught here and in the chapter on role and scope.)
• 2019, Q.2. “Define Public Administration. Discuss the relationship between Politics and Public Administration.”
• 2021, Q.2. “Define Normative and Empirical approaches of Public Administration, and their implications to Pakistan’s administrative system.”
• 2022, Q.8(a). A short note on “Woodrow Wilson’s contribution to Public Administration”.
• 2026, Q.2. “Public Administration is inherently interdisciplinary. Conceptualize the field and discuss its linkages with five key related disciplines.” (The linkages are taught in the chapter on role and scope.)
• 2026, Q.8(c). A short note on “Evolution of Public Administration”.

In Part-I, the 2024 paper asked who first gave “the rationale for public administration to be an academic discipline and professional specialty”, with Woodrow Wilson among the options, and which approach New Public Management is a variant of.²

16. Facts to take into the examination hall

17. What loses marks on this topic

• A definition with no author. “Public administration is the management of government affairs” earns little. “Leonard White defined it in 1926 as the management of men and materials in the accomplishment of the purposes of the state” earns the mark.
• One definition only. The examiner wants to see that the field has been defined in different ways. Give at least two, from different angles, and say what they share.
• Answering “evolution” with the Mughals. A question on the evolution of public administration as a discipline begins in 1887. The pre-colonial history belongs to a question on Pakistan’s administrative roots.
• Presenting the dichotomy as true. The politics and administration dichotomy is the founding idea, not today’s view. Give it, then give its critics, then say what survives.
• No Pakistan. Even a question that does not name Pakistan rewards one exact Pakistani example, such as Article 260 or the Rules of Business.
• Mixing up the normative and the empirical. Define each, give an example of each, and keep them apart before showing how they work together.

18. A worked answer plan

Question (2021, Q.2). “Define Normative and Empirical approaches of Public Administration, and their implications to Pakistan’s administrative system.”

The tasks. There are three. Define the normative approach. Define the empirical approach. Show what each means for Pakistan’s administration.

The plan.

• Introduction. Every study of administration asks either what is or what ought to be. The empirical approach answers the first, the normative the second. Thesis in one line: Pakistan’s administration has strong normative foundations in its Constitution, but weak empirical habits, and it needs both.
• The empirical approach defined. What it is (observation, evidence, explanation), its origins in Simon’s call to separate facts from values (1946, 1947), its methods (surveys, data, case studies), and an example question, such as how long a pension case takes.
• The normative approach defined. What it is (values, duties, standards), its defence by Dahl (1947), who argued that administration cannot escape values, and by Waldo (1948). An example question, such as whether pensions should be paid within a fixed time by right.
• A table. The two approaches compared on their question, method, product, an example and their danger when used alone (as in the table in the section on the two approaches).
• Implications for Pakistan, normative. Article 29 of the Constitution makes the Principles of Policy the responsibility of every person acting for the State. The Rules of Business set the duties of minister and secretary. The normative framework exists.
• Implications for Pakistan, empirical. A goal can only be judged by evidence of what has been done. Proposals: evaluate major programmes before renewing them, publish service data, and train officers in research methods. Each proposal is a step a government could take.
• Judgment. Neither approach is enough alone. A system with values but no evidence cannot see where it fails, and one with evidence but no values cannot say what success means.
• Conclusion. Two lines. Pakistan has written down what its administration ought to do. Its next task is to measure what it actually does.

A figure to draw. A two-column table of the two approaches, or a fork with “What is?” on one branch and “What ought to be?” on the other, both meeting again at “Better administration”.

What to remember from this chapter

• Public administration is both an activity, as old as government, and a discipline, founded by Woodrow Wilson’s essay of 1887.
• Wilson defined it as “detailed and systematic execution of public law”; White, in the first textbook (1926), as “the management of men and materials in the accomplishment of the purposes of the state”.
• In the broad sense administration exists in all three branches of government; in the narrow sense, which most writers use, it is the executive’s administrative machinery (Willoughby, 1927).
• Rosenbloom’s three lenses, management, politics and law, hold the definitions together, each tied to one function and one branch of government.
• The field is a social science: it can be studied with evidence, but applying what is known needs judgment.
• The empirical approach asks what is; the normative approach asks what ought to be; a good study uses both.
• Henry’s paradigms tell the story: the dichotomy, the principles, the challenge, political science and management, public administration on its own, then governance.
• In Pakistan, Article 260 of the Constitution separates the service of Pakistan from political office (and a few other named offices), and the Rules of Business divide policy (the minister) from execution (the secretary).

Check yourself

Answer each question in your own words before you open the answer.

1. Give Wilson’s and White’s definitions of public administration, and say how they differ.

2. What is the difference between the broad and the narrow sense of administration, and which does a question on Pakistan’s civil service call for?

3. Name Rosenbloom’s three lenses, and apply each to the transfer of a district officer.

4. Is public administration an art or a science? Give one scholar on each side.

5. Place New Public Management and the New Public Service in the story of the field in two sentences.

6. How does Article 260 of the Constitution illustrate the politics and administration dichotomy?

7. From the chapter on how to sit the paper: what are the four moves of a twenty-mark answer?