The Troublesome Cleft: Public Administration and Political Science
本文回顾了政治学与公共行政百年来的关系辩论，认为两者边界重叠模糊，强调关注学科间互动而非差异更有利于未来共同进步。
How have we progressed in our 100-year-old debate about the politics/administration dichotomy? Marcia Whicker, Ruth Strickland, and Dorothy Olshfski argue that public management is examined within political science as conversion variable. While political science has not reached consensus about single, discipline-dependent variable, knowledge of the concepts as used-power, justice, equity, conflict, andpolicy-is usefulforpublic managers. At this point in time, political science offers the practitioner more thorough training in scientific rigor than public administration. Public administration is an interdisciplinary hybrid, that can draw as much or morefrom political science as from other contributing disciplines. A focus upon the interface between the two disciplines rather than continued emphasis on their differences provides the greatestprospectforfuture mutual advance. In recent PAR article, David Weimer (1992) cogently challenged the contribution of political science to practitioner skill, reminding us that the relationship between public administration and political science is uneasy and evolving. Waldo (1990) describes the gap between politics and administration as a troublesome cleft. Yet the boundaries between the two disciplines have always been somewhat overlapping and blurred. Waldo's first major work The Administrative State (1948), published more than 40 years ago, was subtitled A Study of the Political Tbeory of American Public Administration, capturing the symbiosis between politics and administration that has persisted to the current day. The sometimes troubled and shifting relationship between politics and administration is classic issue of our discipline, and it remains prominent feature in the scholarly discourse today.