Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions V. 1

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1 Governance: An Int'l J. Pol'y, Admin, & Institutions 1 (1988)

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Image IV Revisited: Executive and Political Roles

JOEL D. ABERBACH and BERT A. ROCKMAN

A PREFACE TO REVISITING IMAGE IV
The growth of the administrative state and the rise of the democratic
political order in this century created tension in the exercise of
governmental authority. Professionalized bureaucracy, which arose in
different places at different times, but almost always in advance of
political democracy, gave to the permanent officials of government the
advantages of continuity, mastery of detail, and often, specialized
expertise. Sometimes, in some settings, it also conferred on such
officials a great deal of social prestige and a common identity reflected
in educational and career patterns and in their special status as high
officials of the state. To the emergent professional politicians, on the
other hand, was conferred the mantle of democratic legitimacy and the
constitutional authority to define the policies of the state.
Formally, the relations between the permanent civil servants and the
transient political leaders are crystal clear. Who is boss? From a legal
standpoint, one can answer without pause; the politicians, of course.
Informally, however, the answer is a great deal less clear. This is so,
first, because civil servants possess valuable knowledge about how
government works that politicians lack. More important though,
politicians by their internal divisions as a class, and by their
inattentiveness to detail and to policy, operations, often default to civil
servants in the control of what government actually does as distinct
from what it symbolically purports to do.
In our book, Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies,
coauthored with Robert D. Putnam (Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman
1981), we set forth a typology of images to conceptualize the
development of role relations between high level civil servants and
professional politicians. We generated four role images that we
thought related the roles of bureaucrats and politicians as they have
unfolded historically, and certainly as they have developed in the
intellectual history of public administration.

Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration, Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan. 1988
(pp.1-25), Š1988, Research Committee on the Structure and Organization of Government
of the International Political Science Association. ISSN 0952-1895