Chapter Four: Administration in the Federal System: Intergovernmental Relations and Constitutional Sources of Values

Key Words:

1. Block Grants: Grants from higher-level governments to lower-level governments that are distributed on the basis of a statutory formula. They may be used in various ways within a broad policy area, with considerable discretion left to the recipient governments.
2. Categorical Grants: Grants-in-aid that are limited to specific and narrowly defined activities- for example, creating small green spaces, or “parklets,” in an urban development project area.
3. Confederal System: A system of organizing government whereby power and authority resides in subnational or state governments that collectively establish an overarching government to which they delegate some powers while retaining veto power over the national entity.
4. Cooperative Federalism: An era of U.S. federalism from the 1930s to the 1950s that emphasized national, state, and local governments as cooperating agents who interacted with each other to jointly face and solve common problems.
5. Creative Federalism: An era of U.S. federalism in the 1960s characterized by joint planning and decision making at all levels of government, including partnerships with businesses and nonprofit social organizations.
6. Devolution: The transfer of power from a central authority to a local government.
7. Dual Federalism: An era in which each level of government was viewed as supreme within its areas of responsibilities, with relatively distinctive functional divisions of authority and independent operations by bureaucratic agencies. Limited intergovernmental funding.
8. Entitlement: A government benefit required by law provided to eligible individuals, groups, or other governments, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security retirement benefits.
9. Externalities: The costs or benefits from one thing affecting another or those not accounted for in free-market exchanges; those costs or benefits then accrue to someone other than the buyer or seller.

10.  Federalism: A system of government in which an overarching national government shares power with subnational governments.

11.  Formula Grants: A type of grant-in-aid in which a higher level of government (national or state) provides funds to a lower level for stipulated purposes and distributes them according to a set formula that treats all applicants uniformly.

12.  Horizontal Federalism: Concerns the relationships among governmental units at the same level: state-to-state, country-to-country, and city-to-city.

13.  Intergovernmental Relations: Acomplex set of interrelationships among federal, state, and local governments that involve political, fiscal, programmatic, and administrative progresses in which higher-level governments share revenues with lower-level governments, with special conditions attached that the lower-level units must meet to receive in the financial aid.

14.  Laissez-faire: A term for the economic principle that government should “let the people do as they chose” or generally keep its hands off regulating the private sectors’ economic life.

15.  Mandating:  higher level of government obligating a lower level to offer or provide some good or programs as a matter of law or as a prerequisite to full or partial funding for either that program or some other, related programs.

16.  New Federalism: An era of federalism from 1968 to1980, attributed by president Richard Nixon, that returned more autonomy to the states and emphasized blocked grants rather than project or categorical grants.

17.  Project Grants: A type of grant-in-aid given from a higher to a lower level of government that must be applied for, with an individual project as its focus. Many strings are attached. Project grants are more numerous that formula grants, generally offer fewer funds, and often require matching funds from the recipient government.

18.  Renewed Federalism: An era of federalism in the 1980s promoted by president Ronald Reagan that emphasized economic capitalism; individual rights; limited government; rationality in government decision making by assessing costs and benefits of federal programs, especially regulatory ones, and devolved authority and funding down to the state and local levels.

19.  Substate regionalism: A multijurisdictional cooperative arrangement between or among local government entities, such as metropolitan special districts or councils of government that provides a regionwide view or approach to a local problem. Most often used for planning, developing, transportation, and environmental policy problem that affects a whole region.

20.  Unfunded Mandates: federal or state laws that impose on lower-level governments a program that requires expenditures but no implementing funds.

21.  Unitary System: : A form of government in which authority is centralized but some responsibilities may be delegated to smaller administrative units; in doing so, the upper level freely grants authority but may limit or even rescind it without the consent of the lower level. Each state within the United States is a unitary system with respect to its local government.

22.  Vertical federalism: The upper-lower relationships between governments at different levels: national-to-state, state-to-local, and national-to-local.

23.  Vertical Functional Autocracies: Largely self-governing professional guilds of members of bureaucracies at the federal, state, or local levels who are able to function as autocracies, running a policy area as a functional fiefdom mostly independent of other agencies or branches of government. Associated with the picket-fence model of federalism.

Chapter Three: The Anatomy of Public Organizations: Bureaucratic Power and Politics

Key Terms:

1.      Acronyms: words formed from the first (or first few) letters of a series of words

2.     Administrative Decentralization: the delegation of authority to subordinate levels within a department or agency

3.      Bureaucratic Ideology: a verbal image of that portion of the good society that is revelant to the functions of a particular bureau as well as the chief means of contstructing that portion.

4.     Groupthink: a mode of thinking within a cohesive group; a practice engaged in by people whose agreement seeking overrides a realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. The drive for consensus at any costs suppresses dissent.

5.      GSPs: government service providers; entrepreneurial electronic communications ventures wherin one government sells its IT services to another.

6.     Ideology: a verbal image of the good society and chief means of construction such a society.

7.      Jargon: The specialized vocabulary and idioms of those who are in the same type of work or profession.

8.     Organizational culture: how an organization views its role in broader society; a complex of assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, norms and values that guide an organization.

9.     Place-based ownership models of economic enterprises: a variety of models or approaches used by local governments to promote economic development which are based on the local geographic locale of the enterprise.

10.   Political decentralization: the allocation of powers among territories or areas governed by subunits.

11.    Privatization: the process of returning to the private sector certain property or functions previously owned or performed by government.

12.   Reinventing government: the latest manifestation of the progressive tradition of continually improving government by tinkering with its operations—in this case, by emphasizing privatization.

13.   results-based budgeting: approach to the budgeting process that eschews incrementalism and scross the board cuts and instead asks fundamental questions about the priorities in governmental servies.

14.   Stovepipes: beltway jagon for the inability of different agencies to share information.

15.   Subsystem: a political alliance of an agency, related interest groups, and legislative committees that shares values and preferences in a particular area of public policy making.

Review Questions:

s1.      Compare and contrast internal versus external foundations of bureaucratic power. How does the nature of an organization’s structure influence its reliance or internal versus external sources of power?

2.      What roles does bureaucratic ideology play in an organization’s culture? How is a bureau’s ideology used to influence the external environment of an agency? How is it used to support internal cohesion?

           The role Bureaucratic ideology is helping bureaucracy cope with uncertainty by providing shortcuts to calculating which policies, procedures, and programs will be most acceptable to its external society. A bureaucratic ideology flows downward from the organization’s higher levels of formal authority and infuses its communication systems, both formal and informal. Top-level officials develop the ideology to provide an efficient means of communicating with both the external environment and bureau insiders. Higher management faces pressing needs to communicate to people who might not be disposed to listen carefully and well, especially when a crisis develops or an environment rapidly changes. The bureau ideology states agency goals in terms of the organization’s ultimate policy objectives in serving the broader society. The verbal images of the bureau’s ideology enable others- legislators, voters, officials with other relevant agencies, related interest group members, and even lower-level bureau members-to use the ideology in decision making without paying excessively high information costs.

3.      How do acronyms and jargon enhance bureaucratic expertise and power? How do they contribute to the problem of stovepiping?

           Acronyms help enhance bureaucratic expertise and power through shortcuts and providing meaning to those familiar with them; but to those who do not know them, they can seem incoherent, incomprehensible, and occasionally outlandish. Jargon helps enhance bureaucratic ideology by creating new words carry certain value connotations.

4.      Compare and contrast an agency’s internal and external sources of values. Is value conflict the result of different values coming from internal versus external sources? Can value conflicts emerge within both internal and external sources?

           Yes, value conflicts can emerge because working with different people with different nationalities, religion, point of view about life, and the ways of doing and thinking in approaching things and idea.

Chapter Two: The Social, Political, Economic, and Environmental Context of Administration

Key Terms:

1.     Affirmative action: the removal of artificial barriers to employment of women and minority groups; compensatory plans for previously disadvantaged groups, as in specific programs to recruit, hire, and promote qualified members of designated disadvantaged groups so as to eliminate the continuing effects of prior discrimination.

2.     Captive agency: an agency whose personnel and decision makers are directly or indirectly influenced by outside interest groups from the very industry the agency is required to regulate or serve.

3.     Clientele agency: a bureaucratic agency that serves, protects, or promotes the interests of those it was established to oversee, often at the expense of the general public rather than organized special interest groups.

4.     Conscientious objection: state laws that allow doctors to refuse to perform a procedure to which they have fundamental moral objection.

5.     Earmarked: funds or tax revenues from a given source that legally must be spent for a given program or service. For example, gasoline taxes must be spent on highway construction or maintenance.

6.     Ecology: the study of relationship of living things to their natural environment.

7.     Ecosystem: any collection of plants, animals, and nonliving things that interact with one another within their environment.

8.     Externalities: positive or negative effects of one thing that entail costs to another.

9.     Grassroots lobbying: a type or method of lobbying in which an interest group uses its own rank-and-file membership to send mass mailings, work phone banks, send mass e-mails, phone talk-radio shows, and walk the halls of the legislature to marshal public opinion and government policy toward its position on an issue.

10.  Ideology: a comprehensive and logical set of beliefs about human nature and the role of government and how its institutions should be organized and managed.

11.  Iron triangle: a type of sub government; refers to the three angles of the policy process for a particular policy area.

12.  Issue networks: a temporary collection of lobbyists, lawmakers, staff members, bureaucrats, and experts who collaborate to shape a particular policy.

13.  Linkage institutions: agencies, such as political parties, interest groups, and the media, that forge links between citizens and public policy makers.

14.  Merit system: the selection, retention, and promotion of public employees based on competitive examinations or formal education qualifications.

15.  Multiculturalism: the belief that the many cultures that make up American society ought to be maintained as distinct and that laws should be used to protect and even encourage them; the value of appreciating the richness of cultural diversity.

16.  NIMBY: the acronym for not in my backyard; denotes opposition to certain government programs or facilities deemed undesirable but that are or could be located in one’s neighborhood or area; typical examples are sewage-treatment plants, solid-waste recycling plants, and prisons.

17.  Partial-birth abortion: a medical procedure to terminate pregnancy during the last trimester in which doctors crush the cranium of the fetus and then induce delivery.

18.  Party in government: all the people from a party who hold public office.

19.  Party platform: a document drawn up by a political party at its state or national convention that establishes the party’s policies and positions on current public issues.

20.  Patronage: the practice of awarding government jobs and contracts to faithful members of the political party in power.

21.  Political culture: the cluster of attitudes, beliefs, ideology, and values that shape our thinking about society and government and the role of the individual within both of them, the part of the overall societal culture that determines societal attitudes toward the quality, style, and strength of its political and governmental process.

22.  Political party:  a group of politically active individuals who organize for the purpose of capturing government by controlling the nomination and election of officials and thereby control the operation of government and determine public policy.

23.  Proposition 209: an initiative passed in California that ended affirmative action programs by banning the use of preferences in state hiring and contracting and in admissions to public colleges and universities.

24.  Reverse discrimination: the perception that social programs to promote integration are racial preferences that promote the interests of minorities at the expense of members of the majority.

25.  Set-aside programs: a type of affirmative action program that includes the use of quotas to award government contracts to minority business.

26.  Spin-off party: a minor, or third, party that begins as a faction within a major party, such as the Bull Moose Republicans or the Dixiecrats.

27.  Systems model:   the concept that things are viewed as more than the sum of a collection of parts; an entity in which everything relates to everything else.