Paper I

Story hook

In June 1887, a thirty-year-old professor at Bryn Mawr published an essay in the Political Science Quarterly arguing that the United States should study how other countries ran their governments. Woodrow Wilson knew this would sound unpatriotic, so he built the argument around a metaphor that has outlived almost everything else in the essay:

"If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intention to commit murder with it."

The murderous fellow was Prussia. Wilson wanted the administrative technique of the Prussian bureaucracy without its autocracy — and he assumed, casually, that technique and politics could be separated like a blade from a hand. That assumption is the founding premise of comparative public administration. It is also the premise the next hundred and forty years of the field spent demolishing.

Six decades later the indictment arrived, and it arrived in two instalments. In 1946, Herbert Simon published "The Proverbs of Administration" in the Public Administration Review: the classical principles, he showed, came in mutually contradictory pairs, so each was a proverb rather than a law. (The article was reprinted the following year as Chapter II of Administrative Behavior, 1947, which is why it is so often misdated.) A year later, in 1947, Robert Dahl — reviewing the state of the discipline in the same journal — supplied the comparative half of the diagnosis: no science of public administration was possible unless the field became genuinely comparative, because every "principle" American scholars had confidently proclaimed was, on inspection, a description of one country's practice generalised into a law of nature. Public administration had a body of doctrine and no control group.

The response was the most ambitious project the discipline has ever attempted: the Comparative Administration Group, founded in 1960 under Fred W. Riggs, Ford-funded, staffed by scholars fanning out across newly independent Asia and Africa, determined to build a genuinely universal theory of administration. It produced the prismatic-sala model, the ecological approach, and the whole vocabulary of development administration. It also collapsed. By 1971 the Ford money was gone, the models were being attacked as untestable and ethnocentric, and the field's own founder was publishing revisions conceding much of the criticism. What survives — and it is a great deal — is the reason this unit exists. When an examiner asks why the British civil service reformed by report and the American after an assassination, why a French préfet answers to Paris and an American governor to nobody, why Japan's ministries wrote the country's industrial policy and China's ministries answer to a Party department — the tools for that answer were forged in the wreckage of the CAG.

Why this matters for UPSC

In UPSC's printed Public Administration syllabus, this material is Paper I, item 7 — "Comparative Public Administration" (item 5 in the same list is "Accountability and control", a separate unit), and item 7 lists historical and sociological factors affecting administrative systems, administration and politics in different countries, the current status of CPA, ecology and administration, and Riggsian models and their critique. It is worth roughly 10-25 marks in a typical Paper I: almost always at least one 10-mark short note (Riggs, ecology, the current status of the field), and in many years a full 15- or 20-mark analytical question. The questions are overwhelmingly analytical rather than factual — the examiner rarely wants a description of the American system, and almost always wants an argued position on whether comparison is possible at all, or on what a specific administrative feature reveals about its society. A candidate who has memorised five country profiles and cannot say what Riggs was arguing against will score poorly; the reverse scores well.