No undergraduate public administration course would be complete without at least a perfunctory attempt to summarize the never-ending debate about what public administration is. From Woodrow Wilson to “scientific management” to the Brownlow Committee to the Willowbrook Conference and beyond, the position papers and studies pile up; yet the debate (which often seems more like a monologue) continues. Students find this debate unsatisfying, and it is easy to see why. For a craft that prides itself above all on its relevance to practical affairs (as Woodrow Wilson put it, administration is “government in action”), the arguments that students are most often exposed to have the arid scholasticism of medieval disputes about angels dancing on pins. If public administration is so practical, students must be thinking, why cannot its theorists just cut to the chase and tell us how to do it? Or even what it is?

The two books under review will not, I'm afraid, help very much, largely because they reflect, rather than combat, the aridity of the public administration debate. One seeks to understand the constitutional place of administration, and the other offers the promise of practical guidance to leaders managing crises; however, both books have a hard time getting to the point.

Which is too bad, because both books raise important questions. The Bertelli-Lynn collaboration, Madison's Managers, looks at the constitutional place of public management. Boin and his collaborators want to know how public leadership bears up under crisis conditions. These are obviously important problems.

The first question—the place of public administration in the constitution—is also a very old one. How bureaucracy can be reconciled with the Constitution has been one of the leitmotifs of the never-ending debate, in part because of Woodrow Wilson's dubious claim that administration was something “new” in American politics and, therefore, something that would have to be accommodated by retrofitting the Constitution. This was decidedly not the Founders' view—or at least, not the view of Alexander Hamilton, and probably not the view of James Madison in 1787. (Madison's Managers spends very little time on what James Madison actually said.) Unlike contemporary scholars, Hamilton had no difficulty defining what administration was: “in its most usual and perhaps in its most precise signification, it is limited to executive details, and falls peculiarly within the province of the executive department” (The Federalist Papers 72). Administration, so defined, would require energy in the executive branch, and if it were conducted properly, the American people would over time become more attached to the national government than to the states.

The “regime of parties and courts” that extinguished the Federalists took a different view of administration, seeing executive agencies as the servants, at least in part, of the legislative branch, and not even the New Deal and the growth of an “administrative state” has driven this view from the field. (As I write, Congress has just passed a law informing the president of what qualifications he must seek in future appointees to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. President Bush has wisely described this provision in a signing statement as an interference with his constitutional responsibilities as the chief executive, and he has promised to ignore it.) We have been working, therefore, with two competing accounts of where administration fits into the constitutional scheme, which helps to explain why there has been so much ink spilled over the past century.

To be more precise, Bertelli and Lynn are interested in reconciling managerial responsibility with the separation of powers. This is a vexing problem. In his masterful Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It ([1991], which is neither discussed nor cited in this book), James Q. Wilson notes that anyone who wonders why management reform is difficult need only read Madison's The Federalist Papers 51 for an answer. Though the Founders wanted a strong national government with a vigorous executive, they also wanted a government that would not be pushed into either legislative or executive tyranny; checks and balances was their famous remedy. However, checks and balances invited the very Jeffersonian legislative assertions that undermined the Hamiltonian view of administration as mainly an executive responsibility.

Therefore, while there is clearly a legitimate constitutional place for public management in a regime of separated powers, our peculiar political history means that administrators often serve two masters. This means that they are capable of evading both, and this fear (or for some writers, this hope) inspired much of the wrangling in the academy over what administration really is and how administrators can be held accountable (indoctrinate them? sue them? replace them frequently?) that has taken up so much of the discipline's attention. Bertelli and Lynn take the reader on a long journey through this debate, leading ultimately to their consideration of the rational choice, or political economy, school of public administration, which holds that Congress is the principal and the bureaucracy the agent, and that public management can be seen as the result of a rational bargaining process among interests in the Congress, in society, and in agencies themselves. The authors, endorsing this view, argue that it can easily be reconciled with the “Madisonian” expectation that a regime of separated powers would make administrative authority safe for a republican regime.

The difficulty, as readers of James Q. Wilson know, is that the “principal/agent” template for public agencies is hard to square with the evidence of how agencies actually behave. The great problem of administrative reform is precisely the difficulty of giving administrative agencies a clear enough picture of what it is they are supposed to be doing that they can be held accountable for doing it or not. What is the Defense Department supposed to do when there is no war? How do we know if they are doing it, or if they are doing it well or poorly? If we, the principals, do not know, how can they, the agents, do our bidding? How can agency supervisors, for that matter, control the behavior of operators far down the chain of command?

So while Madison's Managers is a promising inquiry into managerial responsibility, it is short-circuited by a strange lack of empirical credibility: There is simply not enough appreciation or apparent awareness of what government agencies are really like to make Madison's Managers helpful in the end.

The second book—the volume by Boin et al.—seems at first glance more promising. Featuring a cover photograph of Mayor Guiliani, President Bush, and Governor Pataki at the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 14, 2001, the book offers at least a glimpse of the “action” part of government—something practical at last. Unfortunately, The Politics of Crisis Management is more devoted to a summary of what we know about why crisis management is difficult and to an effort to categorize or model the crises modern societies experience. Much of what the authors tell us is somewhat obvious. We learn that leaders “generally fail to see crises coming,” for example (p. 19). Crises are virtually impossible to predict, they remind us—though it is often possible to “grasp the dynamics of a crisis once it is underway” (p. 19). Crises are also “rare” (p. 25), so there are few leaders experienced at handling them at any given moment. (This latter observation is not even a truism: If a hurricane can be considered a crisis, Gulf Coast public officials get yearly seminars—although some are better learners than others, as Katrina made clear.) We learn also that some leaders are naturally decisive, while others are not, and that leaders are not always in control of events (p. 51).

Chapter 4 presents an interesting discussion of how contentious “meaning making” has become in the midst of crises. The media now competes with public officials to define the meaning of crises even as they are happening, which may undermine the “permissive consensus” necessary to take effective action (p. 70). Much of this chapter is devoted to the difficult business of “framing” a crisis in one way or another, and we are reminded, once again, of how damaging the polarization of the media has become, and how difficult it is to govern when every event, from a terrorist attack to a storm, is “spun” on a daily basis. The authors wonder what the consequences for crisis control will be if “impression management really becomes the most important game in town” (p. 100). Whatever its shortcomings, this book is a timely warning about what happens when citizens believe that everything bad can be prevented, and that every misfortune is therefore the result of “deficient political choices” (p. 138) or grist for political scandal.

Scandalmongering flourishes in an atmosphere of public misunderstanding of what governments do, what they are capable of, and why they fail. In particular, the public is often deeply confused about the separation of powers and federalism, political realities unique to the United States, and the source of both strengths and weaknesses in the American regime—as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina demonstrated very effectively. Therefore, no approach to public administration will prove helpful that does not take seriously the challenges posed by these two aspects of American politics. Students hunger for books that can help them make sense of their own government, leading them to a prudential understanding of what the government does well and what it does badly and why. Unfortunately, neither of these books is up to the challenge of this particular kind of political education.