Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

Managing External Constituencies 205
as specified on organization charts and coordination was managed hierarchically
by their common authority. Any bureaucratic politics was disregarded.
There was little concern with how any activities added up to some agreed general
function of the whole organization. That was a ‘political’ function and not
the concern of public servants who only perform administrative functions.
Secondly, the relationships with independent organizations were also presumed
to be managed by the political leadership, including the relationship
with other branches or levels of the government. Interest groups – a major
focus of what is to follow in this chapter – were barely tolerated by the public
service. Naturally, any contact with them was left to the politicians. Private
enterprises were considered only in passing, as yet another vested interest
group just like any other. They might lobby for or against some things, particularly
to have government money directed to them, but that was something for
the politicians to worry about and not public servants.
Allison’s third point involves any dealing with the press and the public. Both
these were regarded rather negatively by the bureaucracy and were other parts of
the external constituency function left for politicians to worry about. Any relations
which did exist with the press and public were more often exercises in damage
control than genuine attempts to inform or persuade the wider community in
which the public organization existed. Another part of external relations in the
traditional model was a rather negative kind in which the public service jealously
guarded every scrap of information. With this mentality being pervasive, it is little
wonder that dealing with the outside generally, or the press and the public in
particular, was regarded negatively. In general, as expected in a bureaucratic
organization, the outside was regarded as the outside and beyond the interest or
knowledge of the public administrator. A strictly bureaucratic model is internally
focused and does not need the outside. It is presumed to be self-sufficient and
proceeding to the ‘one best way’ answer through deliberation, process and precedent
with the views of outsiders only detracting from this rational process.
Interest groups were regarded with particular disfavour. As recently as the
1960s, according to Pross, the general public ‘treated pressure group participation
in policy-making as illicit’, with some ‘guilt by association’ with lobbying
being one reason for this, but as he continues (1986, p. 53):
A more important influence may have been the fact that pressure group intervention in
policy-making offended public perceptions of democratic government. The institutions of
representative government – the single member constituency and the structure of political
parties in particular – were sustained by myths that recognized no distinction between
the representation of spatial interests and of sectoral concerns. Despite the growing incapacity
of parties and legislatures, the belief persisted that they and they alone had the
responsibility for articulating the needs of the people; that interventions on the part of
other institutions were illegitimate.
The bureaucracy agreed with this view. Pross also argues that the 1960s was
the ‘epoch of the mandarins’ and senior administrators were not prepared to