Paradoxes of Complementarity in Public Administration: Part 5 – Revisiting Professor Lowi’s Complaint

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Erik Devereux
March 28, 2025

This is the fifth column on paradoxes among theories of public administration that inhabit three distinct levels of analysis: constitutional/institutional, organizational and personnel (first column, second column, third column, fourth column). Complementarity in this context refers to how our subject of scientific investigation—a public administration—can evidence contradictory properties simultaneously. This column fulfills an earlier promise to discuss the attack Ted Lowi made in his 1991 APSA Presidential Address on the, “single, diabolical mind … of Herbert Simon,” for ostensibly derailing public administration as a field within political science.

I vividly remember reading Lowi’s remarks when originally published in American Political Science Review and reacting with amusement both at the vehemence of the attack on Simon and at Simon’s rather meek response in a subsequent letter to the APSR along the lines of, “who, little ol’ me?!”—that coming from one of the intellectual titans of the 20^th century. At the time, the gist of what Lowi was discussing escaped me. In case you think Lowi’s perspective lacks contemporary relevance, consider this excerpt from the same Address regarding the transformation of the American state during the New Deal into what he labeled the Second Republic:

“(1) it is a positive, not a reactive, state, from the start centered on the executive branch; (2) constitutional limits on the power of the national government over the economy and the distribution of power among the branches within the national government were very quickly laid to rest; (3) many aspects of politics that had traditionally been private … have been governmentalized—that is, modern government has assumed responsibility for its own politics; (4) political parties, like nuclear families, have declined for lack of enough to do; (5) bureaucracy, independent of party and Congress, has expanded in size and scale approaching autonomy as a social force; and, (6) intimately connected with (5), government has become intensively committed to science. This was no accident and it is no mere policy. Science is an inherent part of the new, bureaucratized state.”

For those keeping score, I would say that the current agenda of the Trump Administration and Project 2025 is to cancel all of these except for (1) and (2). Lowi’s analysis also explains the intentional efforts underway to terminate federal government support for science: For Project 2025, science is not a side effect of power but a source of power for those that have championed the progressive agenda since the 1930s.

Lowi’s criticism of Simon focused on a key issue of how complementarity operates in public administration. Here again is Lowi in two more passages from the same Address:

“Science also has to be microscopic, down to the irreducibly smallest unit. It is not paradox that as our state grew larger, the units of analysis in our social science became smaller.”

“Simon transformed the field [of public administration] by lowering the discourse. He reduced the bureaucratic phenomenon to the smallest possible unit, the decision, and introduced rationality to tie decisions to a system…”

As I have discussed elsewhere in this series, perspectives within public administration research that operate at the level of individual bureaucrats or at the level of decision making may reach vastly different conclusions than those perspectives that operate at the level of entire agencies or at the institutional level of relationships among branches of government. We are left with paradoxes in which the accumulation of ostensibly rational individual decisions (ok, boundedly rational decisions) cannot be deemed rational as a whole. There are other circumstances in which the final choice seems perfectly rational yet none of the individual decisions leading to that choice appear to be well reasoned in isolation. Complementarity tells us that we will never reconcile these paradoxes but must learn to live with them. I am not discouraging more research in the tradition of Herbert Simon but cautioning about the limits of that direction as a way to achieve some overarching theory in our field.

Ted Lowi’s prescient observations from 1991 push public administration back toward two issues that it often has avoided amidst all the government-funded science focused on the gathering of and statistical analysis upon, mass amounts of quantitative information:

1. How should the modern state be configured to sustain the consent of the governed?
2. How should bureaucracies be governed within the confines of that consent?

I teach two versions of the course “Foundations of Public Service” at the University of Illinois-Chicago. The syllabi I used last fall seem just a few months later like a cross between ancient history and science fiction. Before I teach these courses again, I intend to redesign the syllabi around the two questions just stated, slotting in key pieces of research that offer more general insights into the issues that will have to be navigated daily by personnel in public agencies as we enter into what Lowi would describe as our Third Republic. I’m happy to share the results upon request.

---

Author: Erik Devereux is Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy, Management, and Analytics at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He has a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Political Science, 1985) and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (Government, 1993). He is the author of Methods of Policy Analysis: Creating, Deploying, and Assessing Theories of Change (available for free here). Email: [email protected]. More content is available here.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...