From Public Administration to Politics: Drivers and Consequences for Public Policy

John Howard, Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation, 20 May 2025*

This paper interrogates the consequences of Australia’s apparent drift from evidence-based public administration towards performative politics.

As media logic and political theatre increasingly dominate, technical analysis and long-term policy effectiveness have been marginalised.

The result is a governance culture more concerned with appearance than substance, weakening both institutional capacity and public trust. Restoring robust governance requires more than nostalgia for the past: it demands a deliberate fusion of the analytic discipline of classic public administration with a deep understanding of power, accountability, and the complexity of modern democracy.

Drawing on frameworks such as adaptive governance and mission-oriented innovation policy, and learning from emblematic initiatives like the Cooperative Research Centres Program, the paper calls for renewed investment in technical expertise, systems thinking, and political literacy within government. Rebalancing these domains is essential for policy effectiveness and recovering the legitimacy and trustworthiness of public institutions.

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The transformation of public administration from a domain grounded in public management to one dominated by political analysis represents a fundamental epistemological and institutional shift in the theory and practice of governance.

This evolution, spanning over a century, has reconfigured the identity, role, and expectations of public institutions, recasting administrators from neutral experts into political actors and policy from strategic design into a negotiation of interests. It has altered the foundations of public policy, making, implementation, and evaluation.

Nowhere is this more starkly played out than in the domain of science, research and innovation.

From Administrative Rationality to Political Dynamics

Public administration in its earliest form emerged as a response to the governance challenges of the modern bureaucratic state. From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, the field was characterised by an emphasis on rationality, efficiency, and elements of scientific management. Influential figures such as Woodrow Wilson advocated a separation between politics and administration, arguing that public officials should operate as apolitical experts focused on efficient service delivery (Wilson, 1887). It was also the foundation of the (unwritten) British Constitution and the Westminster system of governance that evolved in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.

By the mid-20th century, however, particularly with the emergence of thinkers such as Herbert Simon, the artificial separation between politics and administration came under scrutiny. Simon's notion of “bounded rationality” and decision-making under uncertainty revealed the inescapably political nature of administrative action (Simon, 1947). Public officials were no longer seen as neutral instruments of policy but as co-producers of policy decisions embedded in institutional, ideological, and behavioural contexts.

The real inflection point came in the latter decades of the century, as public administration was absorbed into political science and redefined through the lens of power, legitimacy, and political behaviour. By the late 1990s and into the 21st century, the field increasingly aligned itself with the analysis of political events, campaign strategies, and electoral outcomes. This was also played out publicly with television parodies such as Yes Minister/Prime Minister and The Thick of It.

Driving the Shift

Several interrelated factors drove this paradigmatic shift from administrative rationality to political interpretation.

The Rise of Political Behaviourism and Public Choice Theory.
Public choice theorists such as Buchanan and Tullock reframed public officials as self-interested actors within political markets (Buchanan & Tullock, 1962). This reframing delegitimised the normative model of the neutral bureaucrat, fueling narratives of bureaucratic capture, rent-seeking, and inefficiency. In effect, it politicised the administrative function by aligning it with behavioural economics and rational choice theory.

Institutional Convergence and Academic Restructuring.
University programs in political science and public administration began to merge in the mid-20th century, often in the name of interdisciplinarity. While this enriched the study of governance, it also led to a diminishing emphasis on administrative competence, technical management, and economic rationality in favour of political analysis and narrative construction (Peters & Pierre, 2003). The analytical apparatus of public finance, budgeting, personnel management, and infrastructure planning increasingly gave way to studies of stakeholder negotiation and interest mediation.

The New Public Management (NPM) Agenda.
The managerial reforms of the 1980s and 1990s—epitomised by New Public Management—paradoxically accelerated the politicisation of administration. While claiming to restore efficiency and performance through private sector techniques, NPM simultaneously undermined professional bureaucratic norms by introducing partisan ministerial control over policy outcomes, outsourcing complex service delivery to politically connected intermediaries, and cost recovery and "user pays" principles (Hood, 1991). This led to heightened accountability pressures, often framed through media performance rather than policy outcomes.

The Mediatisation of Governance.
Mediatisation is the process by which the mass media substantially influences other sectors of society, including politics, business, culture, entertainment, sport, religion, or education. The media revolution and the 24/7 news cycle have compressed the temporal dimensions of policy development.

In this environment, Public administration has struggled to maintain its traditional deliberative pace. As public discourse became increasingly performative, administrators were drawn into the spectacle of politics, forced to frame policies in terms of “optics” and narrative coherence rather than long-term planning and institutional robustness (Schudson, 2003).

The Decline of Grand Theory and the Rise of Applied Pragmatism.
Political science itself shifted away from structural theories of governance and institutional analysis toward granular studies of voter behaviour, campaigns, and populism.

The vacuum created by the retreat from political theory, once the backbone of policy thought, has been filled by “real-time analysis” and commentary. This trend has narrowed the analytical bandwidth of political studies, leaving less room for reflective enquiry into administrative systems and their improvement.

These developments have collectively challenged the ethos and practice of administrative professionalism. The ascendancy of political behaviourism, academic convergence, managerial reform, and relentless mediatisation has shifted the centre of gravity from technical competence and impartial stewardship towards agility in managing narratives and stakeholder perceptions. The administrative virtues of analytical rigour, procedural fairness, and commitment to the public interest have been increasingly subordinated to short-term responsiveness and the imperatives of political performance.

As a result, the professional identity of public administrators has become less defined by specialist expertise and ethical independence, and more by their capacity to navigate contested, media-driven environments. This recalibration raises important questions about the capacity of the public service to provide robust, long-term policy advice, sustain institutional memory, and uphold democratic accountability. Reimagining administrative professionalism for the contemporary era will require a renewed emphasis on technical acumen, critical reflection, and a reaffirmed commitment to the values of public service, lest the public sector become merely an extension of the political stage.

Consequences for Administrative Professionalism and Public Policy

The paradigmatic shift from the foundations of administrative rationality has fundamentally altered the formulation, delivery, and evaluation of public policy in Australia and comparable jurisdictions. This reconfiguration is not merely a matter of changing organisational structure or process; it represents a significant transformation in the values, skills, and institutional logics that underpin public administration.

As administrative professionalism has waned, investment in technical training for public servants has similarly altered. Where once civil service education was anchored in disciplines such as constitutional and administrative law, institutional economics, and public finance, fostering technical proficiency, procedural rigour, and a strong sense of institutional memory (Peters, 2010; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2017), this framework has given way to new priorities. The traditional approach supported a systems-based ethos in policy design and public accountability, marked by impartiality and an explicit duty to the public interest.

In contrast, the current paradigm foregrounds competencies in networked governance: skills in facilitating collaboration across organisational and sectoral boundaries, managing complex stakeholder relationships, and navigating diffuse accountability structures (Rhodes, 1996; Kjaer, 2004). Communications and political analysis have become central, reflecting the heightened importance of media cycles and the demands of reputational management. While these abilities align with the realities of a pluralistic, media-saturated environment, their dominance risks crowding out the analytical, legal, and technical expertise essential for effective, impartial policymaking (Pierre & Peters, 2000; Lodge & Gill, 2011).

The practical consequence is a policy design process that often privileges the negotiation of competing interests over evidence-based decision-making. The ascendancy of “collaborative governance” and co-design models has brought greater inclusiveness and diversity of input, but frequently at the expense of clarity and decisiveness. As a result, policy drift becomes a systemic risk: with no single actor possessing the requisite authority or expertise to effect comprehensive reform, governments are incentivised to pursue politically expedient solutions, sometimes lacking in analytic rigour and notably in fiscal sustainability.

These trends are especially pronounced in fields such as education, science, research, and innovation policy. The nuanced frameworks of National Innovation Systems (Freeman, 1987) or the Triple Helix model (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000) have often been supplanted in public and political discourse by reductionist slogans such as “winning the innovation race” or “jobs of the future.” While these rhetorical devices serve immediate political ends, they tend to obscure the long-term, systemic investments required for genuine innovation—sustained capability-building, institutional trust, and adaptive, evidence-informed policy frameworks.

The contemporary obsession with immediacy further exacerbates these challenges. Policies tend to be promoted and evaluated by the narratives they enable and the stories they generate in the media rather than their expected substantive outcomes. Narrative coherence is prized over empirical accuracy, and performance is judged by media reception rather than administrative effectiveness. While policy narrative is legitimate in communicating complex reforms (Roe, 1994), uncritical reliance on storytelling risks substituting analysis with mere impressionism, distorting public understanding and policymaking.

Perhaps the most pervasive and corrosive consequence is the tendency for journalists, media commentators, and even academic analysts to interpret all aspects of public policy—whether in economic management, social welfare, environmental protection, or public health—through an exclusively political lens. Policy debates are too often reduced to tactical assessments of political winners and losers, with the substantive merits of technical feasibility, ethical reasoning, or long-term sustainability displaced by questions of political strategy and electoral impact. Leading newspapers routinely assign political editors to provide economic commentary, further entrenching this dynamic.

In this climate, critical public issues such as climate policy, housing affordability, responses to national disasters and local emergencies are routinely framed as tests of political leadership rather than as domains requiring technical expertise, compassion, or strategic foresight. The result is a cycle in which political theatre consistently overshadows substantive policy deliberation, eroding the distinction between governance and politics and ultimately undermining the legitimacy and effectiveness of the public sector.

Reimagining the Role of Public Administration

The challenge for policymakers and educators is to reintegrate the analytical depth and technical sophistication of the public administration tradition with the democratic and relational insights of the disciplines of political science and institutional economics. A dual focus is required.

1. The restoration of technical legitimacy—through renewed emphasis on logic, reasoning, systems analysis, and administrative law—is vital. This includes building institutional capacity within Government departments, statutory authorities, and Ministerial offices to undertake policy design grounded in evidence, complexity, and foresight.

2. The cultivation of political literacy—not in the sense of media performance but in understanding power structures, institutional relationships, and democratic accountability—allows public administrators to engage with politics without being subsumed by it.

Emerging approaches such as adaptive governance, mission-oriented innovation policy (Mazzucato, 2018), and objective policy narrative offer promising frameworks for rebalancing the technical and political dimensions of policy work. These models recognise the messiness of real-world policymaking but insist on theoretical coherence and institutional learning.

Australia’s distinctive experiences—from the successful Cooperative Research Centres program to the well-grounded portfolio of Medical Research Institutes—demonstrate that policy success depends on the combination of political vision, administrative competence and institutional design. Reaffirming the value of public administration as a domain of expertise, distinct but complementary to political leadership, is essential to rebuilding effective and trusted governance.

Conclusion

Institutional restructuring, ideological shifts, and the media logic of the digital age have driven the journey from public administration to politics. While it has broadened our appreciation of governance as a political act, it has also eroded technical rigour, analytical coherence, and institutional independence in policymaking. The path forward lies not in reversing this shift but reconciling its tensions—reviving the lost arts of administration while embracing the political realities of contemporary governance. Doing so will allow public policy to once again be both effective and legitimate.

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© 2025, John H. Howard. All rights reserved.

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Dr John H. Howard is a policy analyst, economist, and innovation strategist with over three decades of experience advising governments, universities, and industry. As Founder of the Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation and a Visiting Professor at UTS, he brings an integrative perspective to complex policy challenges. His work bridges academic insight and practical application, offering clear analyses grounded in deep professional and personal experience. His Innovation Insights are informed by a lifetime of thinking, doing, and questioning orthodoxies.

John can be contacted at john@actoninstitute.au