Political-administrative relations: Impact of and puzzles in Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman, 1981

Political-administrative relations became an issue once politicians and administrators came to be considered as distinct actors in the public realm. This happened in the late eighteenth century, and several authors since then explored the nature of this relationship in normative andlor juridical terms. But it took almost two centuries before it became an object of systematic empirical study in a comparative perspective: Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockmart (APR 1981). The APR study was the first to use survey methods and to advance empirically based theory. In this article we discuss the intellectual attention for this topic since the early nineteenth century, APR's findings and impact and-given APR's influence upon methodssome intriguing problems with theframework that they developed. Finally we list some potential new avenues of research.