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Political Science 419 (Introduction to Public Administration, Fall 2007)
Instructor: Craig Curtis (Bradley Hall 486, 677-2492, e-mail: rcc@bradley.edu) Home page: http://hilltop.bradley.edu/~rcc/
Text: Rosenbloom, David H. and Robert S. Kravchuk (2005) Public Administration: Understanding Management, Politics, and Law in the Public Sector (6th ed). McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Class Meeting Information: Tues & Thurs, 9:00 to 10:15 am, Br 370
Instructor's Office Hours: Wed. 9 :00 to
10:00 am, Tues. & Thurs., 10:30 to 11:45 am, Tuesday, 1:30 to 2:45 pm
(Afternoon office hours to take effect after Labor Day)
Description: This course is designed to introduce you to the basic principles and topics in Public Administration. Here, as in many, but not all, universities, PA is part of the political science department. Therefore, we will consider PA as a subdiscipline of political science. This is not a practically oriented course of study. Our purpose is not to explicitly prepare you to work in the public sector. Rather, our purpose is to learn about the bureaucracy as a way of understanding government and society. After taking this course, you should be better able to assimilate new information about government agencies and about the administrative problems that face the nation and its constituent governments.
Grading: The final Grade will be based on the following:
1) 2 take home exams given during the course of the semester, each worth
25% of the final grade.
2) A research paper, worth 25% of the final grade.
3) A comprehensive take home final exam, due on Friday, December 14, in
my office, at or before 2:00 pm, worth 25% of the final grade.
The final letter grade will be assigned according to the following scale:
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A 90-100% |
D 60-69% |
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B 80-89% |
F below 60% |
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C 70-79% |
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Note that high quality class participation is likely to have a positive impact on one's final grade.
Class policies
Week I (TH 8-30) Introduction and Housekeeping Chores
Week II (T 9-4) What is PA?,
Week III (T 9-11) The Founding and Structure of the Bureaucracy,
Week IV (T 9-18) Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations,
Week V (T 9-25) More on
State and Local Government.
Practice Exam due at the beginning of class on 9-25.
Founder’s Day on 9-27, class dismissed at 9:50.
Week VI (T 10-2) The Regulatory State,
Fall Break -- no class on Tuesday the 9th
Week VII (Th 10-11) Internal Workings of Bureaucracy: An Introduction to
Organization theory,
Week VIII (T 10-16)
Personnel Administration,
First take home exam due at the beginning of class on 10-16
Week IX (T 10-23) Collective Bargaining (simulation on Thursday -- I will need to know who will be absent ahead of time since I will assign bargaining teams on Tuesday)
Week X (T 10-30) The Federal
Budgeting Process,
Proposed bibliography, with brief annotations, due on 11-1.
Week XI (T 11-6) Local Budgeting and review for second take home exam. The exam will be e-mailed to you on Thursday, 11-8
Week XII (T 11-13) Decision Making,
Second take home exam due at the beginning of class on 11-15
Week XIII (T 11-20) Policy
Analysis and Implementation,
Rough Drafts of Reflection Essays due on 11-20
Thanksgiving Break
Week XIV (T 11-27) More on Policy Analysis, begin Bureaucratic Pathology, Rosenbloom, Ch. 10
Week XV (T 12-4) Ethics, Rosenbloom, Chs. 11 & 12
The final exam will be posted on Thursday, 12-6.
W eek XVI (T 12-11) Catch-up, Wrap-up, and Review for Final, Rosenbloom, Ch.
13.
Reflection essays due
The Final Exam is due in my office at or before Friday, December 14, 2007, at 2:00 pm.
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Practice Exam due on 9-25 |
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First Take Home due on 10-16 |
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Proposed Bibliography, with Annotations, due 11-1 |
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Second Take Home due on 11-15 |
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Proposed Drafts of Research Paper due on 11-20 |
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Final Drafts of Research Paper due on 12-11 |
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Final Take Home Project due on Friday. 12-14, at 2:00 pm, in my office. No late essays will be accepted! |
Every student in the class is expected to write a research paper on the following topic:
Background: Despite the constant promises from both of the major political parties to run government in an efficient and business-like manner, the fundamental reality that government bureaucracy is not like a private bureaucracy in important ways often is made apparent. Evidence in support of this proposition include the many documented problems with the use of contractors in the war on terror, allegations that the CIA and FEMA have made major blunders in the last decade, and the widespread controversy over domestic intelligence gathering efforts, as well as others. Much of the problem stems from the somewhat anti-democratic nature of bureaucracies themselves.
Topic: Your task is to research and present potential ways in which bureaucracy can be induced to behave in a fashion that is more consistent with the American version of limited government.
In order to respond to this assignment, you will need to do some actual research. Our online, full text library resources should be sufficient for this assignment. In order to get you started, I hereby provide you with a few relevant citations. These articles are not meant to be the sole source of your research. They are there to get you started. The bibliographies of relevant articles are usually the best sources for additional articles. In addition, the journals Public Administration Review and Administration & Society commonly publish articles that are relevant to this topic.
Espeland, Wendy Nelson. 2000. “Bureaucratizing Democracy, Democratizing Bureaucracy.” Law & Social Inquiry 25(4): 1077-1109.
Pitts, David W. 2007.
“Representative Bureaucracy, Ethnicity and Public Schools: Examining the Link between Representation and
Performance.” Administration & Society 39(4):
497-526.
Rosenbloom, David H. 2007.
“Reinventing Administrative Prescriptions: The Case for Democratic-Constitutional Impact
Statements and Scorecards.” Public Administration Review 67
(January/February): 28-39.
van der Wal, Zeger,
Leo Huberts, Hans van den Huevel, and Emile Kolthoff. 2006.
“Central Values of Government and Business: Differences, Similarities and
Conflicts.” Public Administration Quarterly 30(3): 314-364.
Yang,
Make sure that you fully document your sources, using the American Political Science Association citation format. The political science reference room (BR 490) has a copy of the most recently revised American Political Science Association Style Manual. The citations listed above follow the format specified by the APSA. Failure to faithfully follow the appropriate citation format will result in a one letter grade deduction.
Your essays should be a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 10 printed pages, assuming standard fonts and margins. Your research should include at least 10 sources not listed above. These are not hard limits, but should serve as a guide to what is expected.
I would hope that the student grapevine about me is that my papers are hard to do and that consultation is very helpful in earning a good grade. To that end, I would like very much to offer some assistance to you. I will gladly consult with you during the course of the semester. I would suggest that you submit a proposed bibliography, with brief annotations, on or before November 1. I will review these and make suggestions for you within a week. I will gladly review proposed final drafts (I do not like the term "rough" draft) if they are given to me in a timely fashion (on or before the class session on 11-20) and if they are complete enough for me to provide feedback. This means no handwritten papers and no partial papers ("I just want to see if I am on the right track" won't convince me to accept it). It also means that I will not read any rough draft that does not contain a full list of references. I will make detailed written comments to assist you, returning your papers to you on the following Tuesday. The final draft is due at the beginning of the last day of class.
I am not an English professor; however, obvious errors of grammar or usage
will result in a deduction from your grade Obvious errors include, among
others, misspelled words, subject-verb disagreement, sentence fragments or
run-on sentences, misuse of homophones, failure to use the apostrophe to
signify the possessive, ending of sentences with a preposition, failure to use
proper punctuation (e.g., failure to place a question mark at the end of an
interrogatory sentence, or failure to properly use quotation marks), and use of
the four letters "A," "L," "O," and "T"
taken together as a word. Because anyone may overlook a typographical
error or two, the first three errors do not count. I do this because, in
the real world, such errors do reduce the value of your work. Please take
the time to edit your work and use a spell check.
All exams will be take home exams. The second and final exams will be cumulative. You will have choices of questions. For example, on the first exam you will likely be given a list of 4 or more questions from which you will choose two. The second and final exams will follow a similar format. The course documents section of this Blackboard site contains old tests for your information. Because these questions will require you to solve real world problems, you will need to do a bit of background research to respond to most of the items. Please make sure that you appropriately cite all sources used in the essays. Never directly quote language without full citation.
Each assignment will require you to write two essays, each of two to four pages in length. The essays must be printed on a word processor. Because the type of skills required to succeed in this type of assignment must be honed by practice, it is my intention to offer a practice exam. One is already posted on Blackboard in the assignments section. If you choose to avail yourself of this opportunity, you must write an essay of approximately 500 words and turn it in to me in class on Tuesday, September 25. I will grade it, and make detailed comments with an eye towards helping you improve your work. Of course, I will be glad to meet with to discuss your essay while you are preparing it, or after you have received my feedback. You are strongly urged to take advantage of this opportunity.
It is my firm belief that anyone of average intelligence can memorize details. What separates the good students from the ordinary ones, and those who are successful in later life from those who merely survive, is the ability to manipulate knowledge of concepts in creative ways to solve complex problems. Thus, merely listing concepts learned in a section of the course in response to an essay question may get you a few points, but will not earn a passing grade. In order to earn a passing grade, you must use the concepts to solve the problem set out in the test item. You are required to apply concepts to meet the goals of political science, which is to describe, explain and predict human behavior in the political arena.
Your opinion and analysis are not equivalent. Political science is based on rational, dispassionate analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, informed by theory. I want your opinions to be informed by rational political science analysis, but experience has taught me that they are not always so informed. Your opinion is what you feel. It is informed by emotion as well as by rational analysis. Your opinion is important to me as a citizen. It is irrelevant to me when I grade your work. What matters is the quality of your analysis.
As a glance at my old tests will reveal, my test items are a bit unusual at times. Please pay careful attention to the call of the question. I may ask you to play a role or respond to a hypothetical situation in a test item. It is your task to play the role as realistically as you can. If dialogue is required, write it. If a letter or memo is required, write it. If a particular ideological point of view is required, you must assume that point of view for the purposes of answering the question. Believe it or not, the best students rather enjoy the opportunity to be creative, and find the test itself to be a learning experience.
All take home exam essays must be printed on a word processor. Length of the essays is largely irrelevant beyond a certain minimum, and the correlation between length and grades is not very strong. In fact, the total length of each essay should not exceed 1000 words, and 500 words is a more reasonable length. Please note that the exams are due at the beginning of class. I will collect exam papers before starting that day's substantive lesson. Once I have finished collecting papers from those who are in the room, those who come in late will be penalized for turning in a late paper. Because these exams are to be take home exams, I expect a polished document. Typographical errors and errors of usage and grammar will result in deductions from the grade. I do this because, in the real world, such errors do reduce the value of your work. Edit your essays carefully.
If you have a documented learning disability that requires alternative
testing arrangements, please let me know well before the first exam
Any instance of academic dishonesty, e.g., cheating on exams or plagiarism of term papers, will be dealt with as severely as university rules allow.
Any attempt to secure the exclusive use of library resources, i.e., hiding or removing from the library any books or journals, or intentional destruction of library materials, i.e., cutting out articles, will be punished severely. You will receive zero credit for the assignment, and the matter will be reported to the library and to the Executive Director of Housing, Residential Life and Student Judicial System. You will be held liable for repair or replacement of the materials.
You are expected to do your own work on all assignments. Plagiarism will be punished as severely as university rules allow, i.e., a zero for the paper will be awarded and the matter will be reported to the Chair of Political Science and the Executive Director of Housing, Residential Life and Student Judicial System.
Plagiarism, according to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (unabridged edition), means "appropriation or imitation of the language, ideas and thoughts of another author, and representation of them as one's own work." Any of the following examples of academic dishonesty constitutes plagiarism:
1. Directly copying a phrase, sentence, passage or paragraph from another author and presenting it as one's own (i.e., without proper quotation marks and full citation -- you are assumed to know how to properly use quotation marks and citations) is plagiarism. Copying text from the book in an open book exam without proper use of quotations and appropriate citation is plagiarism.
2. Paraphrasing a sentence, passage or paragraph from another author without so indicating by proper citation to authority. When in doubt, cite!
3. Knowingly presenting, as one's own, a thought, idea, analytical framework, or theory advanced by another author. Turning in a term paper you did not write, e.g., one you bought, copied, or downloaded off of the internet, is plagiarism.
Note: Turning in the same paper to more than one professor (using the same paper to fulfill more than one assignment), without preclearance from both professors, is considered to be an instance of academic dishonesty. Note also that Bradley is now a subscriber to “Turnitin.com” a service that allows for the rapid checking of student work against virtually the entire body of web content. Cutting and pasting web obscure content into an essay will be detected by this service. When in doubt about what is academically honest, come to see me. If that is not practical, then quote nothing and cite everything.