Sovereignty Sovereignty is the concept that government is the ultimate repository of supreme political power

and authority. It involves a monopoly over the legiti mate use of force in the society. In the United States,
sovereignty resides in the people, as a whole, who exercise it through their elected governments. In our
constitutional framework, the people govern themselves through a rep resentative system of governments.
Public administration and public employ ment, in particular, are consequently considered to be a “public trust.”
As subordinates of the sovereign people, public administrators are also placed in a position that differs
considerably from that of managers and employees in the private sector. Public administrators are agents of
the sovereign, which means that the actions of public administrators have the force of law and the coercive
power of the government behind them. Private firms also make policies and are engaged in activities that affect
the lives of individuals in the society as a whole, but unless specifically empowered to use physical force (as in
the case of privately managed prisons), their policies cannot be enforced through legitimate coercive physical
power. Rather, the private sector must turn to the public sector’s courts and police power for the enforcement
of contracts. Public administrators, being agents of the sovereign, are inevitably engaged in matters of public
policy making and implementation. From the 1880s to the 1940s, public administrative theory in the United
States held that administration and politics should be almost completely separate from one another. Perhaps
this dichotomy between politics and administration was primarily concerned with eliminating partisan or
electoral politics from the public service. But today it is broadly accepted that public administrators do 12 Part I
Introduction: Definitions, Concepts, and Setting have a legitimate role in all phases of the public policy cycle.*
In other words, theory and practice now support the idea that the political system should take advantage of
public administrators’ expertise when it is appropriate to the identification and definition of problems to which
public policy ought to be addressed as well as to the formulation, analysis, evaluation, and revision of policies.
It is now also recognized that public administrators are often required to make policy choices while
implementing statutes and executive orders. They exercise discretion because their mandates from
legislatures are general (rather than specific) and/or because of a scarcity of resources that virtually requires
the selective enforcement of the law. Public administrators’ involvement in the public policy cycle makes pol
itics far more salient in the public sector than in private enterprise. Public administrators are perforce required
to build and maintain political support for the policies and programs they implement. They must try to convince
mem bers of the legislature, chief executives, political appointees, interest groups, private individuals, and the
public at large that their activities and policies are desirable and responsive. Involvement in policy making and
politics raises the question of how it can be assured that those exercising a public trust will do so properly. This
brings a variety of public values, such as representation and transparency, to bear on public administrative
practice. For instance, federal policy has sought to make federal administration representative by assuring that
the civil service “looks like America” in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and other social fac tors.11 It also
provides formal processes through which interested parties can express their views on the adoption of
administrative policies and rules. Transparency is embodied in the federal Freedom of Information Act of 1966
(FOIA) and the Government in the Sunshine Act of 1976. FOIA provides public access to a great deal of
information about the operation of agencies. The Sunshine Act requires multiheaded federal boards and
commissions, such as the Federal Communications Commission, to do a great deal of their deci sion making in
open forums. Similar statutes regulate state and local govern ments throughout the nation. Such values are
less relevant to the private sector. Private enterprise is built around the principle of the profit motive, not that of
providing represen tation to different groups or information about their business decisions and operations to
the public. Subjecting private firms to an equivalent of the fed eral FOIA or Sunshine Act would make it almost
impossible for many of them to operate. In sum, any definition of public administration must lay heavy stress
on the public. There are many similarities between public and private adminis tration, but these are often
relatively unimportant in conveying the essence * The notion of the public policy cycle is a conceptual tool that
views public policy as moving through the following stages: agenda setting (identification of an issue); problem
definition; policy formulation; implementation; analysis/evaluation of impact or implementation process; and
revision of some sort, including termination and succession. Chapter 1 The Practice and Discipline of Public
Administration 13 of each. Public administration is concerned with administration of the public interest, it is
constrained by constitutions and relatively unconstrained by market forces, and it is considered a public trust
exercised on behalf of the sovereign. Private administration, in contrast, generally has a narrower con cept of
the public interest; profit-making firms are heavily constrained by market forces, not by constitutions.
Moreover, private administration is not connected to the issue of sovereignty and is rarely considered to be a
public trust of any kind. The lines between public and private administration may become blurred when
government contracts out public functions to not-for profit organizations or other third parties. The same is
sometimes true in the case of some public agencies that are run like corporations, in the form of public
enterprises, such as water and utility districts and transportation sys tems. But the private sector is not
dominated or characterized by not-for-profit organizations or firms exclusively on government contracts, nor is
the public sector largely organized in corporate form. Substantial differences between the public and private
sectors remain, and, importantly, they promote reliance on different values and processes. It is often asked,
“Why can’t the government be run like a business?” The short answer is that we would have to drastically
reduce the importance of representation, transparency, and other public values in order for it to do so.