Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each statement by whether it supports the politics–administration DICHOTOMY or undermines it.
Groups: Supports the dichotomy · Undermines it
- Officials should be appointed on merit rather than by party
- Officials control the information and draft the options
- Rules are incomplete, so applying them requires judgement
- Ministers should decide policy and be accountable for it
Hints
- One column contains claims about how things should be; the other about how they are.
- The normative claims survive the descriptive failure.
Show the answer
Supports the dichotomy: Officials should be appointed on merit rather than by party, Ministers should decide policy and be accountable for it
Undermines it: Rules are incomplete, so applying them requires judgement, Officials control the information and draft the options
Why
The split is not between right and wrong claims but between normative and descriptive ones. The dichotomy fails as a description of what officials do, and survives as a rule about how they should be appointed and how they should behave, and conflating the two is how the finding gets misused.
Practise Politics and Bureaucracy
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Political Science I is free to start.
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