Political Neutrality Policy In Public Administration

Public administration is about the understanding on the structural operations of government, it’s political, socio economic terrain and the inherent behavior of the operatives who operate the bureaucratic process (Presthus, 1975). Similarly, Waldo (1980) described public administration as the progressive commercial part of government saddled with the responsibility of carrying out polices, made by the executive and the legislative with the consent of the judiciary, and through a joint participatory process backed by the law of the land. Due to the fact that, public administrators are strong actors in decision making, the discipline is viewed as a political process (Lane, 1978). Most likely, this perspective got its derivation from Waldo and

Irrespective of the composition and change of government, civil servants are expected to stay in office without any fear of being dismissed at work unless found guilty of any wrongdoing. The essence of the policy of “permanency in office”-is to promote stability and continuity of government’s responsibility to the society. Most importantly, it supports government to have access to well trained and experienced workforce (Frederickson George, 1971).

The feature of “political neutrality” policy in the civil service requires officials to be neutral politically. They are expected to be committed, unwavering and unbiased to any administration in authority. This concept disallows them from being partisan in the discharge of the day to day duties. Most importantly, this concept helps to boost public assurance in the administration of government. To substantiate this, Harold Stein (1970) argued that public administration concepts like political neutrality and separation of powers contributed hugely to the furtherance of the

The Policy adoption stage is critical to in generating the required support for a particular policy proposal, in order it to be legitimate and constitutional. This stage further seeks to rally government support at all level on a specific course of action.

Stage4: Policy implementation. Stage four is concerned with the implementation of the agreed policy through government’s institutional structure. It deals with the actual application of government’s policy to the problem.

Stage5 :Policy evaluation The last stage is responsible for the appraisals to determine the extent to which the applied policy was effective or not. It answers the key question as to whether the policy worked or not and to what extent.

Source: Brady and Bullock III (Anderson, 1997,