Understanding Shared Roles in Policy and Administration: An Empirical Study of Council‐Manager Relations

Abstract

Recent literature in public administration emphasizes enhanced collaboration between elected and administrative officials. The complementarity view is presented as an alternative to the traditional politics–administration dichotomy. At the center of this new perspective lies the concept of shared roles between elected officials and public administrators with respect to policy making and administration. This article expands the emerging literature on role sharing by proposing and testing new variables to understand what enhances the policy‐making role of city managers and the administrative role of elected officials. Employing data collected from a nationwide survey of city managers and utilizing structural equation modeling methodology, this research finds that the council’s expectations and the city manager’s role conception significantly influence the city manager’s involvement in policy making, while the context of policy making, the city manager’s support, and the council’s access to resources affect elected officials’ involvement in administration. This article aims to make a cumulative contribution to the literature on role sharing.

Professional Identification and City Managers: An Analysis of a National Survey

“…This implies that managers who are more engaged in their profession, and its activities, are more likely to hold this graduate degree in public administration. This supports existing research on the importance of the external environment on the roles and values of city managers (Demir & Reddick, 2012). Essentially, the roles of city managers are influenced by the external environment, and city managers need to go beyond what they are doing internally, within the organization, and engage more in professional development activities outside of the organization.…”

“…However, with Gouldner's research the focus is on managers in general, while the focus of this article is on city managers and their professional identification. City managers are important to study because they possess significant expertise, have expanded roles in the communities they serve, and assume increased responsibility for maintaining democratic governance (Nalbandian, 1990;Streib, 1992;Demir & Reddick, 2012).…”

The mid-level bureaucrats’ performance: determinants of their activities and work relationships

“…Many authors see this dichotomy between strategic decision and operational activities as a weak point of public policy analysis, first because it is very difficult to categorize what is technical and what is political. Second, due to the failure to empirically observe how decisions that come from political actors are incorporated and transformed by the bureaucrats (HOWLETT, 2011;DEMIR and REDDICK, 2012). The advance of the literature depends, therefore, on deepening the analysis of these different dimensions regarding the bureaucrats' daily work.…”

A Century of Municipal Reform in the United States

“…The city manager defends municipal policies publically only after consideration and adoption of such policies by the council. (Stillman, 1974, p. 126) By the 1980s, the idea of a continuum had replaced the dichotomy model as the way to best describe the relationship between policy making and administration (Demir, 2009;Demir & Reddick, 2012;Nalbandian, 1991;Svara, 1990Svara, , 1998. City managers and council members are and should be involved in all dimensions of the governing process, from developing and determining missions and policies to administering and managing policies and programs.…”