Comparative Public Administration

Comparative public administration is the systematic study of administrative systems across countries, regions or historical periods in order to explain similarities and differences in how states organise and run their bureaucracies. Fred Riggs, a pioneer of the field, argued in his 1964 Theory of Prismatic Society that administration cannot be understood apart from its ecological context — the social, economic, political and cultural environment in which it is embedded. The method compares administrative structures, behaviours and performance while situating each case in its setting, guarding against the assumption that arrangements which work in one country will transfer to another. Its purpose is to build generalisable knowledge about administration that is sensitive to context rather than ethnocentric.