0.3 Knowledge for governance: social science perspectives on science  (Page 4/10)

Brownlow’s experience as a city manager formed his vision of professional public administration at the federal level. The city manager concept as it developed during the early years of the twentieth century held that the often competing demands for accountability to an electorate and efficient management could be reconciled through the appointment of a specialist (often an engineer) who would oversee management of municipal departments while answering to elected officials rather than an electorate. Harold A. Stone, Don K. Price, and Kathryn H. Stone, City Manager Government in the United States: A Review After Twenty-five Years (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1940). Brownlow established his Public Administration Clearing House as a means for communication and information exchange among public administrators about their experiences, both positive and negative, with the expressed objective of professionalizing public administration at all levels of government. During the late 1920s and particularly following the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the efforts of Brownlow and others to professionalize urban public administration came to the attention of several state governors, including Roosevelt in New York. In March 1936, Brownlow was named chairman of the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, and was in a position to try to implement his ideas at the federal level. The committee’s report was transmitted to President Roosevelt early in 1937, well before the November 1938 transmission of Relation of the Federal Government to Research .

Charles e. merriam

Barry D. Karl, Charles Merriam’s biographer, has characterized him as “an academic entrepreneur whose extraordinary sensitivities to the ideas of his times were combined with a willingness to govern the resources available for the development of those ideas to produce a phenomenon rare even in its day: a genuine school of thought.” Ibid . , viii.

Merriam’s principal methodological innovation as the first member (in 1903) of the University of Chicago’s political science department and eventual full professor and chair of that department was to give political science less theoretical and more empirical grounding. In particular, he made use of Chicago itself as a laboratory for field research, following the example set earlier by academic sociologists. His Non-Voting: Causes and Methods of Control , co-authored with his colleague H.F. Gosnell and published in 1924, marked “the public debut of what came to be known as the Chicago School.” Ibid., 148. This study, “utilizing a research staff of undergraduate as well as graduate students, studied the Chicago mayoralty campaign of 1923.” It was “the first major study in political science to use both random sampling and the statistics of attributes.”

Non-Voting and its underlying methodology drew largely favorable reactions from academic social scientists, and Chicago business and political leaders were impressed with the potential of such studies to serve as tools for urban planning. Merriam and his colleagues saw no conflict of interest in involving academic social scientists in business and government. After all, the European founders of the social sciences regarded them as a basis for social engineering that could result in rational policy developments. Part of a wave of politically engaged pre-World-War-II American social scientists, Merriam was active in Chicago politics. He was elected as an alderman, and in 1911 waged an unsuccessful campaign for mayor.