Comparative Public Administration

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CPA is a very significant area of study in Public Administration as it helps in understanding Administrative setups and their functioning in various settings and societies/countries and what works and why it works. Also, it helps improvise administrative systems making them more efficient together with helping in adding and improvising the already existing literature/theories of Public Administration thus leading to a strong and practical theory of the subject with the help of practical experiments and analysis. COMPARATIVE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION - DEFINITION: Public Administration itself faces problem in getting a unified definition. Comparative Public Administration is a branch of Public Administration. This already implies that there is little point trying to draw strict dividing lines between comparative public administration ‘proper’ and some aspects of, say, European studies or of comparative law or of healthcare administration ( Pollitt, 2011: 115). Another problem of defining CPA is its substantive content. What are the issues in the Public Administration that are qualified for ‘Comparison’? Two aspects should be considered before defining the CPA: Focusing the public organizations rather than private and should emphasise on ‘inter-cultural comparison’ rather than ‘intra-cultural comparison’. (Quah, 1979). Then what about International Organizations??? Like UN, OECD or WB. Aren't they play more important roles in the current globalised world?? Increasingly, comparativists need to incorporate a transnational as well as an inter-national dimension to their analyses (Pollitt, 2011). Pollitt also asserted that CPA does not require any methodological or theoretical apparatus in order to be classified as ‘Comparative) Nimrod Raphaeli asserted CPA ‘as a study of Public Administration on a comparative basis’ (Raphaeli, 1962:22). Riggs restricted

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