Since the time of Max Weber and his sociological research on bureaucracy during the Pre-World War I era, public administration has played a major role in the ever shifting relationship between the individual and the community. This altered our essential concepts of the public and private monarchy within social life during the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, the contemporary liberal democratic impulse towards both an unfettered individualism and a strong restricted civic community or culture has developed major challenges to Weber’s ‘modern’ approach to public administration. From former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s declaration that “the era of big government is over” in 1995, to recent proclamations within international theories of a new world order cemented by a ‘global’ civil society, ‘bureaucracy’, as the foundation of the contemporary nation-state, has been challenged on a theoretical and practical level. It is from this exemplar that democratic administration theory has largely emerged. Responding to the new challenges of traditional bureaucracy and their subsequent ‘hollowing out of the State’ as an effective institution, democratic administration theory has attempted to construct a new basis of administrative rule in which both the ‘expert’ and ‘client’ becomes leveled in their discourse through democratic and even radical reform of the administrative process itself. This newfound principle of political rule is in stark contrast to Max Weber’s belief in the eventual “leveling of the governed” in their submission to a rational-legal order. According to Weber, this system will be administered by bureaucratic experts These experts would reign within a stratified structure of “officially” authorized methods of discipline.
Despite this fundamental difference in principle, democratic administration theory should re-formulate itself