Tenets of Contemporary Professionalism in Local Government

Council-manager government grew out of a reform movement at the turn of the century with an explicit goal of cleansing municipal government of graft, corruption, and inefficiency. One important intellectual underpinning of the council-manager plan, taken from the short-ballot movement, was the proposition that political authority should be focused in one elected body, as in a parliamentary system, not divided as in a system which separates powers. A second tenet was that the administration of government should rest in the hands of professionals. Under this reform style of government, administrative expertise would be applied within the broad policy guidelines established by the single governing body. Political involvement in routine administrative operations was proscribed. Later, orthodoxy in public administration often prescribed a strict separation of politics and administration, reaching back to earlier theory of Woodrow Wilson and others. The orthodox view impacted council-manager government for several decades after World War One, limiting its responsiveness to changes.