A century ago two fields, political science and public administration, were one. At the 1939 meeting of the American Political Science Association, public administration created its own professional organization, and the two fields’ paths have since diverged.
The man instrumental in the creation of the Brookings Institution, Charles E. Merriam, sought to move toward a “science of politics.” In his presidential address to APSA in 1921, he spoke of what he called a pressing problem, the reconstruction of the methods of political study (Merriam 1921, 174). Thus began a trend that placed increasing emphasis on the development of theories and testable hypotheses.
By the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, political science courses had begun appearing on college campuses. This was followed by the establishment of political science departments and degree programs.
As a subfield, public administration first appeared separately in the annual listing of doctoral dissertations in the American Political Science Review in 1936.
Throughout the 1940s, discourse produced a redefinition and reconstruction of issues. Shifting from the philosophical to the positivist, behavioralism drove the paradigm through which political science research would be conducted and legitimated... Theoretical science replaced the original intent of reform as the raison d’etre of the field.