Public administration and political science: Can this marriage be saved?

There is a profound irony in how public administration and political science splintered at the very pinnacle of their interconnection, intellectual power, and practical impact. Much of public administration has gradually separated from political science. Then public administration broke into pieces, with public administration and public management going in different directions. The central question is this: Are these tensions the product of diverging intellectual trends, or of fundamental organizational changes in higher education? B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre, Eva Sorensen, and Jacob Torfing argue that political science and public administration have reached a "bifurcation" that is nothing less than a "divorce." As I note in this paper, the wedges in this division are deep, and the basic theoretical and practical challenges are forcing it wider. It is time to ask: Can this marriage be saved? Is this a marriage that should be allowed to wither away? If the divorce becomes final, what might we lose in the split? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]