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Administration (government)

For Wikipedia's administration, see Wikipedia:Administrators.

The term administration, as used in the context of government, differs according to jurisdiction.

United States

Main article: Executive (government)

In United States usage, the term refers to the executive branch under a specific president (or sometimes governor, mayor, or other local executive), for example: the "George W. Bush administration." It can also mean an executive branch agency headed by an administrator: these agencies tend to have a regulatory function as well as an administrative function. On occasion, people in the U.S. will use the term to refer to the time a given person was president, e.g. "they have been married since the Jimmy Carter administration."

Europe

Usage in Europe varies by country, but most typically the term refers to the local government, or the hierarchy of national and local government, that applies to a town or district. More specifically, it may refer to public administration, the business of administering public policy as determined by government.

For the US sense of the word, most (English-speaking) countries use the analogous term government, as in the "Tony Blair government". (This is also true of the non-European members of the Commonwealth of Nations).