Handbook of Public Administration

W. Bartley Hildreth, Gerald Miller, Evert L Lindquist, W. Bartley Hildreth, Gerald Miller, Evert L Lindquist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781498750035
• Edition: 4
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000400502
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Administrative Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Public administration as a field of study finds itself in the middle of a fluid environment. The very reach and complexity of public administration has been easy to take for granted, easy to attack, and difficult to explain, particularly in the soundbite and Twitter-snipe media environment. Not only has the context for the discipline changed, but the institutions of public administration have adapted and innovated to deliver services to the public and serve those in power while becoming increasingly complex themselves. Has public administration evolved? And what new lines of research are critical for effective policy and delivery of programs and public services while preserving foundational principles such as the rule of law and expert institutions? This Handbook of Public Administration sheds light for new researchers, doctoral students, scholars, and practitioners interested in probing modern public administration's role in solving major challenges facing nations and the world.

This fourth edition recognizes that the scholarship of public administration must reflect the diverse influence of an international orientation, embracing public administration issues and practices in governance systems around the world, and illustrating just how practice can vary across jurisdictions. Every section identifies foundational principles and issues, shows variation in practice across selected jurisdictions, and identifies promising avenues for research. Each chapter revisits enduring themes and tensions, showing how they persist, along with new challenges and opportunities presented by digital technology and contemporary political realities. The Handbook of Public Administration, Fourth Edition provides a compelling introduction to and depiction of the contemporary realities of public administration, and it will inspire new avenues of inquiry for the next generation of public administration researchers.

1
Introduction to the Fourth Edition of the Handbook of Public Administration

Evert A. Lindquist, W. Bartley Hildreth, and Gerald J. Miller

The Current Context: Upheavals in Governance

Public administration as a field of study finds itself in the middle of a fluid environment, with consensus fraying about the value of expertise and professional public administration. Questions abound on the foundations upon which over a century of public administration reforms have been built. Intellectual figures of that foundation, such as Woodrow Wilson, are now found lacking in morality. Citizens demand change, and they do it with heightened individual vigilance with a camera in a phone and global access. Even if in Great Britain the vote for Brexit was a ‘voice’ without intent, the result of that collective act moved institutions and policies away from the existing foundation. While global events such as the two World Wars (1914–1918 and 1939–1945) forged calls for stability, events such as 9/11 (2001), the Global Financial Crisis (2008), and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020) have challenged the so-called Washington consensus on the best ways to govern nation-state and the internationals order (Roberts, 2019 2020).

In the United States, there have been shifting mantras such as ‘change’ after the Watergate scandal back to normalcy with Jimmy Carter’s election as President in 1976; heightened security and intelligence outside and inside the United States to protect Americans after 9/11 from international terrorists; and, more recently and in the opposite direction, Donald Trump’s election in 2016 against the ‘deep state’ which has involved a sustained assault on long-standing national policies, the undermining of international institutions and agreements, evading accountability, and corroding ethical sensibilities. Once more, and to be clear, that ‘deep state’ President Trump and his supporters rail against are the principles and rule of law which constitute the foundation of public administration. Elsewhere, nationalism and authoritarian leaders are also challenging international institutions of order and collective action.

Not only has the context changed, the institutions of public administration have become very complex as they have been elaborated and adapted in order to deliver services to the public and serve those in power Indeed, they become so complex that they almost defy description and explanation to citizens and observers. They are easy to criticize and deride by populist leaders; and the effects of ongoing cutbacks, departures of experts, and undermining of repertoires and regulations are not noticed until major challenges and failures occur. And, yet, as implementers of the rule of law and followers of tradition, public administrators face an unyielding clamor for change by recipients of public services and their elected officials. Years of calls for a more responsive approach to service delivery now confronts a loud demand for hybrid, and quick, solutions to social problems.

We do not subscribe to the view that public administration as we have known is crumbling in the face of these challenges, nor that the foundational thoughts and traditions underpinning earlier understandings of public administration should be immutable. However, we do believe public administration practice and research must forthrightly confront the tensions and complexity of living in this small world in the ending years of the first quarter of the 21st century. There is a role for public institutions to deal with the major challenges facing nations and the world, but has public administration evolved and what new lines of research are critical for developing new approaches to developing effective policy and delivery of programs and public services, while preserving foundational principles such as the rule of law and expert institutions?

This Handbook of Public Administration – the latest edition that follows three previous handbooks – seeks to shed light on for new researchers, doctoral students, and scholars and practitioners interested in probing the modern problems confronting public administration practice and research, and identifying new avenues for research.

Key Themes Animating Previous Handbooks and Approach for the Fourth Edition

Our editorial lineage to the original Handbook of Public Administration frames this fourth edition. It builds upon the intellectual impetus behind those prior editions – Jack Rabin. In that first edition in 1989, the diverse scope of public administration as a field of inquiry was seen as advancing management and policies so that governments could better function. Such a wide scope and broad goal required an understanding of the field’s history, concepts, and theories. To achieve that mandate, the Handbook not only was the first of its kind but it introduced an innovative design of two chapters on each subfield of public administration written by the leading scholars in American public administration. The first chapter traced the major writers, theories, and applications, by decade (the ‘history’ chapter). The second chapter, by a different scholar(s), specified the five greatest, or most significant, ideas or theories associated with the subfield (the ‘great ideas’ chapter). These complementary essays evaluated the current state of knowledge in the subfield based on the accumulation of research and knowledge.

Two additional editions of the Handbook of Public Administration continued that distinctive design. In 1998, the second edition recognized that public administration was changing through reengineered institutions to make them more responsive to clients, customers, and ultimately citizens/taxpayers. A third edition in 2007 carried forward that tradition with the latest developments and research by subfield, but again from an American perspective. Each handbook reflected key issues, new approaches, and sensibilities of its time, and here we have an opportunity to reflect on them. This fourth edition recognizes that the scholarship of public administration must reflect the diverse influence of an international orientation. With this in mind, Evert A. Lindquist of the University of Victoria, Canada, and Editor, Canadian Public Administration, joins as co-editor. A broader charge enabled this team to attract scholars from around the globe to bring the latest research and theory to this compendium of knowledge.

In this collection, we want to honor the contributions of Jack Rabin and the motivations animating the first three editions. As with the previous handbooks, we wanted to show not only how the field has been changing but also to gather ideas for future research, but this collection differed in several ways. First, reflecting the internationalization of the public administration literature, we wanted to move from a US-centric collection to embrace public administration issues and practices in other governance systems and to illustrate just how practice can vary across jurisdictions. Second, with this in mind we invited several scholars from other countries or with comparative perspectives to show how ideas animating public administration have been expressed and operationalized in other contexts. Third, we also wanted to show some of the inherent complexities found in public administration systems, which often reflect the complex challenges and cross-pressures that public policy and administrative systems must deal with.

As with all collections, the editors set out with an approach in mind: we identified several broad domains, invited authors to contribute papers covering enduring themes, comparisons, and research agendas in each. What surprised us was how many authors, though focusing on one domain, essentially took up or acknowledged other challenges and research domains, reflecting the extent to which our field embraces multilevel analysis and complex systems. As editors we felt that collapsing some of the original categories we had envisioned was fruitful, showing the overlap and resonances across that work.

Finally, and perhaps worryingly, as the contributors proceeded with drafting their chapters, we began to realize that many of the ‘enduring themes’ and foundations of public administration were increasingly under challenge and even assault in the United States. Although the Handbook has never been a textbook in the strict sense, it did reinforce our call for several authors to focus on enduring themes and foundations as reminders of why public administration principles remain salient even if the instruments, practices and ways of delivering services, managing budgets, engaging citizens, and holding governments to account have multiplied and resist categorization.

Overview of the Fourth Edition of the Handbook of Public Administration

This edition of the Handbook of Public Administration is organized into two parts, each with three sections containing various chapters. Every section identifies foundational principles and issues, shows variation in practice across selected jurisdictions, and identifies promising avenues for research.

The first part of the Handbook focuses on the contemporary complexities of public administration: first considering enduring traditions, institutions, and legal foundations in comparative contexts; then surveying the variety of government and non-government actors involved in increasingly diverse approaches to design and deliver public services, and frameworks for making sense of this diversity; and, stepping back, exploring the relevance of complexity theoretical frameworks as an overarching framework. The second part focuses on three well-known domains of public administration: budgeting, performance management, and accountability; modernizing human resource management systems; and the various disciplines and heuristics for understanding how policy gets developed in administrative systems. Each chapter revisits enduring themes and tensions, showing how they persist along with new challenges and opportunities presented by digital technology and contemporary political realities.

While our organizing categories do not mimic the traditional topics of public administration textbooks and many other handbooks, we think it provides a compelling introduction to and depiction of the contemporary realities of public administration, and may inspire new avenues of inquiry for the next generation of public administration researchers.

Part 1: The Contemporary Complexity of Public Administration

Public administration in the 2020s has a different character than the 1880s when patronage was rampant, the years of reform and reinvestment in public works in the early Twentieth Century, the aftermath of World War II when expertise and planning were put to the test, the 1980s after Watergate and a decade of stagflation, or following 9/11 in 2001 and then the Global Financial Crisis in 2009. Despite these significant governance challenges and effects on public administration structures and capabilities, many, if not most, of the concepts, principles, and issues associated with public administration endure, but require new balances to be struck. Now, added to the incredible variety in governance and management of public institutions is a new era of national politics and global realignment creating new tensions and complexities for public administrators to navigate and scholars to interpret and contribute new knowledge towards addressing.

Section 1: Foundations and Tensions in Public Administration

Céline Mavrot, Christian Rosser, Fritz Sager, and Pascal Hurni start off the Handbook by considering the origins and influences of ideas underpinning diverse public administration systems. It is usually presumed that national systems differ mainly because of the unique history, culture, and traditions of each jurisdiction, but like the policy transfer and diffusion literature (Rose, 1991; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Bennett & Howlett, 1992), the authors suggest many national traditions are, in fact, influenced at crucial points by ideas and examples from other jurisdictions. Exploring different levels of analysis and domains of public administration, this chapter offers an overview of the transfer of ideas between German, French, and US Public Administration during the 20th century, suggests that administrative systems might be less exceptional than often supposed. They call for more cross-national studies of the evolution of governance and public administration systems.

William G. Resh similarly offers a historical perspective in Chapter 3, seeking to review the evolution of the normative foundations of the state writ large rather than the field’s predominant focus on specific policy and administrative domains, in this case focusing on the US administrative presidency and its efforts to control the broader administrative system. The chapter reviews how, despite initial balance-of-power principles baked into the Constitution, more power has been given to sitting Presidents over time, leading to steadily more politicization, centralization, and privatization of the US administrative state. With this comes greater emphasis on loyalty in key leadership positions and less core expertise in policy-making, strategic management, and contract management, threatening the checks-and-balances long at the core of the system.

Lorne Sossin also takes a historical perspective on the administrative state in Chapter 4, but focuses instead on how administrative law – broadly defined as “webs of legality, including statutes and regulations, civil liberties and human rights, constitutional norms and a range of policy and informal constraints” – has steadily evolved to further rights and procedurally and substantively constrains public administration decision-makers. Sossin reviews the origins and evolution of administrative law with reference to US, Canadian, and UK court decisions on oversight of agencies, boards, and commissions, as well as rule-making in several other countries. Like Mavrot et al. in Chapter 1, He shows how cross-fertilization of ideas and practice occurred, and the need for adaptability and regeneration in the exercise of accountability as new technologies and blurring of boundaries challenge existing rule-making and oversight systems.

In Chapter 5, Christine Ledvinka Rush reviews key themes driving research on administrative law: the role of law as foundation and constraint on decision-makers, the importance of discretion and deference to rule-makers in judicial oversight, and the continuing relevance of law even with the emergence of collaborative approaches to governance. These principles have withstood the arrival of managerial or NPM models of delivering services, and de-emphasis of legal scholarship in the field. In an era of continuing interest in decentralization and deregulation, Rush suggests better linking legal and public administration scholarship, encouraging more research on citizen engagement in rule-making and the impact of different models of regulation on intended outcomes, potentially seeing law not simply as a constraint but also as an asset.

Section 2: The Evolving and Increasing Variety of Public Administration

In Chapter 6, Herman Bakvis provides a review of the emergence, evolution, and variations of federalism as an approach to public administration governance, developed in an era when ideas about limited central government and acknowledging regional diversity were ascendant before the Industrial Revolution. He considers different examples of federal structures, which have their own unique complexities, and how well these approaches mesh with the arrival of New Public Management and networked governance models, along with contemporary governance challenges observed in the rest of this section, concluding that federalism has always been a work-in-progress and perhaps well-suited to adapt in response.

In Chapter 7, Simon Porcher considers the traditional “make” or “buy” debate over whether government hierarchies versus market mechanisms are better for delivering public services and explores whether hybrid arrangements or concurrent sourcing might work better. He reviews five theoretical frameworks for appraising such decisions and whether th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction to the Fourth Edition of the Handbook of Public Administration
• Part 1 The Contemporary Complexity of Public Administration
• Foundations and Tensions in Public Administration
• The Evolving and Increasing Variety of Public Administration
• Analyzing Public Administration with Complexity Lens
• Part 2 Crucibles for Public Administration: Money, People, Policy
• Budgeting and Performance Monitoring for More Complex Environments
• Modernizing Human Resources Systems for the Public Sector
• Public Administration and Regenerating the Policy Cycle
• Index