Foundations of Public Service

E Pluribus Unum

Douglas F. Morgan, Richard T. Green, Craig W. Shinn, Kent S. Robinson, Margaret E. Banyan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000462630
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Asuntos públicos y administración

Designed to serve as a basic text for introductory courses in public administration, this pioneering work provides students with a clear-eyed understanding of the vital management functions covered in most standard textbooks with two important differences.

First, it is written to address the needs of both the experienced practitioner and the entry-level public servant. Case examples bridge the content-rich environment of practitioners with the principles of public administration sought by pre-service students. Second, the discussion of management practices is grounded in the political and ethical tensions inherent in the American constitutional form of governance.

This innovative approach reflects the authors' belief that public administration operates as an integral part of the country's political traditions, and thereby helps define the political culture. Key themes in this third edition include:

• an emphasis on the ways in which public administration and their agents play a critical role in ensuring legal and political accountability of the political system;

• an exploration of local public administration as the backstop of American democracy, requiring a close working partnership between part-time elected officials and career administrators;

• careful examination of the ways in which the American political economy requires administrators who are skilled at co-producing the common good with voluntary associations, businesses, nonprofit organizations and other governmental entities;

• an understanding that public administration plays a critical role with its prudential judgments in balancing the competing values necessary to secure a regime of ordered liberty.

Every chapter has been thoroughly updated, with particular attention paid to chapters on budgeting and revenue, e-government and the digital divide, shared power and the rise of "wicked problems, " and the future of public administration in the United States amidst deep polarization. Foundations of Public Service, 3rd Edition provides a framework for understanding American political traditions and how they inform public administration as a political practice. It is required reading for all introductory Public Administration courses with an emphasis on practice and real-world applications.

CHAPTER 1A Constitutional and Political Approach to Public Administration

10.4324/9781003218029-1

[A]‌ government must be fitted to a nation as much as a coat to the individual, and consequently, that what may be good at Philadelphia may be bad at Paris, and ridiculous at Petersburg.

(Alexander Hamilton, in Syrett and Cooke, 1961–79, Vol. 22, 404)

This book takes Alexander Hamilton’s claim seriously. The proper forms and operations of a nation’s governments depend on the values and character of its people as these evolve over time. Learning how to govern properly requires that, at a minimum, public servants in all levels of government and across sectors cultivate their understanding of this evolutionary history and use it to inform their governing practices. This book is committed to that end. In the chapters that follow, we explore the enduring values that shape the nature, dynamics, and evolution of public service in the United States. Our approach immerses the reader in the historical development of our governing institutions; it provides an essential context for understanding proper administrative practice, and it explains the origins of ideas about what constitutes “good government.” This approach helps us to identify administrative traditions that have evolved from the Founding era to the current day, and it helps us to understand why these traditions both confer and challenge the legitimacy of government decisions. We will illustrate why and how these traditions remain relevant to today’s public service at all levels.

In keeping with our goal of grounding public servants in the historical and institutional foundations of their practice, the book is written as an extended narrative text rather than an encyclopedia of substantive information. In keeping with the spirit of a narrative text, we weave common themes throughout the chapters, emphasizing that governance is more about balancing tensions than resolving them. As such, the history of how these tensions have played out becomes a vital aspect of acquiring the competency to govern well. The governing roles played by public servants provide a guiding theme for our narrative history of public administration.

In this text, we focus primarily on the role of career public servants rather than that of elected officials. We do this for four reasons. First, government and special district civil servants are subordinates in our governing systems, and confusion often abounds concerning to whom they are subordinate. In a system of divided and checked powers, they have many bosses. Ultimately, in a regime based upon popular sovereignty, the people are their bosses, not just elected politicians and judges. Ironically, this situation places career officials at the center of politics and policy-making, where they are responsible for translating an often-conflicting mix of policy intentions into agency action at all levels. They share in a big way with their political superiors the task of “creating public value,” maintaining “operative capacity,” and building legitimacy for government policy and action (Moore, 1995, passim). At local levels, nonprofit administrators also share responsibility for creating public value and building governance capacity within the community. Any time nonprofit administrators enter into the community polity to develop and provide public services and to coordinate with other providers, they act as governing agents who face public concerns over their legitimacy to act for the community as a whole, as well as concerns about uncontrolled, concentrated power.

Second, career tenure gives public administrators some advantages over state and local elected officials, who often do not or cannot make public service a lifetime calling. Term limits, low pay, staff limitations, and broad ambitions mean that most elected politicians stay in a particular office for relatively short periods of time. This bolsters the role and power of career public officials in determining how our local systems of democratic governance work. They exercise discretionary judgments that affect the health (good or bad) of democratic governance. Career public officials help to design, organize, implement, and maintain our public safety and defense systems, our transportation infrastructure, our sewage and water systems, our social service programs, our school systems, our land-use planning practices, and our public health and environmental programs. In the process, they contribute to, and may also detract from, the engagement of citizens in democratic life. The stimulating and/or retarding influence of career public officials in shaping the meaning and practice of democratic government is especially significant in local governments, which are frequently overseen by elected bodies of part-time officials who have no staff.

Third, career public officials greatly outnumber elected officials and their political appointees. In the whole United States, there are slightly more than 500,000 elected and appointed officials compared to nearly 17 million career officials, 65 percent of whom work in local government (Morgan and Gleason, 2020, 6, 12). The breadth and diversity of practices among career officials can easily overwhelm the capacity of superintending officials to adequately monitor and control them. This situation tends to reinforce a common image of a massive, monolithic, and unresponsive bureaucracy; however, as we shall see, the reality is neither that simple nor that ominous.

Finally, career administrators play a pivotal role in maintaining an appropriate balance among the general governments, special district governments, and the for-profit and nonprofit sectors within American communities. Career administrators manage these boundaries on a daily basis; those in charge of making any alterations to these boundaries must work to meet the expectations of participants. In doing so, it is incumbent upon these public officials to understand the rationale underlying each sector and how the work in each sector can be harnessed to serve the larger good of the community.

The Role of Public Service in a Democratic Republic

For the reasons outlined above, career public servants play an integral part in the governing process, rather than just acting as subservient clerks who merely carry out the wishes of one superior or another. As we will review in greater detail in chapter 5, this latter “instrumental” view was popularized by the academic field of public administration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scholars and reformers articulated this instrumental approach as a politically expedient solution to a vexing problem: how to reduce partisan meddling and influence that tended to corrupt and distort governmental operations, while preserving democratic principles of governance. The solution offered by early reformers was to create a public service that possessed technical and scientific expertise for carrying out the wishes of the people as expressed through elected policy-makers. They thereby redefined public service as a politically neutral and responsive field of administration that is largely confined to the executive branch. This view was based on the theory that administration involves questions of how to get things done, while politicians determine what things should be done.

This simple formula enabled administrative theorists to conceive of administrative practice as a neutral, independent field of scientific and technical study that could be applied universally to all organizations, whether private or public, and regardless of culture or context. This instrumental, executive-based theory of administration has undergone a variety of permutations of varying sophistication over succeeding generations, and remains influential among many scholars, politicians and career public servants today. We view this approach as wholly inadequate for explaining the role of the public service in American government, and in many ways distortive of what really happens in the governing process.

The approach we take in this book treats public service and administration as a “sublimated” political process. An insightful scholar of the field, Herbert Storing (1965, 48), once observed that, “Age-old political and constitutional problems now present themselves as problems of (or in) public administration.” By this he meant that the founding fathers designed a constitutional system that would hold conflicting principles in irresolvable tensions, and thus force public servants at all levels (even street level) to cope with them in the ongoing administration of government. In the design process, the founding fathers left many broad political and constitutional questions unanswered, in part because they could not agree among themselves about the “right” answers. For example, even though all of them “believed in the importance of attracting the best individuals to public office, they failed to establish any mechanisms ensuring that this would happen on a consistent basis” (Morgan et al., 2010, 631, paraphrasing Storing, 1981a, 73). They also differed in their views of proper representation of the people by public officials, and the role that the people themselves should play in public policy and administration. They differed vehemently over the respective powers and roles of the states versus the national government, as well as over the extent of powers held by any one branch of government. They left these and other important disagreements (to be discussed in subsequent chapters) unresolved for future generations to cope with as they saw fit for their times.

Their disagreements also extended to the kinds of policies governments should pursue on behalf of the people, and which levels of government should be responsible for designing and/or implementing them. For example, the Anti-Federalists strongly opposed establishment of a “standing” or professional army, preferring instead to conduct defense exclusively through state militias. And their attitude toward the national government in general was that it should be small and unambitious, except in how it catered to the interests of the states. Federalists, on the other hand, wanted the new national government to play an aggressive role in economic and military policy. This was especially true of Alexander Hamilton who, as Secretary of the Treasury and the nation’s premier bureaucrat, pressed for robust developmental and regulatory policies to spur the formation of a complex national political economy that would be protected by a strong army and navy. His proposals set off intense controversies, which helped to polarize the founding generation about which powers should be exercised by state and national governments, and whether some of these powers and policies were even permissible under the new Constitution. While they were all committed to the idea of “limited government,” the meaning of this concept remained highly ambiguous and was therefore subject to intense dispute. These differences rapidly stimulated the formation of the nation’s first political parties—the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans—and, as we will see, their differences on these matters remain salient to this day. The founders shared a healthy respect for diverse opinions about what popular government most needed in order to be successful in securing the blessings of liberty. Toward that end, they shared a common belief in the need for balancing contending principles and interests. They subscribed to the Aristotelian view that regimes tend to fail from an excess of their virtues or dominant principles. Alexander Hamilton, for example, often advised that no matter how well-crafted and executed a given policy may be, it inevitably contained the seeds of its own excess and demise. Wise leaders should anticipate this tendency and build in precautions against abuse and excess whenever possible. The designers of our Constitution integrated such precautions through checks and balances that would force separate, superintending branches and levels of government to contend for, as well as cooperate in, control over the administrative machinery of government. Thus, they did not confine administration exclusively to the executive branch of government. Even Hamilton, one of the most ardent supporters of broad executive powers, acknowledged this in his definition of public administration in the seventy-second Federalist essay: “The administration of government, in its largest sense, comprehends all of the operations of the body politic, whether legislative, executive, or judiciary” (Federalist No. 72, 435). As we shall see, the founders instilled irresolvable tensions in three ways: by blending powers horizontally between the branches of government; by blending them vertically between levels of government; and by using the extended sphere of a large republic to encourage proliferation of factions or special interests that would help to prevent any one group from dominating the political system.

Our approach to public service and ...