The Next Public Administration

Debates and Dilemmas

B Guy Peters,Jon Pierre

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473993921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Asuntos públicos y administración

Written by two of the leading scholars in the field, this book explores public administration in the past, present and future, critically reviewing the modernization of public management reform. Itreasserts public administration as an integral component of democratic governance and fostering a state-citizen relationship.

Wide-ranging in scope, The Next Public Administration:

• Extends basic public administration to consider issues associated with management, governance and democracy
• Covers core public administration concepts and their evolution through time
• Draws on an international spread of examples, bringing theoretical discussions to life
• Includes lists of further reading

Essential reading for students of public management and public administration.

1 Public Administration in Democratic Governance

Few phenomena in public life are probably more misunderstood than public administration. It is customary to think of public administration, or public bureaucracies as they are often called, as rigid organizations more concerned with promoting their own interests than catering to the needs of their clients. The more extreme images of the bureaucracy tend to portray these public organizations as essentially exoskeletons of power and control, accountable to no one. Political rhetoric, fictional literature but also a surprising amount of academic work is replete with these images of public administration. These caricatures also serve political purposes. Parties and politicians on the political right advocating extensive tax cuts and cutbacks in the public service need to instill an image of an inefficient, costly and power-minded bureaucracy to sustain their claim that taxes can be cut dramatically without any noticeable difference to the rest of society. And parties of the political left have criticized public administration for being insensitive to the needs of the disadvantaged in society.

Yet these public institutions organize public transport in cities, manage service facilities for children and the elderly, provide emergency rescue services, maintain infrastructure, and help ensure safety and security to citizens. They are charged with the fundamental task of implementing public policy and upholding legal authority. To be sure, it is difficult to think of any significant public service that is not delivered by the public bureaucracy or a private contractor working for the bureaucracy. Furthermore, while it is certainly true that administrative decisions can have a major impact on the lives of clients and citizens – from issuing a driver’s license to sentencing individuals to serve time in prison or having them deported – that administrative authority is conducted under supervision and accountability.

Given this centrality of the public administration in fundamental public affairs such as policy implementation and service delivery, at least in the Western democratic world, the public administration is integral to democratic governance. However, this perspective has been overlooked for a long time, with the public bureaucracy treated to a large extent as a system of organizations on its own. For instance, in the United States, public administration and political science have become different academic disciplines; an arrangement which has prevented many observers from observing the inherently political and democratic mission of the public bureaucracy. Many political scientists now do not appear to realize that most of the work of governing is done through public administrators.

It is also a mistake to think of the public bureaucracy as a rigid, self-referential system unable or unwilling to change and modernize. There are few, if any, areas of the public sector that have undergone more extensive reform over the past couple of decades than the public administration. Public organizations have to a significant extent increased their efficiency in delivering service and to operate in closer contact with their clients. New models for measuring the performance of the bureaucracy have been developed and are today an essential instrument in the management of most public organizations. Managers have been given greater autonomy, allowing them to organize their work in an efficient and professional way. Basically all major systems in the public administration, from human resource management to budgeting and accounting, have been thoroughly modernized over the past several years.

It is fair to say that public administration scholars in general tend to be closer to their object of study than are most other political scientists or economists. The linkages between academia and public administration have historically been strong. The positive aspect of this close relationship between practitioners and scholars is that research is more likely to be relevant to practice. The main downside of this arrangement is that research may become atheoretical and mainly concerned with documenting and studying practice without wider reflection or theoretical criteria for assessment (see Bogason and Brans, 2008; Peters and Pierre, 2016). There are also examples of the opposite pattern, where we can see students of public administration deliberately removing themselves from administrative practice in order to apply abstract deductive theory. Strange as it perhaps might seem, building theory means that you have to remove context and formulate more general statements about how, in this case, public administration behaves and what might account for that behavior. What is gained in terms of generalizations is lost in the lack of attention to detail.

Public administration has for long suffered from being undertheorized. Dwight Waldo once described public administration as a ‘subject matter in search of a discipline’ (1968: 2), an observation that remains relevant to date. There are both positive and negative aspects of this state of affairs. The positive aspect is that an explicitly multidisciplinary research area draws on theories from a multitude of academic disciplines. The main downside is that, paradoxically, this multitude of relevant theories has led many scholars in the field of public administration away from theory altogether. There is a disturbing tendency among some public administration scholars to avoid complex theoretical or normative issues and instead rely on administrative practice as a yardstick of research quality. Instead the philosophy seems to be that as long as practitioners recognize their work in the analyses presented by scholars, this is proof of the quality of the research. Instead of deriving benchmarks and criteria for assessment from theory and investigating the degree to which practice meets those criteria, such a strategy of research runs a real risk of elevating practice to standard or even to ideals.

It is equally erroneous to think that one can gain an understanding of a public organization, or any organization, for that matter, without having at least some interaction with that organization. Although the organizations that make up a public bureaucracy operate under similar rules and management philosophies, they differ in many other respects, which means that understanding any individual organization cannot be achieved only through observations at the systemic level. We insist that public administration can and should serve both academic and practice-oriented interests and that indeed it is not possible to deliver good-quality public administration without considering both the theoretical aspects as well as the practice of public administration. Part of the reason why many scholars choose not to address conceptual and theoretical issues is that public administration is by definition a multidisciplinary area of research. Some scholars have made great efforts in separating the study of public administration from other social science disciplines. This has particularly been the case in the United States, where public administration is its own academic discipline. Meanwhile others have emphasized the close relationship to disciplines such as sociology, organization theory, economics and political science. Thus, there is no single core of defining theories in public administration.

Again, we argue that close dialogue between the study and the practice of public administration is central to the development of both. Scholars of administration cannot come up with meaningful research questions without engaging practitioners – indeed, most universities today strongly emphasize engagement as a key activity for its academic staff – and practitioners often lack the national and international overview required to design effective reform or devise models for evaluating the organization’s performance. Scholars also have a role in stepping back from the object they study; in deriving yardsticks and benchmarks from conceptual and theoretical analysis; and in applying that framework to empirical cases. We need to understand public administration through a variety of analytic perspectives. This enables us to both understand the institutions involved in delivering public services and to evaluate its performance.

This book offers an advanced introduction to public administration as a field of practice and as a research field. Throughout the book we will be pursuing the argument that public administration matters a great deal, in several different ways. The institutions and people that make up the public bureaucracy are essential to policy implementation – often also policy advice – and are thus key components of democratic government and governance. Furthermore, while we as voters have an opportunity to communicate our views and opinions to the political elite only on election day, we do in fact have almost daily interactions with the public administration and may be able to influence the services we are offered by engaging the producers of that service directly instead of going via political channels. Public administration is thus the key linkage between the state and society. The public bureaucracy channels information upward from clients into the public sector and maintains continuing contact with the public as they administer government programs.

Central to government, democracy and society as these roles of the public administration are, a noticeable development over the past 20–25 years has been the denigration of public administration in public discourse and the elevation of ‘public management’ as the preferred way to think about the public sector. The architects of administrative reform lost interest in many of the conventional roles of public administration, such as upholding due process or ensuring legality, transparency and accountability. Instead, they focused on efficiency and the creation of competition in public service delivery. There was certainly merit in focusing on cost-cutting and efficiency issues although, we suggest, the reform agenda that was pursued during the 1990s and early years of this millennium came at a price: core aspects of public administration and its role in governance were ignored (Frederickson, 2005). It is intriguing to note that important elements of so-called ‘post-NPM’ or neo-Weberianism can be seen as proof of a growing awareness of these problems (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011).

We have also had similar comments from practitioners over the years. Public management reform involves middle and senior levels of public organizations and has shifted attention across organizations towards productivity issues and measurements. Meanwhile, large numbers of public bureaucrats still find that their workday is dominated by issues related to more conventional public administration tasks. The shift in scholarly attention from public administration to public management is thus more than a fad or a modernization of an academic discipline; it has meant a redefinition of the reform and research agenda related to public sector organizations. One important mission of the present book is to reintroduce public administration both to practitioners and to our fellow scholars and students of public sector organizations. The book will discuss these and many other aspects of public administration in detail. Each of the chapters ahead will address a dichotomy or a dilemma in public administration, for instance the tension between neutrality and responsiveness; or between autonomy and integration; or between authority and democracy. These dilemmas continue to shape how public administrative systems around the world are designed and operate.

Rediscovering Public Administration

Some 200 years ago, Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that ‘the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration’ (1788, quoted in Pierre, 2013b). There is very little to suggest that this statement is not as relevant today as it was then. In fact, recent research efforts on good governance or the ‘quality of government’ typically emphasize the critical role of public administration in building institutional trust and legitimacy for the political system (Rothstein and Teorell, 2008) and that, indeed, the quality of public administration is more important in these respects than the degree to which that system allows for effective political representation and accountability (Gilley, 2009; Rothstein, 2009; Peters, 2010a). A host of literature substantiates the integral role of public administration, both in developed countries and in the developing world, in producing effective and legitimate governance (Doornbos, 2004). Public administration is essential to all aspects of good government and democratic governance (Suleiman, 2003).

Let us first go through a few definitions. A baseline definition of public administration is that it refers to those organizational structures of the public sector that are charged with service delivery, law enforcement and due administrative processes. This means that we usually do not think of state-owned companies such as public service radio and television companies or public utility companies as part of the public administration; nor do we include private contractors in public administration. Public administration refers both to particular organizational structures in the public sector charged with specific tasks that we associate with the state and governing and also to formalized processes of making decisions pertaining to clients. The former category, which relates to clients at the aggregate level, typically includes policy implementation. The latter meaning of public administration applies to due process deliberations and rulings on matters related to individual clients.

We should, however, also think of public administration as a fundamental function of governing; indeed, it is difficult to think of democratic government without a professional public administration. The public bureaucracy delivers a range of tasks that are essential to governing, from tax collection and law enforcement to providing policy advice to politicians and facilitating different exchanges between clients and public officials. This means that public administration is much more than an institutional system created to deliver public service or enforce the law; as pointed out earlier, it is integral to democratic governance. Following Alexander Hamilton, we would argue that the quality of public administration tells us much about the quality of democracy in any given country. A high-performing professional public bureaucracy enhances the quality of policy implementation and increases clients’ trust in the bureaucracy, thus reducing transaction costs. By the same logic, a public bureaucracy plagued by corruption and a lack of institutional integrity in relation to policymakers and society will be detrimental not just to public service delivery but to democratic governance more broadly.

To sum up so far, public administration refers to organizational structures; to processes of deliberation and decision-making; and also to an actor or an interface connecting the citizenry with their political leaders. Perhaps most importantly, while elections are essential in deciding which party or parties should govern a country and its agenda, the public bureaucracy provides citizens with daily exchanges with the state and is therefore essential in shaping citizens’ perception of government (see, for instance, Nilsson, 2004).

Public administration and its intellectual neighbors

Having provided a baseline definition of public administration, we can now delineate this somewhat nebulous phenomenon in relation to close yet significantly different phenomena such as governance and public management. We discussed the role of public administration in governance in some detail earlier. The governance role of public administration is today beyond controversy among students in the public administration field. Just a few decades ago, however, there was more emphasis on the apolitical nature of the bureaucracy and the formal–legal nature of its deliberation and service delivery (see Peters, 2009). That perspective ultimately harked back to the Weberian and Wilsonian dichotomy between politics and administration, and the importance of keeping these spheres of government separate. Today, however, there is recognition that the public administration is indeed part of the policy process and an important link between state and society.

The relationship between public administration and public management is perhaps less obvious. Indeed, despite several fundamental differences, public management became, in many ways, used synonymously to public administration during the 1990s and early 2000s, as part of the New Public Management (NPM) reform campaign that swept across the Western world and beyond. The essence of NPM was, as the name suggests, a focus on management; the objective was to cut costs in public service delivery and to empower its clients, or customers, by providing choice among competing service providers (see Kettl, 1997; Peters, 2001). We will return to these issues later in this chapter. For now, we note that public management is primarily concerned with reforming public organizations in such a way that they become more cost-efficient. With such efficiency as the key driver of reform, conventional norms in public administration such as due process, equal treatment and accountability came under attack.

The public management ‘turn’ meant a reprioritization of the goals of public administration, with all that entails in terms of changing roles, decision-making processes and command lines. That having been said, we see management issues as subordinate to the bigger issues about the role of public administration in governing. Such a perspective suggests that management reform should be assessed not just in terms of its expected effects on costs or efficiency but also, and primarily, in terms of the degree to which is contributes to the core mission of public administration. Here, as we will see later, opinions tend to differ significantly as some argue that NPM reform has made a major contribution to democratic governance since it empowers citizens as customers, whereas critics maintain that political responsiveness and accountability have been damaged by reform.

Thus, in our view, governance, public administration and public management are essentially a set of matryoshka dolls, with public management being a subsection of public administration, which, in turn, is a subsection of governance. Attempting to understand any level of this nesting of institutions and practices without understanding their context is likely to lead to significant er...