Public Administration

Research Strategies, Concepts, and Methods

B Guy Peters, Tero Erkkilä, Patrick von Maravić

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317369578
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoria: Política

Public Administration: Research Strategies, Concepts, and Methods explores how scholars of public administration and institutional politics can improve their analysis by focusing on the contextual particularities of their research problems and considering the use of multiple theories and methods. The book functions as an introduction to central themes of public administration and related traditions of research, but also proposes a new pluralist approach for studying public institutions.

Chapter 1

Power

Power is a central concept in the social sciences and is also central to the study of public administration. The common wisdom with bureaucratic power is that it lies at the top of hierarchy. In reality, there are also significant power resources at the hands of the street-level bureaucrats through their expertise and knowledge. Power is also entangled in administrative ideas, symbols, and framing of things. The various substantive chapters below all touch on various manifestations of power in the public sector, and this chapter will focus on the ways in which power can be used to understand the political and administrative dynamics of the public sector. Given that power is difficult to conceptualize, the dimensions of analysis above, along with the general logic of triangulation used throughout this book, will be used to illuminate the concept.

Power occupied the early political philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli (2003/1532), who famously gave cynical advices to rulers. Indeed, power often carries negative connotations and is seen as a synonym of coercion. But we would not be able to address complex and pressing issues, such as climate change, without the decisive use of power. Indeed, many generally applauded goals would be unattainable without it. Organizations are often seen to imply power (Clegg, Courpasson, and Phillips 2006). Bureaucracy in particularly is thought to possess power through formal rules and its ability to register and withhold information.

For Max Weber (1978) hierarchy was at the center of his classic characterization of legal-rational bureaucracy. The power position of bureaucracy was based on its expert knowledge and administrative secrecy that made even absolutist rulers dependent on it (991–994). One common misunderstanding of Weber’s work is his admiration of bureaucratic power. Though Weber defined the basic characteristics of bureaucracy, he was by no means an admirer of bureaucratic order. Instead, Weber claimed that the bureaucratic rule diminished the room for ethics, further distinguishing value rationality from instrumental rationality. Also importantly, Weber distinguished power and authority (Roth 1968, 194–197). Weber considered authority to be a special case of power, and legitimate authority a subtype. Karl Marx (1990/1867) discussed power in society from the perspective of class relations and organization of labor and the related antagonism. In subsequent years, Marxist analyses of power have argued that historical lineages of the state determine elite composition and regime types (Anderson 1993; Moore 1966).

The classic political scientific studies on power explore the composition and relations of power elite (Mills 1956a) and use of political power in an American town (Dahl 1961). There are also general attempts at defining the concept of power. Often cited classical texts are the analysis of the “two faces” of power by Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz (1962) as well as Steven Lukes’s (1974) “radical view” on power. These approaches have also been questioned and criticized, perhaps most notably by Michel Foucault (1977).¹

One of the many challenges in studying power is the difficulty to expose it—we assume power is there, but how do we know? This also links to the issue of causality, showing that power has an actual effect. Unlike Stanley Milgram’s (1974) controversial experiments in obedience, real life situations and research designs are likely to deal with far more subtle mechanisms of power than can be easily observed. In this chapter, power in public administration is analyzed with regards to power positions and competence, as well as technologies and ideas of governance and also symbolic power. Where appropriate, the chapter aims to summarize the relevant discussions elsewhere in the book regarding power.

Power as Hierarchy, Position, and Competence

From Hierarchy to New Forms of Governance

The power of public organizations is often attributed to their organizational form (see chapter on Structure). The classic bureaucracy is a power hierarchy, and the term hierarchy is often treated as a euphemism for power. The new forms of governance have changed this picture, causing several shifts of power from the point of view of the state: an upward shift granting international organizations more influence, a downward shift of decentralization, and an externalization of government activities to private and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (Pierre and Peters 2000, 77–91).

From the perspective of bureaucratic power these shifts are not easily analyzed. On the one hand, the reassessment of the role of state may have limited the power of national administrations, but on the other hand, the increasing complexity has granted more influence to civil servants, one may argue. While the domain of national politics has been significantly reduced, public administration is likely to have even more central role in transnational governance, where policy ideas and practices tend to diffuse from one context to another. Moreover, the role of international public organizations has also increased through globalization.

Scholars have also described governance as a network, where the power relations are even more complex and difficult to establish (Kickert et al. 1997). From the perspective of global governance the picture of sovereignty and accountability becomes even more multifaceted (Slaughter 2004). Often the identification of new power relations is linked to the attempts to bring about accountability. There is a perceivable shift from traditional types of accountability to new forms of control (Erkkilä 2007). Though the new means of controlling the government are often dismissive of hierarchies, it can also be argued that none of these new forms can be monitored as effectively (Mulgan 2003). Arguably, accountability is more explicit in hierarchies, where the power relations are more apparent.

On the other hand, one common misunderstanding of hierarchy is to assume that power always lies at the top. This is not necessarily the case, as there might be significant power at the bottom of organization that holds most of the information (Kaufman 1981, p. 2012; see also chapters on People and Decisions). Indeed, hierarchy is also a division of power, where individuals have influence over matters assigned to them. Bureaucratic power can also be seen to control, or at least be in conflict with, other types of power such as the traditionalist patrimonial power (Weber 1978). These conflicts are perhaps most evident in Latin American regimes with strong clientelistic foundations for politics but also with institutionalized bureaucracies.

The grand shifts in the role of state amid new governance forms and economic globalization have also emphasized the need to assess the new forms of governance for their power aspects. There are even systematic approaches to this. For instance, the Nordic countries have engaged in power studies, exploring the state of democracy in these countries (Götz 2010). Paradoxically, the emerging forms of public administration where power relations are less apparent are making the issue more pressing. Faced with the uncertainty of who has got power in contemporary governance, even politicians are keen to initialize major research projects to find out about this, as the Nordic experience shows.

Structural changes provide both a motivation and context for research on power in public administration. Sweden was seen to be shifting away from the “Swedish model,” characterized by a compromise between labor and capital, central planning, and public sector expansion. The main sources of uncertainty for the system were seen to stem from individualization and internationalization of politics and the power shifts involved (Petersson 1991). While the Danish and Norwegian power investigations both identify globalization as the biggest challenge for national politics and administration, they arrive at different conclusions, as the Danes are quite positive about the state of their democracy, but Norwegians assess theirs more negatively (Karvonen 2004). These countries bear great similarities and common institutional history, but they also have their differences, with Denmark having to share its power with the European Union and Norway undergoing power shifts due to its emerging oil economy. As Karvonen (2004, 426) concludes, the results of the above investigations largely reflect the expectations laid for domestic policy choices and their realism, leading one to see the glass as half full and the other as half empty.

Power in American politics is often said to lie with big business and, increasingly, with affluent contributors to political parties and election campaigns. These actors have been especially important in driving the agenda of American politics away from much of the rest of the world, by maintaining greater dependence on fossil fuels, denying anthropogenic climate change, and generally resisting internationalization of the American economy and society.

Civil Service as Power Elite

Defining an elite in a given society or situation is difficult and often dependent on the context of analysis. The characteristics of elite differ, and there is seldom a single elite to be identified, but rather several elites in different fields of social life, such as political, financial, bureaucratic, and cultural elites. Several analyses of power also involve the role of civil servants as members of elite.

Robert Dahl (1961) asked who “governs” in New Haven while Pierre Bourdieu’s (1989a) and Ezra Suleiman’s (1974) work on the French political-administrative elite—the “state nobility”—is also often mentioned as power studies. Civil servants can be seen to be members of elite with regards to their socioeconomic position, education, and expertise (see next section on experts). Yet the often suggested shifts to less hierarchical forms of governance are also apparent in the role of the administrative elite, making its power position less apparent as previously.

On the other hand, the new demands for output and performance have also introduced managerialism in the public sector, creating new elite positions with significant power resources: the public manager, auditors, and accountant (Pollitt 2003). And while the power elites of the past were mostly domestic (Mills 1956a), the transnational governance has created new forums and elite networks that are often significant in steering the policy work on national level (Marcussen 2000). Although more traditional signifiers of elite status still apply to civil servants (Aberbach and Rockman 2002), the elite status of civil servants at present increasingly is based on expertise.

Power and Expert Position

As discussed in the chapter on Roles, the role of civil servants has shifted toward experts who base their elite position on knowledge. This often involves transnational governance networks and forums of cooperation (Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2008; Mahon and McBride 2009). As members of these epistemic communities (Haas 1992), the civil servants gain influence as knowledge brokers. Also the loyalties of the civil servants might shift toward their peers in the expert networks, a potential issue for accountability.

As noted in the introduction to this book, ideas can be crucial for shaping decisions in bureaucracies. The policy ideas discussed are often subject to boundary work (Gieryn 1983), where the policy community is actively trying to establish a shared set of normative and causal beliefs. Civil servants are hence carriers of management ideas (Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall 2002). The ideas discussed in the policy sphere often differ from those discussed in public (Schmidt 2008).

Altogether, the ideas shared by the policy experts are often based on scientific knowledge and may shift according to paradigm changes. For example, transparency became first acknowledged as a key component of economic performance when the research on information asymmetries in markets reached a broadly acclaimed status among economists (Stiglitz 2002). This was later translated into policies on good governance, and transparency initiatives have since traveled around the globe (Bennett 1997; Erkkilä 2012). The power related to expert position is always closely tied to policy ideas and discourses that themselves are often seen as a source of power.

Technical expertise was already discussed by Weber (1978, 994), and expert knowledge was the source of power for bureaucracy and enterprise alike. Expertise is also often linked to the pejorative term technocracy, where power is transferred to nonelected technocrats often in the name of economic crisis or national security. Latin America is frequently named as a case where economists have had a major influence on politics (Montecinos and Markoff 2009), a region also known for autocratic regimes, military power, and ideational transfer from abroad (Borzutzky 2005). In the wake of the Eurozone crisis many indebted southern European countries have also seen the arrival of technocrats.

As will be discussed in the chapter on Change, individual actors are also influential in the process of institutional change. They may also prove significant in deciding the institutional outcome of a change process, where existing institutional forms may be recalibrated or outright reversed (Mahoney and Thelen 2009). From the perspective of institutional analysis the role of actors is important, but the picture needs to be complemented with institutional ideas that are involved in the process.

In his analysis of the developmental state Peter Evans (1995) discusses the state’s relations to society and economy as embedded autonomy, which also has national economic and democratic implications. These relations are not static but rather evolve over time and are also prone to structural changes such as economic crises. For instance, the post-2008 economic crisis has had an effect on the fiscal powers of states. Such steering tasks are in many ways central to contemporary public governance and also account for the rise of regulative bodies and expert organizations that complement traditional state administration. This regulative state framework stresses the broker position of states in controlling markets (Majone 1997), also implying that the power of policy instruments, ideas, and techniques can be combined effectively to produce effective governance. Interestingly, in many ways the United States with its presumably weak government was more effective in making these combinations than were European governments.

Power of Governance Techniques and Ideas

Information and Power

The modern state was built on technologies of governance such as cartography, census, and statistics (Sheehan 2006). A census allowed states to form armies and impose taxes on its citizens, and statistics as a tool of governance allowed new issues to be analyzed systematically (Desrosières 1998). Public statistics are often seen as a source of power that is difficult to challenge, and Weber (1978) saw quantification as one of the key elements of bureaucratic power and instrumental rationality.

Budgeting, and the expertise behind it, has been one of the traditional sources of administrative power. Today performance management and various budgeting tools are important sources of influence. Though these calculative methods are fundamentally similar to the previous techniques of government, it is noteworthy that it is now the public institutions that are exposed to these measurements. As accountability measures they have come to set limits to the activities of public sector. But it is at times difficult to see how citizens could hold these organizations accountable through their performance (Dubnick 2005).

On the other hand, performance management and auditing seems to be leading to hierarchization through reporting duties and the setting of performance goals. This process of creating both power and accountability is typical of public sector organizations. There is currently a shift in the accountability mechanisms that are making the civil service increasingly responsible for its own performance. There are clear indicators of such shifts, but to actually identify them and to be able to generalize we need to take a careful look at different public sector functions, types of public organizations, policy fields, as well as different countries. This also entails shifts in power, making the public administration subsumed to new means of control, but at the same time increasing the role and influence of public managers (see above the section on managerial power).

The current drive for evidence-based policy making—developing an empirical research foundation for making policy choices—has also shaped the power relations within governance. But information is seldom completely neutral, and knowledge production often has political elements to it. One essential question is who controls the “evidence” in evidence-based decision making. There are many issues that tend to fall into the shadow of expertise, so that only certain aspects of a policy problem become highlighted while other, potentially relevant issues are never discussed or measured.

E-government, meaning the use of the Internet and other electronic means to link citizens and governments, is often linked to network-type governance models, with various public organizations working seamlessly together. Paradoxically, e-government may also lead to increasing hierarchies and creating new ones (Starr 2010). The tools of government are rapidly changing in the digital era (Hood and Margetts 2007), and new issues concerning power are rising, for instance with regard to privacy (Newman and Bach 2004). On the other hand, public information is being reallocated due to the global spread of freedom of information laws (Bennett 1997). Transparency is a central concept for democratic accountability, but it also entails power aspects, allowing hierarchical control similar to performance management. Transparency creates shadows, in a sense, because it illuminates certain issues while other remain uncovered. Finally, transparency and good governance have also power aspects as policy initiatives. Their diffusion, adoption, and institutionalization is part of a paradigm shift that is often referred to as the “Washington consensus,” referring to its roots in development economics and the World Bank (Stiglitz 2008).

Institutional change is also relevant to power, as is apparent, for instance, in the discussion on policy convergence and isomorphism that according to Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell (1983) may even be coercive by nature, implying a power relation between those imposing the policy prescription and its receivers. The Meyerian world society analysis also fundamentally discusses the different power positions between the center and periphery with regard to the diffusion and adoption of global policy scripts (Meyer et al. 1997), though it does not explicitly address power. We will discuss these questions more in the chapter on Change.

Power, Ideas, and Discourses

The above accounts on expertise and institutionalization tie power to ideas and the knowledge-based processes of inclusion and exclusion that may be translated into power. Such an analysis of knowledge and power makes up the core of Foucault’s work (2002). Foucault did not assume that kno...