Democracy, Public Administration, and Public Values in an Era of Estrangement

This essay examines the interplay and challenges of democracy, public administration, and public values in an era of estrangement. Of course, we are not the first in our field to confront these contemporary issues. Perhaps most notably, those who gathered at the first Minnowbrook conference 50 years ago charted a “new public administration” (Marini 1971) in response to widespread social and political upheaval. However, we believe our current circumstances, though similar in many respects, are also qualitatively different in others. Specifically, today we find ourselves not only in an era of estrangement characterized by growing public distrust, political polarization, and populism, but also in an increasing hollow administrative setting characterized by unprecedented levels of contracting across myriad policy domains. These issues not only threaten public values and political legitimacy, but also reinforce a narrowing of the field’s intellectual agenda. This raises a critical question: how can we protect, let alone advance, democracy, public administration, and public values when extensive indirect administration is coupled with pervasive anti-bureaucratic and anti-governmental sentiments?

In addressing this question, our effort is animated by concern about both the ideas and results that now guide our field and its relationship to its environment, particularly the political institutions in which public administration is embedded. We find ourselves echoing a concern Dwight Waldo (1952, 81) articulated almost 70 years ago: “If administration is indeed ‘the core of modern government,’ then a theory of democracy in the twentieth [now the twenty-first] century must embrace administration.” We would add that the inverse is also true: administration must explicitly embrace democracy. Finally, while our discussion is hardly exhaustive, we highlight the importance of public values, which illuminate the critical issues of the day and strengthen the salience of principled public decision-making about potential solutions. Moreover, a public values perspective offers a solid—and appropriate—foundation for the development of a robust intellectual agenda that can help public administration begin to tackle current challenges.

Our essay opens with a discussion about the connections between democracy and public administration. We then turn to an examination of the “hollow state” and its consequences for public values and political legitimacy. Finally, we present an agenda for the future intended to help the field better address the challenges of democracy, public administration, and public values in an era of estrangement.

Democratic Ideals and the Practice of Public Administration

All governments—monarchies, oligarchies, democracies—have a system of public administration on which a regime depends for the execution of policy and the management of daily affairs. Of course, the strength, efficacy, and performance of those administrative systems vary tremendously. Although public administration exists in every form of government, it occupies a special place in democracies. Democracy and public administration are mutually supportive, as each depends on the other for its realization. Democratic systems rely on public bureaucracies for effective delivery and implementation of nearly all services and policies, not to mention maintenance and operation of electoral systems. In turn, those bureaucracies have an inherently democratic mission and must rely on support from citizens and institutions of government for their viability.

Many public administration scholars cut their teeth on Paul Appleby (1945), Dwight Waldo (1948), and Frederick Mosher (1968), who provided the intellectual roots for the relationship between democracy and public administration in the post-World War II era. Since these mid-century efforts, the connection and importance of public administration to democracy has become broadly accepted among the democracies of the world, and scholars have made strides in understanding the dynamics underlying the realization of democracy. For example, in his exploration of theories of social choice and democracy, Riker (1982) contends that participation, liberty, and equality are necessary to make voting, the central mechanism of democracy, work. He also argues that these three elements (like democracy itself) are both ideals and methods—they are core public values and they are operational procedures. Similarly, Drèze and Sen (2002, 6) argue that democratic ideals such as “freedom of expression, participation of the people in deciding on the factors governing their lives, public accountability of leaders, and an equitable distribution of power” can only be realized when functional democratic institutions create and sustain and democratic practices; that is, “while democratic institutions provide opportunities for achieving democratic ideals, how these opportunities are realized is a matter of democratic practice.”

Despite widespread acceptance of the idea that effective, efficient, equitable, accountable, and responsive public administration is a primary intermediary in realizing the promise of democracy, too much of the public administration literature still works “the old boundary line between politics and administration” and does not “emphasize new and different lines” that would advance a theory of democracy and public administration (Waldo 1952, 96). As a result, scholars have relatively little understanding about how the dynamic forces of public administration enable or constrain democratic values, institutions, and practices or about how democracy plays out through the administrative apparatus of the state (Hummel 2008; Ventriss 2010). Moreover, while scholars accept that democracy and public administration have a reciprocal and reinforcing relationship, they have not widely studied what happens when the link between democracy and public administration is under pressure. And, democracy is under pressure (Bartels 2016; Hudson 2012; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Mounk 2018).

While criticisms of government functioning can be found throughout history, geography, and political systems, something new is afoot in the United States and in other democracies around the world. Public administration, like many American democratic institutions, is currently under assault by elected officials and political movements. The disdain of some politicians for the “deep state,” as well as for courts, Congress, the free press, and other democratic institutions, has begun to erode the “checks and balances” required in the American political system—a balance in which public administration is deeply embedded.

Also problematic is the rise of populism, the worldwide phenomenon with adherents outside of conventional left–right politics. Populism is opposed to experts, bureaucrats, elites, and universal values, especially human rights. Bret Stephens (2019) captured it well in a recent column:

The common thread [is] … contempt for the ideology of them before us: of the immigrant before the native-born; of the global or transnational interest before the national or local one; of racial or ethnic or sexual minorities before the majority; of the transgressive before the normal. It’s a revolt against the people who say: Pay an immediate and visible price for a long-term and invisible good. It’s hatred of those who think they can define that good, while expecting someone else to pay for it.

Together, these and other pressures have led to pervasive public distrust and persistent political polarization in the United States and in other democracies. This era of estrangement has produced a numbing cynicism that is tearing at the very fabric of democratic discourse and public decision-making (Mounk 2018). In the following sections, we explore how the hollow state exacerbates this estrangement, particularly in terms of its impacts on public values and political legitimacy.

Public Values and Legitimacy in the Hollow State

Under the best circumstances, this era of estrangement would be problematic; however, the challenge and its consequences are amplified given the pervasiveness of indirect administration in government. The metaphor of the “hollow state,” which refers to the contracting of third parties—be they private companies or nonprofit organizations—to provide a governmental good or service and act in the name of the state, captures the phenomenon well (Milward and Provan 2000, 2003). Indirect administration, coupled with the inability to hire the numbers of people who have the proper skills necessary to oversee these contracts, has important implications for public values and political legitimacy. This is particularly true given substantial evidence that the instruments of public administration and governance—including contracting—are outrunning the ability of governments to control them (e.g., Mettler 2011, 2018; Milward 2016; Milward and Provan 2003; Morgan and Campbell 2011; Perry 2020; Stanger 2009).

While contracts for public services have been an integral part of the American federal government since the beginning of the Republic (and part of other governments for thousands of years), the extent and volume of contracting today has reached unprecedented levels. Moreover, definitions of “inherently governmental” services are necessarily subjective, and it seems there is little left in that category (O’Carroll 2017). Paul Light (2020) finds that although federal employment today stands at about 2,000,000 employees, the same as in 1952, the contract workforce has grown to over 5,000,000. With Medicare and Medicaid, 2% of the federal workforce is responsible for 20% of federal spending (Kettl 2020). In hollow areas such as mental health, a state like Arizona may write a $300,000,000 check to a private firm to handle services for a county of 1,000,000 people with no government officials involved in program implementation.

The ubiquity of contracting may obfuscate and hinder the realization of public values, which underscore macro-societal issues of enduring civic relevance and strengthen the salience of principled public decision-making. While recognizing they are an inherently a fuzzy concept (Rutgers 2015; van der Wal, Nabatchi, and de Graaf 2015), we define public values as those values that provide “normative consensus about (a) the rights, benefits, and prerogatives to which citizens should (and should not) be entitled; (b) the obligations of citizens to society, the state, and one another; and (c) the principles on which governments and policies should be based” (Bozeman 2007, 13). Thus, public values include, among others, transparency, accountability, honesty, and due process. Furthermore, we accept that public values can be categorized in many different ways, including for example, as professional, ethical, democratic, and human values (e.g., Kernaghan 2003; Molina and McKeowan 2012) or as democratic/political, constitutional/legal, organizational, and market (e.g., Nabatchi 2018).

Among other challenges, the encroachment of revenue-seeking entities into public service delivery clearly taints the decisions made by elected officials and administrators (Chavkin 2013). In turn, the public values that should drive much of government and program administration increasingly are subsumed by managerialism and profit-seeking (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011). For example, in some states, private companies provide probation services that are funded entirely by fees levied on probationers. The consequences of nonpayment can include incarceration, perhaps in privately owned or operated jails/prisons (Katzenstein and Waller 2015). Even nonprofits, which are typically underpaid in government contracts, increasingly must turn to revenue prioritization to protect their interests and honor their missions (Romzek and Johnston 2005). At best, the private and nonprofit organizations that work for and (maybe) share broad goals with government reshape public values, though probably not in ways as closely attuned to the legal and Constitutional perspectives expected from public servants. At worst, those organizations replace public values and the focus on the “public” with an emphasis on market values and benefits to private shareholders. Despite these issues, opposition to contracting is seen by many as bureaucratic or union self-protection.

The diluted emphasis on the “public” and on democratic and Constitutional values raises fundamental challenges for the legitimacy of public administration. Political legitimacy, widely considered to be a basic condition for governing, is acceptance by the “public” of a ruling authority and/or a governing system. In a democracy, political legitimacy derives from the people—from popular consent and from popular perceptions that government abides by democratic principles, is accountable to its people, and effectively addresses public problems (Bozeman 2007; Nabatchi 2018). For American public administration, notions of the “public” are further shaped by the Constitution and our particular democratic and legal systems. This focus on citizens helps legitimize the American bureaucracy and its public servants.

The relationship between citizen and public servant plays out every day, through encounters in public education, transportation, regulation, and beyond. In many, if not most instances, these are positive experiences that connect citizens directly with representatives of their government (Goodsell 2015). Fundamental to contemporary public administration is the reality that citizens increasingly will not interact with public servants, but rather will engage with actors who are not in government, but instead are responsible and accountable to organizations working for government. As the gap between citizen and public servant widens, so too do the challenges for public administration. Next, we chart a path forward—one that will help us meet the vexing challenges before us and help advance and strengthen the links among democracy, public administration, and public values.

A Path Forward

Given what we have written in this essay, we pose a final—but not so simple—question: Where do we go from here in gaining a better understanding of democracy, public administration, and public values in this era of estrangement? We offer a robust intellectual agenda that includes suggestions in three broad areas—scholarship, connections to practice and the public, and education.

Scholarship

The field needs to cultivate scholarly inquiry that highlights public values, their trade-offs, and their bearing on public actions, examines the role of public participation in identifying public values and generating better policy and outcomes, and uses multi-level analyses and methodological pluralism. First, it is imperative that the field of public administration increase its knowledge base about public values, particularly to develop a shared understanding of what they are and how to measure them. Recent scholarship has spawned a variety of perspectives, emphases, and terms concerning public values (Bryson, Crosby, and Bloomberg 2014, 2015; Nabatchi 2018). The different perspectives seldom intersect and have left large parts of the scholarly and professional communities reluctant to engage the topic and confused about meanings and direction (Fukumoto and Bozeman 2018). We have no easy remedy to bridge and synthesize the competing intellectual traditions, but we believe they need to come together for the field to make progress. While a “shared understanding” of the construct has not flowed from research to date, developing agreement might provide a foundation for progress and also begin to ameliorate the estrangement we discuss above.

We also need to generate a reflective attentiveness to the identification of the (un)intended and (in)direct impact of policy outcomes, as well as to the normative and empirical consequences of policy and public (in)action. Consideration of public values can broaden our scholarly inquiry to consequential societal issues such as climate change, income mobility and wealth inequality, individual privacy and social media, the changing role of the state, the advancement of technologies, and the growing distrust of public institutions, to name but a few. And should not these issues gain at least a modicum of attention from the field of public affairs? David Ellwood, former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, has argued that policy schools ought to address such challenging problems as “climate change, budget problems, terrorism, demography, extremism and partisanship” because it is “our job to fix these things” (cited in Pierson and Riley 2013). We agree. Many public affairs schools and scholars are addressing these problems at least to some extent; however, we would like to see more attention given to these and other substantive issues, particularly in terms of how they connect to public values.

Second, a growing body of empirical evidence supports the long-articulated claims that public participation, and particularly deliberative participation, can help generate understanding about the public values at play for a given issue and thus lead to better policy decisions, actions, and outcomes (e.g., Nabatchi, Gastil, Weiksner, and Leighninger 2012). Of course, participatory processes vary widely, and we are only beginning to understand the connections among participatory designs and outcomes (Nabatchi 2012). More work is needed to understand where, when, why, and how various designs are most likely to produce an understanding of public values and yield benefits for governance and society. Such work will help us more critically examine the politics-administration-public interface, and stop thinking of public administration as a technocratic and instrumental field that is separate from politics. In turn, this will help us advance legitimacy and public values, and ultimately help mitigate estrangement.

Finally, we need multi-level analyses and methodological pluralism that incorporates historical, empirical, legal, institutional, and economic approaches into social inquiry to better account for the impact of environmental factors on public administration and democratic institutions (Bozeman and Moulton 2011; Rutgers 2015; Ventriss 2000, 2010). This is not necessarily an argument to rejoin political science, but rather recognition that estrangement of public administration from governance institutions is a complex phenomenon that demands research schemes public administration is unaccustomed to using. Research should incorporate several levels of analysis, ranging from systems to institutions and operations to individuals, and employ a variety of methodological approaches. Fortunately, we have several multi-level frameworks that could provide the analytic foundation for what we propose. Two frameworks, the institutional analysis and development framework (IAD) championed by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom (Kiser and Ostrom 1982; Ostrom 1990) and the new logic for governance research model proposed by Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill (2001), reflect both the letter and spirit of our proposal.

Connecting to Practice and the Public

Public administration scholars and practitioners have a responsibility to tightly tie the field to public values by articulating them clearly and integrating them into practice. This can be done through a focus on professionalism and participatory practices. A natural way for public administration to develop closer connections with public values in research and practice is to more closely situate the academic field with professional practice. For example, an inspection of the International City/County Management (ICMA) Code of Ethics quickly brings the reader into contact with many of the values and concepts we bemoan as absent from the academic field today, including for example: democratic government, honor and integrity in all public and personal relationships, serving the best interests of the people, and handling all personnel matters on the basis of merit. Although the ICMA Code of Ethics uses many of the terms we invoke in this essay, relatively little research has investigated either the efficacy of the code or the difference it makes in communities where it governs the behavior of the city manager.

Studying city managers and, more generally, professions across public service could be a way for public administration to reduce the estrangement we discuss above. Ironically, although the field has made little progress in developing professionalism, our professional degree, the MPA, has flourished both in the United States and globally. Moreover, the champion of the first Minnowbrook Conference, Dwight Waldo (1968), proposed that public administration adopt a professional perspective as a way to address its identity crisis. Of course, we are a long way from when Waldo proposed this, and now we must account for both government and contracted employees. Still, public administration can embrace public service professionalism as a means for joining the instrumental (how things are done) and normative (determining what must be done) dimensions of public service (Perry 2018), thereby reducing, or at least trying to reduce, the estrangement between the field and its political context. Research related to professionalism (Perry 2018) could go a long way toward contextualizing and advancing public values research, and better connecting public administration to research on regime legitimacy.

Another reason for embracing the study and practice of professions in public service is the turn that professions collectively have taken toward technical or expert professionalism in the decades since Waldo’s (1968, 10) exhortation that public administration “…act as a profession without actually being one.” If ever there were a time to better understand social trustee professionalism (Brint 1994), a view of professionalism that subordinates expertise to core public values and ethics, it is now. When governance abandons a significant portion of the public value set, public administration scholars and practitioners have a responsibility, whenever possible, to call out the deviations and recommend corrections. Stronger grounding in and understanding of the public values and values conflicts professionals confront is one way to legitimately surface contemporary concerns. Similarly, greater awareness of the professions and their roles in public services and public life is at least a first step in remedying the hollowing of government and the marginalization of citizens which we pointed out earlier in this essay (Perry 2007).

Public administration must also work to identify processes and mechanisms that maximize the likelihood for an organized, collective will capable of addressing and resolving macro-societal issues of public relevance. As suggested above, this requires an understanding of publicness, public values, and professionalism, but it will also require robust and rich interactions with the public that center on public preferences, goals, and values as they pertain to inherently complex choices and trade-offs (Fung 2015; Nabatchi 2010, 2012). Direct public participation is part and parcel of democracy—it is both a democratic ideal and democratic method (Riker 1982; see also Nabatchi 2018). Most democratic theory centers on voting, a method of indirect participation in representative democracy. A theory of democratic administration, however, will need to include other, more direct pathways of participation through which the public can engage with agency administrators, as well as with third party actors working on behalf of the state (e.g., see Nabatchi et al. 2012; Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015).

Education

Building a strong cadre of public administrators is another defense against estrangement. In 2009, the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (now the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration, NASPAA), proclaimed that public service values are “at the heart of the profession [of public administration]” (NASPAA 2009, 4). However, while public values are central to the field, we must ask: do traditional approaches to professional pedagogy, knowledge, and practice constrain our policy perspectives and the questions we ask? That is, regardless of the normative clothing in which we wrap ourselves, do we limit ourselves to approaches that are consonant with the “application of research-based knowledge to the solution of problems of instrumental choice” (Schon 2001, 186)? Donald Schon (2001) alerts—indeed warns—us that a strong adherence to instrumental choice and technical rationality may distract attention from broader societal issues that warrant serious examination and ultimately push the field toward a narrow—if not intellectually pedestrian—focus.

Schon’s caution is predicated on the notion that through the appropriate application of managerial knowledge and analysis, a public administrator can improve the efficacy of many, if not most, social programs, and therefore resolve pressing societal issues (Adams and Balfour 2008; Stivers 2010; Ventriss 1991, 2010). Whether this belief has merit, of course, is debatable. Yet one could still argue that even though substantive topics such as the role and meaning of citizenship and other related normative issues have received copious attention in recent decades, these noble endeavors have played an ancillary role educating future professionals in comparison to the technical and managerialist matters that have proliferated in the wake of the New Public Management movement (Adams and Balfour 2008, 2010; Roberts 2018; Ventriss 1991).

To be sure, educating professionals for public service requires knowledge of policy analysis, management, budgeting, and other technical matters. Although technical and managerial knowledge is vital to public administration, one easily can argue that we have inadvertently narrowed the moral syntax of public affairs (and the issues considered central to the field) by fixating on problems of instrumental choice and technocratic rationality. For example, proposed revisions to NASPAA public service master’s degree accreditation standards emphasize student competencies in the use of “disruptive, emergent” technologies and nonprofit management, but do not once mention “democracy” or “constitution” (NASPAA 2019).

This predilection for instrumental choice and technocratic rationality is part of an intellectual, professional, and research trajectory that became particularly pronounced in the late 1970s and early 1980s but still resonates widely today (Goggin 1984). During this time, a public philosophy started to emerge that emphasized economic individualism, administrative efficiency, the role of markets, and measuring governmental performance. This perspective reflects an underlying procedural rationality that analyzes societal problems primarily through the cognitive lens of managerial expertise and market values (cf. Goggin 1984, see also Adams and Balfour 2008; Box 2005, 2008; Ramos 1981; Ventriss 2000).

Countering this perspective—at least in part—is Bozeman’s (2007) pragmatic formulation of public values, which questions public affair’s proclivity for market values and economic individualism and reiterates the critical importance of “normative publicness.” This view suggests that public administration is more than a utilitarian enterprise; public managers and policy analysts occupy a fiduciary purpose and role in a constitutional and/or in a democratic system, which mandates they uphold a greater variety of public values than just managerial and market ones (e.g., Bozeman 2007; Moore 2013; Turkel and Turkel 2016; see also Bryson, Crosby, and Bloomberg 2014, 2015).

The challenge for public service education is how to balance, or at least temper, the broader utilitarian market mind-set that continues to run especially deep in the political and economic veins of advanced industrial societies, most notably in the United States (Bozeman 2007; Sandel 2012). This utilitarian ethos reinforces the notion that most, or at least many, of the problems we face in society are technical problems that can be addressed with appropriate administrative analyses and market-oriented techniques (Sandel 1996, 265; see also Ramos 1981). Of course, this is not to negate the important role that managerial expertise and market values play in public affairs; rather, it is to remind us that terms like efficiency and economy, consciously or unconsciously, inculcate a certain kind of reasoning in our scholarly and public discourse, particularly in the way we—in our professional role—relate to the public, view contemporary public issues, and ask questions. Thus, we must educate our students not just to understand, but also to uphold and advance broad sets of public values, including—importantly—democratic, constitutional, and legal values, especially in situations when those values are hardest to realize.

Conclusion

In this essay, we explored the intersections of democracy, public administration, and public values in our current era of estrangement. Such issues have, of course, been confronted at other points in history, perhaps most notably among those who gathered 50 years ago at the first Minnowbrook Conference. Like theirs, our concerns and arguments emerge directly from our current state of affairs. Specifically, we believe that a rising tide of public distrust, political polarization, and populism threaten to erode the democratic foundations of public administration. We assert that this problem is exacerbated by the “hollowing of the state” through contracting. The penchant for contracting—which emerged, at least in part, from New Public Management and its emphasis on technocratic and instrumental rationality—has made it especially difficult to implement and enforce public values. While contracting and New Public Management may have generated some efficiency gains in government, the emphasis on market values and strategies seems to have crowded out public administration’s concern with and for other public values and the public it serves. This has undercut political legitimacy and undermined the substantive relationship between the agency and the public it serves (Kettl 2020). It unwittingly has reinforced a professional ethos that views societal issues as primarily technical, administrative problems. Thus, its influence, together with the increased focus on “science,” has not only diverted the field’s scholarly attention from the most critical issues of the day (Adams and Balfour 2008; Schon 2001), but also muted its voice on them.

Without striking chords of hyperbole, this era of estrangement endangers the core of public administration. The estrangement has diminished the sense of “publicness” in public administration at precisely the moment when it is perhaps most important to sustaining democratic ideals, practices, and institutions. For this reason alone, not to mention for other policy-directed purposes, such as reducing income inequality, mitigating climate change, and reforming injustice in our corrections system, public administration must use its voice to speak to public values and to the public itself. However, many formidable forces are likely to be arrayed against strengthening public administration, filling the hollow state, and reinforcing the links between democracy, public administration, and public values, including, for example, regulated industries, industries with large volumes of contracts, and political coalitions on the right and left. They will not yield easily, and yet we cannot divorce public administration from politics. Instead, public administration must actively respond to this estrangement and seek to repair and strengthen the links between democracy, public administration, and public values through scholarship, connections to practice and the public, and education.

References