What Is The Public? A Pragmatic Analysis of a Core Concept in Public Administration

Abstract

The discipline of public administration has grappled with concepts regarding the public for well over a century. Scholars from public opinion, public choice, and public value(s) have analyzed myriad elements of administration related to the public. Scholars also have applied numerous concepts from philosophical pragmatism to public administration. However, detailed explorations of the fundamental concept of the public remain surprisingly sparse. The public remains eclipsed by administration. In this essay, I analyze the concept of the public focusing on the works of John Dewey. Viewed through this lens, publics emerge when social interaction generates unreglated effects on communities that respond by organizing collective or state action, a process which I refer to as the realization of the pragmatic public. I juxtapose the theory with multiple extant literature on public administration, including public choice, transaction costs, and public value(s). I identify consistencies and inconsistencies to provide a pluralistic yet coherent framework in the hope of revealing points of departure for future theory development. Finally, I reframe and extend the pragmatic public by applying the insights of contemporary scholarship in networks and complexity theory.

INTRODUCTION

The complexity of the concept of the public continues to evade the discipline of public administration (PA). Scholars often discuss the people, the citizens, the customer, the client, the community, or the stakeholders and then move on without deeper analysis (Frederickson 1991, 2021). Scholars of public opinion argued for the necessity of technocratic control in democracies (Lippman 1922). Public interest (Goodin 1996) and public good (Dahl 1989) scholars emphasized the common good and the general welfare. Public choice scholars reframed the public in economic terms (Ostrom and Ostrom 1971). Public value (Fung 2006; Moore 1995, 2013, 2014; Nabatchi 2018) and public values (Bozeman 2007) scholars emphasized utility, virtues, and norms, whereas scholars of publicness emphasized authority, funding, ownership (Bozeman and Bretschneider 1994; Moulton 2009; Walmsley and Zald 1973), and engagement (Merritt 2019). Each research tradition offers ideas essential to identifying the public, but its ontological complexities remain under-theorized (Nabatchi 2010). In the words of the late H. George Frederickson (2021), “As an academic field, public administration is wildly off the mark in terms of explaining what we mean by the public.” This article aims to put us back on the mark by examining and extending a pragmatic theory of the public.

A consistent throughline of philosophical pragmatism crosses numerous literatures in PA with the works of John Dewey being the most influential (Ansell 2011, Ongaro 2017, Shields 1996, 2008). Across the 20th century, many figures in PA referenced pragmatism and pragmatists in their publications (Evans 2000). In the 2000s, a robust debate on the general applicability of Dewey’s pragmatism to PA occurred (seeEvans 2005; Hickman 2004; Hoch 2006; Miller 2004; Shields 2003; Stolcis 2004).¹ The debate covered many topics, from epistemology to pedagogy. Yet, development of Dewey’s unique theory of the public remained limited.

In this article I describe and build on Dewey’s theory of the public, found primarily in his classic book The Public and its Problems (1927). I refer to this theory of the public as the pragmatic public. I define the pragmatic public as a property of social systems that emerges when the local interactions of two or more actors generate broader consequences for others who recognize these effects and respond by organizing collective or state action. In the following sections, my approach is to elaborate on the theory of the pragmatic public, to trace the idea through the literature, to juxtapose it with other prominent concepts, and to reframe it in terms of contemporary theory.

JOHN DEWEY’S THEORY OF THE PUBLIC

John Dewey’s (1927),The Public and its Problems provides the foundation for the pragmatic theory of the public. Dewey published the book toward the end of his scholarly career. It is widely regarded as the culmination of his thought on political philosophy. Commentators (e.g., Bohman 2010; Decesare 2012) point out that The Public and its Problems (Dewey 1927) was a response to Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925)—an exchange commonly referred to as the Lippman–Dewey debate. Lippman saw an intractable gap between the complexity of public problems and the public’s understanding of these problems. Closing this gap entailed a technocratic imperative to actively shape public opinion through the tools of mass communication. Dewey maintained a more optimistic view suggesting that publics tend to self-organize in response to the problematic consequences of unregulated social interaction. The debate symbolized the tension between top-down technocratic control of democracy and bottom-up cultivation of deliberative and participatory modes of democratic organizing. In retrospect, Dewey’s view was more emblematic of the Progressive Era, whereas Lippman’s views shifted toward skepticism of progressive ideals. The Lippman–Dewey debate maintains relevance today as societies across the world undergo technologically driven change to the basic structure of social life.

In contrast to many prominent theories of the era, Dewey’s pragmatic view rejected conceptions of the public as a fixed and singular entity derived from human nature or a theory of the state. Riding a line between individualism and collectivism, Dewey (1927, 24) states, “Individuals still do the thinking, desiring and purposing, but what they think of is the consequences of their behavior upon that of others and that of others upon themselves.” This premise builds up a relational view, where the individual is the singularity of wants and desires, but the content of human ideas inevitably reflects social relations. Although cognition occurs in the individual mind, where doubt resolves into belief through inquiry (Peirce 1877), for the public this process occurs in communities of inquiry that collectively seek to comprehend and address problems relevant to broader institutional issues (Dewey 1938; Shields 2003).

The intertwining of the individual and the social within the context of the problematic situation provides the basis for the elaboration of the public. In Dewey’s (1927, 15–16) words, “The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically provided for.” The public emerges from the indirect consequences of private interaction. When two or more actors interact socially, economically, or politically, there are often consequences for others never initially involved. The organization of this network of actors, relationships, and consequences constitutes the public. All those stakeholders around the problem are constitutive of the public. Under this theory, the scholar or the practitioner may identify a public pragmatically by tracing the consequences of social interaction on other individuals within a broader community.

I combine pragmatic with public to indicate this specific theory of the public. Thus, the pragmatic public represents a community as it grapples with the consequences of social, economic, and political interactions. As communities of inquiry develop in recognition of these problematic situations, they self-organize and coordinate to affect collective or state action. The process of self-organization and the application of collective influence or state authority as a response to these consequences is the realization of the pragmatic public. In this sense, the public is most often numerous publics. Only in rare situations at the national or global level does a singular public emerge. Throughout I refer to the public singular for simplicity and readability, but publics plural is generally implied.

The pragmatic public demarcates between public and private domains. Private interactions without perceptible consequences on others remain in the private realm, whereas interactions that affect third parties establish a public and a public realm. As Dewey (1927, 12) states, “[C]onsequences are of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately concerned. In this distinction, we find the germ of the distinction between the private and the public.” However, a practical problem remains. Many of the traditional boundaries between public, private, individual, collective, society, and state have eroded under the weight of technological progress. Resolving today’s public challenges requires complex collective action crossing all conceivable social, economic, and political boundaries. Can the pragmatic public still respond effectively to large-scale contemporary technological challenges? Is technocratic control by shaping public opinion necessary? Was Lippman right?

Dewey’s theory has further implications for the role of the state. As Dewey (1927, 12) elaborates, “When indirect consequences are recognized and there is an effort to regulate them, something having the traits of a state comes into existence. When the consequences of an action are confined or are thought to be confined, mainly to the persons directly engaged in it, the transaction is a private one.” This is a relatively unique explanation for the emergence of the state. We need not speculate about the metaphysical essence of the ideal society, the nature of the platonic state, the stipulation of a social contract, or claims about human psychology to identify and demarcate a public and a private realm. Rather, the content of a public problem can be located within the specific context of a network of actors, interactions, and consequences. State action constitutes the collective effort to regulate the consequences of these interactions. Thus, the state arises as the result of the emergence of the public.

As Dewey (1927, 33) suggests, “the state is the organization of the public effected through officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members.” State responsibilities are established by the public’s expectations regarding the mitigation of negative consequences and promotion of positive consequences, bounded within a relevant community of affected stakeholders. Yet, the identification of positive and negative consequences necessarily involves the interaction of a complex network of ethical and moral judgments. However, these judgments are often channelized by overarching constitutional frameworks, legal precedents, and institutional rules and norms. Thus, the Deweyan view may need modification beyond the standard blend of consequentialism and virtue ethics to also include attention to the type of deontological moral reasoning embedded within these overarching societal frameworks.

Dewey’s theory further entails a specific role for public officials, conceptualized as agents of the affected. Dewey (1927, 35) writes, “This public is organized and made effective by means of representatives who as guardians of custom, as legislators, executives, judges, etc., care for its especial interests by methods intended to regulate the conjoint actions of individuals and groups.” Thus, public officials act not as private individuals but as agents of those affected stakeholders. The public and the state join as a unified political body once those “seriously affected for good or evil” are cared for and those consequences are controlled by public action.²

The Deweyan approach seems to assume the pluralist ideal that values at stake may be defined and acted upon in ways that are knowable, objective, and concrete. In practice, organically emerging publics are typically composed of stakeholders that have the incentive and inclination to engage in deliberative discourse. This suggests that public officials must engage in the active construction of the public, a point that is examined at length in the public value literature (Fung 2015; Moore 2014).

The Pragmatic Public and the Regulatory Functions of the State

During the Progressive Era, Upton Sinclair’s (1906) novel The Jungle popularized the negative consequences of an unregulated meat-packing industry. The case represents a culmination of several problematic situations. The meat-packing firm transacts with a relatively powerless immigrant workforce. The processor wishes to pay the lowest possible price for labor and avoid costly health and safety regulations. As the dangerous working environment and the negative health outcomes of unsanitary food are experienced and comprehended, a pragmatic public emerges demanding government action taking the form of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which later led to the formal establishment of the US Food and Drug Administration.

The regulatory functions of government are well explained by Dewey’s theory. For example, the mission of a regulatory entity such as the Environmental Protection Agency to support “environmental stewardship” is explicable within the conceptual parameters of the pragmatic public. Pollution of the environment through the consequences of private business is a prototypical example. The recognition of the problematic situation, the emergence of a self-aware community of inquiry, and the establishment of a regulatory body represent the realization of a pragmatic public.

Numerous historical reformulations of public problems through this lens can be made across a range of issues, such as child labor laws and the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. More recently, such issues include the prohibition of abortion, sex work, and exploitation, the war on drugs and decriminalization, government response to pandemics, police killings of citizens, the regulation of artificial intelligence. Yet, a question remains, when does the concept cover too much? How do we know if the consequences of private interaction are worthy of state action? Who decides, and what are the decision criteria employed?

As Dewey suggested, “There are many answers to the question: What is the public? Unfortunately, many of them are only restatements of the question…. We do not find and should not expect to find sharp and fast demarcations” (1927, 37, 43). Approaches searching for archetypical exemplars of the public within a specific nation, culture, or society will inevitably fail to produce useful concepts applicable across jurisdictions and across time. What remains are the consequences of social activity: “The only constant is the function of caring for and regulating the interests which accrue as the result of the complex indirect expansion and radiation of conjoint behavior” (1927, 47). Regardless of the society, the culture, or the context, social interaction inevitably produces unforeseen consequences, necessitating action by a superordinate actor (the state) standing above the relevant context and possessing the authority to regulate and control the causal chain. Yet, institutions still determine what actions are considered and implemented. The emergence of the public occurs within the constraints of culture, tradition, history, and law. However, we lack a strong criterion for identifying which consequences are relevant to the identification of a public.

Limits of the Theory and the Necessity of Experimentation

Dewey (1927) proposes three factors to identify a limit to the identification of public problems worthy of state action: their geographic and temporal scope; the degree to which they are settled in habit, observed frequently, and appear in a relatively standardized form across contexts; and the irreparability of the consequences. Important problems appear across cultures and across time, recur frequently, manifest in a habitual and predictable manner, and are so severe as to create irreversible negative effects on individuals within a community.

However, Dewey (1927, 64–65) suggests, “There is no sharp and clear line which draws itself, pointing out beyond peradventure, like the line left by a receding high tide… The line of demarcation between actions left to private initiative and management and those regulated by the state has to be discovered experimentally.” Those in search of clear and definitive answers will be disappointed. The dream of identifying a platonic ideal state is a fool’s quest for certainty about matters that are best understood as an ongoing process of social interaction (Dewey 1929). The public is not a fixed ontological entity. Rather, Dewey (1927, 67) suggests that the “lasting, extensive and serious consequences of associated activity bring into existence a public.” In this sense, the public will remain a phantom for those seeking fixed ideal forms.

But an important question remains. How do we know whether the programs implemented by the state do not produce consequences more dangerous than those they are designed to regulate? There are no prepackaged answers from a canonical book of commands. In the face of novel problems, the consequences of public programs can only be estimated. Adjudication can only truly occur with experimentation.

The American experience with alcohol and cannabis prohibition provides apt examples. Temperance-movement groups suggested that alcoholism led to widespread domestic violence, representing a consequentialist justification for state action. Other prohibition groups focused on deontological moral reasoning invoking the language of sin. After implementation, prohibition produced an extreme period of communal violence between those involved in the black market for alcohol. The failure of the experiment was recognized, and prohibition was repealed. Much the same for the modern war on drugs, widely regarded as a failure that merely criminalizes citizens, magnifies racial strife, and elevates the status of drug cartels. Now roughly half of the American states have medical and recreational cannabis. Meanwhile, many states still fail to recognize the well-established medical uses of cannabis. The issue resides in a peculiar state of federalist conflict playing out across America’s laboratories of democracy. The main point here is that deliberation is the only pragmatic way to adjudicate the veracity of public consequences, whereas experimentation is the only way to determine whether the unintended consequences of policies and programs are justified on balance.

EXTERNALITIES, PUBLIC CHOICE, AND METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM

Dewey’s theory of the public plays an important role in the orchestra of ideas in PA. Yet, the pragmatic public appears submerged as an undercurrent in many schools of thought, often cited but rarely excavated. During the early development of PA, this body of thought was eclipsed by the development of administrative behavior, organization theory, and public choice theory. Simon (2013) references Dewey in Administrative Behavior. Yet, representing the generic tradition in public management (Rainey 2009), Simon is less interested in the distinctive public elements of administration than in utilizing pragmatic philosophy to articulate decision making under conditions of bounded rationality. Similarly, public choice theorists seem less interested in the distinctions between public and private than in applying the familiar tools and concepts of neoclassical economics.

The public choice theorist Vincent Ostrom engaged extensively with Dewey’s political philosophy. Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren (1961) provided a rare analysis of externalities based explicitly on Dewey’s theory. Pointing to The Public and its Problems (1927), Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren (1961, 832) state, “The basic criterion traditionally offered for distinguishing between public and private affairs was formulated some years ago by John Dewey.” They then point toward Dewey’s (1927, 15) classic criterion, “the line between private and public is to be drawn on the basis of the extent and scope of the consequences of acts which are so important as to need control whether by inhibition or by promotion.” Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren (1961, 832) then build on Dewey’s distinction suggesting the “indirect consequences of a transaction, which affect others than those directly concerned, can also be described as ‘externalities’ or ‘spill-over effects.’” They further suggest that externalities can be either negative or positive. Typically, private firms will attempt to internalize positive externalities to appropriate rents while avoiding responsibility for the costs of negative externalities, such as pollution. This logic establishes a generic purpose of government, which is to internalize negative externalities. In short, Dewey’s theory of the public appears to be the intellectual foundation for the public choice logic of externalities.

When Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom introduced public choice to Public Administration Review in 1971, they dropped Dewey, drawing attention to the neoclassical economic axioms of methodological individualism, rational self-interest, and the pursuit of utility maximization. In addition, these axioms were also applied to politicians, bureaucrats, and voters (e.g., Buchanan and Tullock 1965; Downs 1957) and remain critical to the public choice logic of public goods. Here non-rivalry, non-excludability, spillovers, externalities (Bator 1958; Samuelson 1954), and information asymmetry (Akerlof 1970; Arrow 1963) are key drivers of market failure.

Public choice axioms depend upon assumptions about human nature and the power of incentives that are centered on the atomistic individual. Self-interested rational maximizers lack the incentive to invest in goods with no, low, or merely social returns. They wish to free ride on the investments of others wherever possible. They wish to appropriate the returns on investments made by others. They wish to avoid internalizing the costs of externalities and spillovers associated with their own market activities. They wish to conceal important information and maintain uncertainty about inferior or risky products to maximize their own returns.

The difficulty in fully integrating public choice with the pragmatic public is that the former lacks the concept of interdependence between individuals. Although Dewey’s view of the public is consistent with the logic of public goods, externalities, and equity concerns of public choice, the strong ontological commitment to axioms of individual psychology embodied in homo economicus is at odds with the pragmatic focus on the consequences of social interaction.³ Dewey’s epistemological opus, The Logic of Inquiry (1938), suggested that individuals are embedded within a complex social fabric of interdependency, where logic itself is constituted in reference to the relevant epistemic community. This contrasts sharply with the methodological individualism of public choice, where individuals are islands unto themselves.

INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS AND SOVEREIGN TRANSACTIONS

The conceptualization of the pragmatic public arising from the consequences of social interaction is an explicitly transaction-based approach. The relational approach shared by pragmatism and institutional and transaction cost economics was no coincidence. As Bush (1993, 59) notes, classical institutional economics was directly influenced by American pragmatism: “American institutional thought can best be understood as an application of pragmatic instrumentalist philosophy to the study of economics.” However, institutional economics was relatively unpopular among PA scholars until the later part of the 20th century.⁴ Rather, neoclassical economics had a far greater influence on concepts and methodology in PA.⁵ Yet, many contemporary PA scholars now recognize the importance of the transaction cost approach in areas such as procurement and contract management (e.g. Brown and Potoski 2003; Brown, Potoski, and Van Slyke 2006).

The ontology of institutional economics and transaction costs theory is compatible with the theory of the pragmatic public. Institutional economics features substantial influence from classical pragmatism, specifically in its assumptions about human psychology. Classical institutional theorists such as Veblen (1899), Hamilton (1919), and Commons (1931) recognized that (1) institutions had profound effects on the psychology of individuals and (2) there were indeed significant costs to transacting in pure markets.

Following Coase (1937), if individuals are rational and markets are efficient, why do we even need bureaucratic organizations? Why shouldn’t the economy just be organized as one gigantic aggregation of spot transactions? Institutional economics identifies significant costs to transacting that are not well managed by markets. Organizations are more efficient than the price mechanism at governing costly transactions, particularly when the product or service is technically complex, involves frequent interactions, features high asset specificity, or worse, when opportunistic behavior is rampant (Williamson 1979, 1981).

Even if organizations are more efficient in regulating complex market transactions, why do we need public organizations, especially when they have such a poor reputation for being inefficient and bloated bureaucracies? Williamson (1999) argued that public organizations are better suited to addressing transactions that depend more heavily on probity, defined in terms of loyalty and integrity. This is particularly the case when the stakes are high, but the incentives are low powered. Williamson uses the case of the US Department of State, but other poignant examples might include criminal justice, public education, and child services. Sovereign transactions between nation-states feature low-powered incentives but enormous expectations of probity. In this case, the agents (diplomats) of the public, who manage transactions between nation-states, hold vast responsibility for potentially catastrophic public consequences. Perfect loyalty to the President’s agenda is expected, complete integrity is paramount, and opportunistic behavior is deeply shameful.

Under Williamson’s remediableness criterion, public organizations are undoubtedly inefficient under a variety of situations but privatizing a public organization such as the US Department of State would be unthinkably complex and hazardous. In this sense, economic efficiency is decentered as the sole criterion (Wittman 1995). When sovereigns interact through diplomacy, the consequences implicate the entire populations of the respective nations. In view of nuclear war, the entire population of the planet is potentially called into a pragmatic public. Although Williamson’s (1999) analysis never mentioned Dewey or pragmatism, it is nevertheless useful in demonstrating how the pragmatic public scales depending on the scope of those affected by social interaction.

CATALYZING PUBLIC VALUE(S)

Public Value Singular

One of the key scholars of the public value literature is Mark Moore, who is described by Alford et al. (2017) as “A Dewey-inspired pragmatist to the bone.” Moore (2014) identifies three principles of the public value literature: (1) the democratic public determines what is valuable, (2) government assets include both money and authority, and (3) value includes both utilitarian material welfare and deontological virtues such as fairness. The theory of the pragmatic public advance here so far mostly emphasizes the negative side of the coin, that is, public problems. Public value takes a positive view toward enhancing public welfare.

Nabatchi (2018, 60) defines public value as the “appraisal of what is created and sustained by government on behalf of the public.” It is not enough for governments to resolve public problems (Alford and Hughes 2008). Good government also acts on ethical assumptions of virtue, such as justice and fairness (e.g., Rawls 2020) to fulfill the expanding expectations of the public. Kirlin (1996a) suggests that governments create public value through the design of institutions. Moore and Fung (2012) treat Dewey’s philosophy as central to the development of public value. But even Dewey’s work was focused on public problems and had a somewhat limited view of positive government action. This is perhaps because, as Fung (2007: p.445) notes, "pragmatism takes problems as the source of reflective intelligence". Public value theory goes beyond the negative concerns raised by public choice and institutional economics to explore the possibilities for enhancing the general welfare.

In this view, the public manager is not only inclusive and participatory but actively seeks to create opportunities for public deliberation. The development of myriad deliberative opportunities relative to the emergence of manifold publics increases the sophistication and legitimacy of public organizations and enhances democratic decision-making processes. Here, the public leader has a unique role. Referring to Dewey (1927), Moore and Fung (2012), and Moore (2021) argue that a central challenge of leadership in PA is “calling publics into existence.”

Calling forth a public is an activity that is both epistemic and axiological. The epistemic goal is to generate and disseminate knowledge to all those affected by the consequences of living within a complex social system, to raise self-awareness, and to catalyze the organization of communities of inquiry that can identify and act in their own interest (Shields 2003). The public leader encourages communities to critically examine their own perspectives and experiences and to identify solutions through consensus-based deliberation. The axiological goal is to lead with ethics. Decisions must be made and implemented with concern for the humanity of all involved. Moore (2021) argues that good public leaders must be able to run public bureaucracies efficiently and effectively but must also strive to uphold fairness, justice, and the law of the land.

One of the challenges of creating opportunities for deliberative democracy is that too large a multitude is often implicated in a pragmatic public. Size limits the practicality of inclusion within the deliberative process. As such, Fung (2003), following Robert Dahl, describes a process of assembling minipublics, which are middle-range institutional forums that select stakeholder groups for participation. Dahl’s (2008) writings on democracy and the public good suggested a pluralist concept emphasizing numerous publics with multiple concepts of interest and good which must be satisfied in equal measure to sustain the broader ideals of democracy. Fung (2003) suggests that the polarized nature of contemporary politics largely precludes the development of a single unified public. Instead, small-scale but widespread engagement through minipublics may be more effective.

Public Values Plural

In contrast to Lippman’s (1922) technocratically formed public opinion or modern concepts of public choice that situate public interest on economic individualism, Bozeman (2007) re-situates public interest in terms of the long-term survival and well-being of the community. As he suggests, classical approaches have been too idealistic, amorphous, and nonsystematic, and modern approaches have been too heavily dominated by the logic of economic rationality. Bozeman identifies the public interest and articulates public values on Dewey’s pragmatic idealism, suggesting that the public interest gains specific content by identification of public problems. From here, Bozeman (2007) defines public values as those that provide consensus among the public about entitlements, obligations, and principles of the state.

Public values can be discerned by communities as they confront specific problems. The process of deliberation about problems brings pluralistic interests and values into fruitful conflict within an arena of inquiry, providing the mechanism for identifying the public. As Nabatchi (2012) suggests, public values are critical to the discipline of PA and can be identified through careful selection of design choices for deliberative mechanisms.

Another stream in this literature has sought to identify an exhaustive list of public values. Van der Wal, Nabatchi, and De Graaf (2015) explore the universe of values across disciplines. Furthermore, Page et al. (2018) provide a framework for understanding how interorganizational settings are rife with value collisions. Similarly, Strauss (2021) argues that the public values approach represents an important shift away from efficiency and markets but that much of the emphasis has been on the microlevel analysis of organizations instead of broader regime values. A pragmatic approach suggests identifying the causal relations between the consequences of social interaction and the emergence of self-aware communities grappling to control their destiny, where social consciousness is shaped by consensus values relative to a given community.

COMPLEXITY SCIENCE AND THE NETWORK ONTOLOGY OF THE PRAGMATIC PUBLIC

The Public as an Emergent Property of a Complex System

A variety of physical, biological, and social phenomena represent complex adaptive systems featuring numerosity, emergence, and self-organization (Ladyman, Lambert, and Wiesner 2013; Miller and Page 2009). Thurner, Klimek, and Hanel (2018, 22) define complex systems as “co-evolving multilayer networks.” A classic example is the behavioral patterns of large crowds. Here numerous individuals exhibit interdependence and mutual adaptation uncoordinated by any higher-order system. Emergent patterns such as a stadium wave, a crowd surge, or a stampede cannot be reduced to descriptions of the individuals involved. Yet, this is precisely what we attempt when we treat the public as a mere aggregation of individual interests. In contrast, emergence suggests that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and self-organization is the idea of spontaneous order without external control or coordination.

Many of these concepts were introduced to PA quite a long time ago by Herbert Simon (1962). As Simon (1996, 170) states, “emergence simply means the parts of a complex system have mutual relations that do not exist for the parts in isolation.” Complexity concepts were relatively slow to be incorporated into empirical PA research (Klijn 2008). Recent developments in the governance of interorganizational networks have accelerated the uptake of complexity and network science in PA (e.g., Comfort 1994; Eppel and Rhodes 2018; Meek and Newell 2005; Morçöl 2012; Nowell and Kenis 2019; Teisman and Klijn 2008; Whetsell et al. 2021).

In the theory advanced here, a pragmatic public exhibits complexity, emergence, and self-organization with modifications for external coordination and control. Numerous actors interact within a social system. Their interactions are characterized by patterns of interdependence. Their interactions frequently have direct and indirect negative and positive effects on others both near and far. These effects stimulate others to self-organize into groups that coordinate their activities around the application of higher-order structural controls. The application of state power is the most formal type of structural control but influence of behavior and institutions through collective action can also represent an important type of control.

A few caveats and qualifications are in order. Actor can include individuals, organizations, nations, or even nonhuman technological agents. The characterization of the pragmatic public as an emergent property should not be construed as a static entity but as a dynamic process. The relevance of the distinction between direct and indirect effects on the characterization of a pragmatic public remains an open question, as does the distinction between informal collective action and formal state action.

In a democracy, the exercise of public authority through laws and regulations represents the efforts of the public to promote or constrain patterns and structures of self-organization. The public leader is a member of the system who can interact with other actors but also has a hand on the levers of the system structure. Through the application of state power, the leader can catalyze or disrupt positive or negative modes of self-organization. Ontologically, the pragmatic public is realized as an emergent property of this complex dynamic social network.

One cannot derive a public by looking only at actors and their characteristics. Analysis of the pragmatic public requires the use of relational rather than individual-focused methods. Tools such as descriptive and inferential network analysis (Cranmer, Desmarais, and Morgan 2020; Provan et al. 2005) and agent-based and simulation models (Scott, Thomas, and Magellanes 2019) often provide more appropriate tools for analyzing complex public problems. Furthermore, PA scholars have long lamented the inadequacy of traditional tools that assume independence between observations, that is, the independent and identically distributed (IID) assumptions in ordinary least squares regression (Gill and Meier 2000; Heinrich and Lynn 2001; Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2000).

In contrast, tools used in the networks literature are suited to analyzing the relationships between individuals and organizations and the general patterns emerging at the network level (Provan, Fish, and Sydow 2007). Rather than assuming that actors are isolated entities whose attributes and characteristics do not interact with each other, network analysis explicitly incorporates dyadic interdependence into the modeling approach. These approaches allow scholars to study public problems in terms of complex social phenomena, such as homophily, transitivity, and preferential attachment (e.g. Whetsell et al. 2020; Whetsell, Kroll, and DeHart-Davis 2021).

Social Networks as the Context of Public Emergence

In contrast to many types of basic social networks consisting of actors and their relationships, the concept of the pragmatic public resembles a more complex structure involving causes and effects. Interactions between actors represent a causal mechanism, whereas the consequences of an interaction represent effects. Often, social networks consist of a single actor type (e.g., individuals, organizations) and a single type of relation (e.g., exchange of resources, contractual relations, alliances, partnerships). But in the case of the pragmatic public, the basic network of actors and relationships includes a network of causes and consequences. In Bhaskar’s (2013) terminology, the generative mechanism producing the observed social network is the underlying network of causes and consequences. Applying the lens of the pragmatic public, such networks might be considered pragmatic networks.

Figure 1 illustrates an idealized model of a pragmatic network, using a modified causal graph approach (Iannone 2019) to conceptualize the process. The figure is divided into two parts to maximize visibility. Figure 1a illustrates Actors 1 and 2 coordinating to form a private Firm. Their Firm produces an externality that affects Actors 3, 4, and 5, who in turn coordinate to form a Coalition. This idealization assumes that the Coalition and the Firm include all the relevant stakeholders.

Figure 1b removes the actors from the graph to focus on the larger process. The Coalition protests to the Firm and to the Public Manager, and the Firm lobbies the Public Manager. The Public Manager represents a high-ranking public leader with relative autonomy and access to the local policy-making process. As a result of these interactions, the Public Manager convenes a deliberative participatory body that includes the Coalition, the Firm, and the Manager. This represents an incipient public called a Minipublic. The Minipublic produces a policy instrument that the manager implements to resolve the externality. The entire process represents the realization of a pragmatic public. The process incorporates elements of public choice, public value(s), and social networks.

Prefiguring this approach roughly a century ago, Dewey (1927, 36) stated, “What is needed to direct and make fruitful social inquiry is a method which proceeds on the basis of the interrelations of observable acts and their results. Such is the gist of the method we propose to follow.” The method proposed by Dewey has now come into maturity as network analysis has been fully developed in the social sciences and has further been fruitfully applied in PA with studies of networks and network governance (e.g. Hu et al. 2022; Provan and Milward 1995; Provan and Patrick 2008; Siciliano, Wang, and Medina 2021; Whetsell et al. 2021). The pragmatic public provides a philosophical foundation for network studies in PA. For example, Sørensen and Torfing (2005) apply The Public and its Problems (1927) to the literature suggesting that governance networks can enhance deliberative processes of democracy.

CONCLUSION

The central concerns of PA revolve around the identification of the public, the management of public problems, and the creation of public value. The theory of the pragmatic public provides a philosophical foundation for the analysis of these concerns and appears quite durable across time and scale. The intellectual history of PA often features the theory prominently, but at other times it remains submerged. The consequence is that emphasis on administration has eclipsed the public. The pragmatic public played a prominent role in the early development of the logic of externalities, focusing scholars on the use of state action to manage problems rather than catalyzing prosperity (Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren 1961). Yet, traditional market failure analysis provides a limited justification for government action (Bozeman 2002), and the positive consequences of social interaction can be catalyzed to enhance public value (Fung 2015; Kirlin 1996b). Market failure and public value are reconcilable under the theory of the pragmatic public, which lends itself to an analysis of both public problems and public prosperity through a focus on the positive and negative consequences of social interaction.

The elegance of John Dewey’s concept of the public is that it provides scholars with the conceptual tools to determine how publics emerge, to distinguish between the public and private, to identify the emergence of the state, and to describe the function of the public leader. The theory is parsimonious but also quite powerful, as it can maintain scale with the scope and size of the consequences of social interactions. Its advantage is the precision in describing the micro-foundation with which publics emerge without resorting to strong reductionism or circularity. Where other theories posit an ideal public, demarcate citizens and noncitizens, or stipulate motives of individual agents, Dewey situates idealistic notions of the public interest through community deliberation on specific problematic situations. As Dewey argues in The Quest for Certainty (1929), the error arises from a long tradition in classical philosophy of attempting to locate the nature of reality in universalistic platonic forms. Rather, the pragmatic public can be located through the analysis of complex networks of interaction, consequences, and adaptation. Finally, developments in networks and complexity theory have enabled a reconceptualization of the pragmatic public as an emergent property of a social system that can be modeled and analyzed using contemporary tools of network analysis. The theory of the pragmatic public points toward new analytic insights for a richer understanding of the public, its myriad problems, and its potential for future human progress.

I would like to acknowledge comments on an earlier version of this manuscript by Patricia M. Shields, Gordon Kingsley, and Jos Raadschelders, as well as comments on a later version by Michael Hoffmann, Bryan Norton, Robert Rosenberger, Justin Biddle, Hans Klein, and John Nelson in the Philosophy Club at Georgia Tech.

REFERENCES

Footnotes