The Big Questions of Public Administration in a Democracy

Behn's (1995) recent delineation of the questions of public makes an important and compelling argument that any field of inquiry should focus on major questions and should be driven by those questions, not diverted to more tractable questions nor limited by methodological orthodoxy. This is a strong critique of much of the contemporary public administration and public management literature, both in terms of the questions addressed and efforts to establish an orthodoxy of methods somehow judged to be most appropriate. Behn is careful to limit his suggestions to public management and to invite others to offer alternative definitions of big questions. In this article, I respond to this invitation, arguing that the big questions of public administration in a democracy are quite different from the big questions of public management, a position also recently suggested by Newland (1994). To begin, I identify Behn's big questions, give an initial preview of the critique more fully developed later, and offer a listing of the seven big questions of public administration in a democracy. Big Questions Behn's three big questions for public management (1995; 315) are: 1. Micromanagement: How can public managers break the micromanagement cycle - an excess of procedural rules, which prevents public agencies from producing results, which leads to more procedural rules, which leads to ...? 2. Motivation: How can public managers motivate people (public employees as well as those outside the formal authority of government) to work energetically and intelligently toward achieving public purposes? 3. Measurement: How can public managers measure the achievements of their agencies in ways that help to increase those achievements? These questions, asking public managers can address each of the three big questions, place the public manager (implicitly operating from a public bureaucracy) at the center of the enterprise of governmental action. This approach, in common with others focused on public management, and much traditional public administration focused on public agencies, fails to confront adequately the issues of public administration in a democracy. It gives management of organizations primacy over the democratic polity, a position effectively critiqued by Appleby (1949) nearly half a century ago. It similarly fails to address the argument of Rosenbloom (1983) that public administration theory includes three distinctive approaches - managerial, political, and legal - all of which must be incorporated if public administration theory is to be legitimate in this nation. Primary attention here is focused on the important questions for public administration in a democracy, particularly the United States. Four criteria the big questions of public administration in a democracy must satisfy are: (a) achieving a democratic polity; (b) rising to the societal level, even in terms of values also important at the level of individual public organizations; (c) confronting the complexity of instruments of collective action; and (d) encouraging more effective societal learning. Seven big questions emerge from the analysis: 1. What are the instruments of collective action that remain responsible both to democratically elected officials and to core societal values? 2. What are the roles of nongovernmental forms of collective action in society, and how can desired roles be protected and nurtured? 3. What are the appropriate tradeoffs between governmental structures based on function (which commonly eases organizational tasks) and geography (which eases citizenship, political leadership, and societal learning)? 4. How shall tensions between national and local political arenas be resolved? 5. What decisions shall be isolated from the normal processes of politics so that some other rationale can be applied? 6. What balance shall be struck among neutral competence, representativeness, and leadership? …