SUSS POL 201 Study Unit 1: Fundamentals of Public Administration and Bureaucracy

Development of the Field

Public Service and Public Servants

  • Public service refers to the various services provided by the government to the people
    • Governments can either
      • provide such services directly through the public sector and its employees or
      • in partnership with organisations, for profit and non-profit, by financing its provision

Public Administration and its Importance

  • The primary task of public administration is to implement the policies enacted by the government.
  • Public administration, via its large and reliable workforce, ensures that the essential characteristics of government, such as
    • revenue collection,
    • expenditures, and
    • service provision
  • are done in a timely and professional manner.

The Social and Political Context of Public Administration

  • Politics is perceived as a matter of representation and accountability while administration is about policy implementation and the exercise of political power and law

Historical development

The early system

  • The earlier systems of administration shared a common characteristic where one’s personal ties and loyalty to important individuals such as a king or a minister were central to getting the job.
  • Such systems eventually resulted in corruption or misuse of the office for personal gains. These practices have persisted even till now in some countries.

Traditional system

  • In Britain, the start of the traditional model is seen during the mid-nineteenth century when the Northcote-Trevelyan report (1854) recommended establishing a system of examination for public service appointments and to fill higher posts by promotions from inside based on merit, thus abolishing patronage systems.

19th and 20th Century Professionalising Bureaucracy

  • Wilson and Weber argued for a separate professional ethos and a set of core skills for administrators who should be separate from politics

Paradigms of Public Administration

Traditional public administration

  • The focus of the traditional public administration was on issues such as
    • bureaucracy,
    • law,
    • organisation theory and
    • the politics and administration dichotomy, which was all influenced by the original scholars of public administration
  • Style of administration was bureaucratic

New public management

  • The 1980s saw the arrival of a business-like New Public Management (NPM), which focused on ideas from the private sector such as
    • efficiency,
    • cost-effectiveness and
    • being responsive to citizens as clients.
  • This type of management emerged in the early 1980s in Anglo-Saxon countries
  • Administrative style is competitive. Governments in these countries wanted the public sector to mimic private sector practices to increase efficiency and cut costs.
  • NPM believed that the government should steer, not row - which led to large-scale privatization and contracting out in different countries

New public governance

  • the 2000s called for a more collaborative approach in new public governance with a focus on network governance and collaborative governance.
  • There was a shift to horizontal network-based modes of governance from the traditional hierarchies in public administration with a focus on multiple actors on both formal and informal interactions

Role of a Public Administrator

  • The role of public administrators have changed according to different paradigms

Traditional Public Administrator

  • The traditional, rule-oriented bureaucrat’s role was
    • to be loyal to political mandates,
    • neutral in their views of policies and programmes and
    • impartial in executing and administrating the policies and programmes and an efficient official

New public management administrator

  • New Public Management shifted the role of the public manager who was to become business-like with their use of private-sector inspired tools, techniques and values.
  • The performance-focused manager of New Public Management was more involved in steering rather than rowing and was a deregulating manager with importance accorded to values such as effectiveness, performance, and customer satisfaction.
  • The delivery modes were also expected to be different for NPM with introduction of quasi-markets, contracts and public-private partnerships.
  • NPM criticisms included the need to think about public sector values other than economic efficiency.

New public governance administrator

  • Another major change in public administration has been the increasing linkages of state and society in the delivery of public services given that bureaucracy is a lot less centralized and less hierarchical than ever before.
    • public managers of today have to be the networking, relation-focused collaborator who focus on facilitating and enabling collaboration where responsiveness, communication, and flexibility is highly valued.
  • The working environment and challenges of contemporary public servants and managers today are unique as they operate in a world that is uncertain and complex with volatility and ambiguity (van der Wal 2017).
  • The focus is on governance rather than government as the public sector is one of the many actors involved in governing. In addition, there is an increased demand for transparency and knowledge of new forms of technology at their fingertips.
    • Public managers are expected to work in such an environment and be innovative, effective and citizen-centric in their delivery of public services.
    • So, while the state and society linkages have boosted effectiveness and even government legitimacy, it has also raised problems related to accountability and control for the government

Politics and Administration Dichotomy

  • The politics-administration dichotomy was introduced after the spoils system in the US when reformers.
    • Wilson wrote about the distinction between politics (policy making) and administration (policy implementation), and said that administration was a field of business, not politics
    • He strongly urged for the creation of a technically competent and politically neutral administrative system for a democracy
    • Goodnow also noted that politics or the “expression of the will of the state” can be distinguished from administration or “execution of the will”
  • The Politics-Administration dichotomy has been debated since, but it has now been acknowledged that
    • politics and administration cannot be distinctly separated and that
    • public administration cannot realistically occur in a neutral and apolitical environment since they overlap and are influenced by each other.

Bureaucracy

  • Bureaucracy is the structure within which virtually all government organisations operate.
  • Bureaucracy is supposed to ensure that goods and services are produced and provided in the most efficient manner, but it is not always the case as seen in different countries and contexts.

Chracteristics of an ideal bureaucracy

  • Max Weber (1946) argued that bureaucracy constitutes the most efficient and rational way to organise human activity and that organised hierarchies are necessary to maintain order and maximise efficiency.
  • His ideal-type bureaucracy is characterised by the following:
    • Hierarchical organisation
    • Formal lines of authority
    • Fixed area of activity
    • Rigid division of labour
    • Regular and continuous execution of assigned tasks
    • Reliance on written documents
    • Decisions and powers restricted by regulations
    • Officials with expert training
    • Career advancement based on qualifications
    • Qualifications evaluated by organisational rules, not individuals

Civil service and Bureaucrats

  • The civil service is composed of career bureaucrats who are hired on professional merit instead of being appointed or elected.
  • Unlike elected officials, bureaucrats can neither be voted in nor voted out of office.
  • Their job security means that they usually work over transitions of different political leadership. Because of their longer years in the public sector, they can gain certain expertise in the field and subject matter, which becomes valuable when they have to provide advice to politicians on certain policies and while they implement laws based on local contexts

Bureaucratic discretion and decision-making

  • Civil servants can also wield political power because there is room for discretion in the decisions they make.
    • An essential activity of public administration is to implement laws thus, bureaucratic discretion is very important.
    • The laws passed by legislatures are often general, and require elaboration by administrators, especially in unforeseen scenarios. This allows for laws to be interpreted by career bureaucrats in their execution and implementation.
      • This may raise questions of democratic accountability, but it does support making the implemented policies more technically appropriate for the circumstance
  • Scholars have argued against giving public administrators too much discretion, given the inherent difficulty of controlling such discretion (Lowi 1979).
    • Examples are given of streetlevel bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980) who provide public benefits and maintain public order, such as teachers and the police, who exercise wide discretion and essentially make policy.

Elements of Good Governance

  • Good governance requires participation, inclusivity, accountability, and transparency
    from those involved in decision-making

Transparency

  • Transparency is an obligation for governments to share information with citizens so that they have the ability to make informed decisions and can hold public officials accountable for their actions and decisions.
    .

Accountability

  • Public administration is usually embedded in politics and administrators are expected to be accountable to political leadership.
  • Public administrators are also accountable to the public as they often interact and receive services as ‘clients’ of various government agencies, especially through street-level bureaucrats

Ethics

  • Ethics are a set of normative guidelines directed at resolving conflicts of interest so as to enhance societal well-being
  • A code of ethics creates a standard for the workplace on expected professionalism and is present for both the public and private sectors.

Technology and Public Administration

Types of accountability

  • Types of accountability Boven writes that modern public managers operating in a democratic system have to face at least five different kinds of forums and provide an account of their action based on:
    • organisational accountability,
    • political accountability
    • legal accountability
    • administrative accountability and
    • professional accountability .

Technology and Government

  • There are numerous technological advancements that are changing the operation of public administration
    • Technology can dramatically save time and money by improving the speed and methods of collecting data and by analyzing it for better decision-making.
    • But there are also significant risks as sensitive personal data could be compromised with ease, leading to identity theft and fraud, so safe data storage is essential
  • Technology can also be used to share information by the government agencies about services and it can increase citizen’s reach to governments by being able to complain or provide feedback.
    • The amount of trust citizens have on their government has strong implications for the governments in power especially since the image of bureaucracy isn’t usually positive

E-Governance

  • E-governance, according to UNESCO, is the public sector’s use of information and communication technology (ICT) with the aim of:
    • improving information and service delivery,
    • encouraging citizen participation in the decision-making process, and
    • making the government more accountable, transparent, and effective.

Management of Technology by Government

  • Within government, information is no longer only stored in stand-alone systems, but are converged and consolidated into shared databases
  • Government agencies often have a chief information officer (CIO) and a chief technology officer (CTO) responsible to coordinate secure and uniform technology systems

Digital Divide and its implications for Public Administration

  • Digital divide relates to the gap or divergence between segments of the population, in terms
    of the ability to access to technology and the ability to use technology
  • More in rev slides)

Technology and citizen engagement

  • Berman (1997) lists several reasons why citizens are cynical of governments:
    • they feel that elected officials and bureaucrats abuse their power for their own personal interests, citizens are detached from government and the delivery of services are viewed as substandard.
  • So government strategies to target cynical citizens can include publicizing the benefits of government, improving service delivery and by giving individuals means to influence public policy and decision-making

Security concerns

  • Security challenges remain with the use of technology and e-governance and special care needs to be taken to ensure public data is protected online.
  • The three areas in which personal protection and internet security are focused on are
    • personal privacy,
    • confidentiality and
    • security

Freedom of information

  • Governments aren’t always open to sharing data they collect, which led to increased dissatisfaction with the secrecy in policy developments and decisionmaking.
  • Citizens have had to fight for their right to information whereby requests can be made to receive government-held information.
  • Because of this, over 100 countries around the world have implemented some form of freedom of information (FOI) laws and legislations, which allow the general public to access data held by national governments, freely or at a minimal cost.