POSC 430 – Fundamentals of Public Administration

1. POSC 430 – Fundamentals of Public Administration

2. Public Administration and the Public

3. The Public’s Interaction with Public Administration • Every person in the United States is affected by some public administrative actions all of the time. Six main overlapping categories: • Clients and customers – over half of the population has had one direct contact with the government on employment, job training, worker’s compensation, unemployment compensation, public assistance, hospital/ medical care, or retirement benefits.

4. The Public’s Interaction with Public Administration • Regulatees – vehicular licenses, traffic violations, income taxes, and police matters the four most common. • Participants – Direct public participation. • Litigants – lawsuits against public administrators. • Street-level encounters – Direct interaction with public administrators (police discretion, for example).

5. The Individual in the Administrative State • Public administration thoroughly permeates American society. Administrative controls have replaced more traditional social controls. • Public administration has tended to be bureaucratically organized despite the NPM’s successes in changing this to some extent.

6. The Individual in the Administrative State • Bureaucracy is at odds with society because it relies on “rationally organized action,” rather than “social action.

7. Precision. Stability. Discipline. Reliability. Calculability of results. Formal rationality. Formalistic impersonality. Formal equality of treatment. Justice. Freedom. Violence. Oppression. Happiness. Gratification. Poverty. Illness. Death. Victory. Love and hate. Salvation and damnation. Bureaucracy vs. Society

8. The Individual in the Administrative State • Public administration, bureaucratically organized, tends to be in tension or conflict with society in terms of styles of action, emotional feelings, and overriding concerns. • The differences between societal and bureaucratic values are social interaction versus administrative action; feeling versus doing; and belief, randomness, and emotionalism versus specialized expertise, systemization, and impersonality.

9. The Individual in the Administrative State • The problem arises when administrative values replace societal values in so many public functions.

10. The Individual in the Political System • The individual’s role in the political system also undergoes major transformation with the rise of the administrative state. • The difficulty elected officials have controlling and holding accountable administrative agencies. • Popular sovereignty is compromised by the tendency of the public to become subjects of the administrative state. • Democracy and bureaucracy clash.

11. Equality. Rotation in office. Freedom. Pluralism. Citizen participation. Openness. Community. Legitimacy based on election. Hierarchy. Seniority. Command. Unity. Participation based on enterprise. Secrecy. Impersonality. Legitimacy based on expertise. Democracy versus Bureaucracy

12. The Individual in the Economy • The contemporary administrative state also changes the individual’s place in the economic system. • Government inevitably gains greater control over the nation’s economic resources. • Makes individuals dependent on government for their well-being. • The accumulation of wealth in government’s hands gives government more leverage over the individual.

13. The Public’s Evaluation of Public Administration

14. The Public’s Evaluation of Public Administration • Clients and customers are satisfied. • Surveys are unreliable. • Negative experience lowers expectations, but positive is considered accident. • General taps ideology, specific taps pragmatism. • Regulation is opposed. • Contractors are conflicted.

15. The Public’s Evaluation of Public Administration

16. The Public’s Evaluation of Public Administration

17. Public Administrative Perspectives on the Public • Traditional managerial approach. • Maximization efficiency, effectiveness, and economy. Result: depersonalization. • Ombudsman. • Cost effectiveness of public-administrator interaction. • Avoid burden shift of costs to public.

18. Public Administrative Perspectives on the Public • NPM approach. • Public as customers. • Surveys and benchmarking from private sector. • Downplays utility of traditional political channels. • Clients may not have same preferences as whole public. • Political systems have barriers to majority preferences. • How do you identify which customers to satisfy? • Identifying customers can be thorny issue.

19. Public Administrative Perspectives on the Public • NPM (New Public Management) approach. • Contractors as partners in service and goods delivery. • Shift regulations from rules to guiding principles. • Out-sourcing.

20. Public Administrative Perspectives on the Public • Political approach to the public. • Emphasizes values of representation, responsiveness, and accountability. • Premium on participation. • Lack of participation reduces responsiveness and representativeness. • Nonparticipation reduces civic obligation. • Nonparticipation produces ignorance. • Nonparticipation increases alienation. • Participation promotes community. • Participation promotes legitimacy.

21. Public Administrative Perspectives on the Public • Political approach to the public. • Direct participation. • Public school governance. • Agricultural administration. • Environmental administration. • Client-centered administration. • Advocates for their clients. • Coproduction • Joint provision of services by agency and client.

22. Public Administrative Perspectives on the Public • Political approach to the public. • Public interest groups. • Seeking public goods.

23. Public Administrative Perspectives on the Public • Legal approach to the public. • Seeks to assure individual’s constitutional and statutory rights. • Administrative hearings. • Street-level contacts. • Judicial oversight.

24. Synthesis • Service. • Transformation from clients to customers. • Therapy. • Requires a more client-oriented, participatory approach. • Regulation. • Traditional managerial perspective influenced by legalistic considerations.

25. Synthesis • Litigation and street-level encounters. • Informed by values of the legal approach. • Participation. • Dominated by political perspective with some overlay from service and therapy.

26. Readings: Richard J. Stillman, Public Administration, Concepts and Cases, 9th edition Coursepack, POSC 430 – available at www.csulb.edu/~cdennis (click on “Courses”)

27. Grading Each of the following: 1 – a series of unannounced quizzes over the readings; 2 – your cumulative score on all facets of the term paper; 3 – a comprehensive final exam.

28. Utilize Me!! Office Hours: Monday and Wednesday – 8:45-9:25; 2:00-2:30 in SPA – 227 Phone Office Hours: Call me at home on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 2:00-5:30 at (562) 597-7287 I don’t return phone calls. Phoning is MUCH BETTER than email. Talking is faster and easier than typing. Also, I need to ask you questions.

29. Political Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is what government does. • As a profession, public administration has developed values and ethical standards, but as an activity it merely reflects the cultural norms, beliefs, and power realities of its society. • Public administration is the totality of the working day activities of all the world’s bureaucrats – whether they are legal or illegal, competent or incompetent, decent or despicable.

30. Political Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is both direct and indirect. • Direct – provision of services like mortgage insurance, mail delivery, and electricity. • Indirect – when the government pays private contractors to provide goods and services to citizens (space shuttle, dams).

31. Political Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is a phase in the policy-making cycle. • Decisions and nondecisions are public policy. • Administration does not end with implementation because someone will always think it can be done better.

32. Political Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is implementing the public interest. • The public interest is the universal label in which political actors wrap the policies and programs that they advocate. • The public interest is a commonly accepted good. • The rise of administrative discretion in the face of legislative vagueness means that the job of the anonymous administrator is to define the public interest.

33. Political Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is doing collectively that which cannot be done so well individually. • The legitimate object of government [is] to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities – Abraham Lincoln. • Twentieth century communications has given rise to “a revolution of rising expectations.”

34. Legal Definitions of Public Administration • Because public administration is what a state does, it is both created and bound by an instrument of the law. • Public administration is the law in action. • Public administration is inherently the execution of a public law. • Every application of a general law is necessarily an act of administration. • In the United States, the Constitution of 1787 is the law of the land. All legislation must conform.

35. Legal Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is regulation. • It is government telling citizens and businesses what they may or may not do. • Regulation is one of the oldest functions of government. Code of Hammurabi – “The mason who builds a house which falls down and kills the inmate shall be put to death.” Driving to McDonald’s – regulation.

36. Legal Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is the king’s largesse. • It is whatever goods, services, or honors the ruling authority decides to bestow (monarchy). Plaques and political machines.

37. Legal Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is theft. • The primary culprit is redistribution. • Ayn Rand – the only proper function of the government of a free country is to act as an agency which protects the individual’s rights. • John Kenneth Galbraith – It is a simple matter of arithmetic that change may be costly to the man who has something; it cannot be so to the man who has nothing.

38. Managerial Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is so much a branch of management that many graduate schools of management (or business or administration) are divided into public and private – and now increasingly nonprofit – programs.

39. Managerial Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is the executive function of government. • Government agencies put into practice legislative acts that represent the will of the people.

40. Managerial Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is a management specialty. • Top managers make the big decisions and are responsible for the overall success of the organization. • Public administrators are found in middle management, the group responsible for the execution and interpretation of top management policies and the day-to-day operation of an organizational unit.

41. Managerial Definitions of Public Administration • Anything that requires considerable effort with few results. • Often used to mean “red tape”, excessive formality and attention to routine. Red ribbon that official used to use to tie up public documents. • Use because they promote efficiency and equity overall, although not always in individual cases.

42. Managerial Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is art, not science – or vice versa. • Public administration is actually both. • It requires judgment, panache, and common sense. • It also requires technical skills that allow for the digestion and transference of information. • Just because you have the academic credentials does not mean that you can function as a high level administrator.

43. Occupational Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is an occupational category. • It is whatever public employees in the world do. • Most of the 18,000,000 public employees in the U.S. would not describe themselves as administrators, but they are.

44. Occupational Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is an essay contest. • People in bureaucratic careers tend to rise and fall on how well they can write. In a game of shuffling paper, the person whose memorandum ends up on top wins. • Oral presentations are also useful, but writing is more decisive.

45. Occupational Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is idealism in action. • Many people enter public service careers because they are idealists; they believe in and seek to advance noble principles. • Idealism draws people into public administration because it provides them with worthwhile and exciting things to do with their lives.

46. Occupational Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is an academic field. • The study of the art and science of management and incorporates as its subject matter all of the political, social, cultural, and legal environments that affect the running of public institutions. • Cross-disciplinary – political science, sociology, business administration, psychology, law, anthropology, medicine, forestry, and so on.

47. Occupational Definitions of Public Administration • Public administration is a profession. • A body of academic and practical knowledge that is applied to the service of society. • A standard of success theoretically measured by serving the needs of society rather than seeking purely personal gain. • A system of control over the professional practice that regulates the education of new members and maintains both a code of ethics and appropriate sanctions.

48. The Evolution of Public Administration • The core content • Organization theory. • Bureaucratic behavior. • Personnel management. • Public finance and budgeting. • Policy analysis. • Program evaluation. • Administrative ethics.

49. Case Study: Government Response to the Destruction of the World Trade Center

50. September 11, 2001 • American Airlines Flight 11(8:46 a.m., One World Trade Center) and United Airlines Flight 175 (9:03 a.m., Two World Trade Center). • Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. • Richard Sheirer, Director, New York City Office of Emergency Services. • Activated Emergency Operations Center, 7 World Trade Center. • Closed all roads below Canal Street and all tunnels and bridges.