Postmodern Public Administration

Hugh T Miller, Hugh T. Miller, Charles J Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317478423
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

This widely acclaimed work provides a lively counterbalance to the standard assessment-measurement-accountability prescriptions that have made showing you did your job more important than actually doing it. Now extensively revised, it articulates a postmodern theory of public administration that challenges the field to redirect its attention away from narrow, technique-oriented scientism, and toward democratic openness and ethics. The authors incorporate insights from thinkers like Rorty, Giddens, Derrida, and Foucault to recast public administration as an arena of decentered practices. In their framework, ideographic collisions and everyday impasses bring about political events that challenge the status quo, creating possibilities for social change. "Postmodern Public Administration" is an outstanding intellectual achievement that has rewritten the political theory of public administration. This new edition will encourage everyone who reads it to think quite differently about democratic governance.

1

The Representative Democratic Accountability Feedback Loop

Orthodoxy

As an acceptable model of governance, orthodoxy is dead. Orthodoxy (Waldo 1948/2006) was that enduring prescription of neutral public administration ascribed in the literature to Wilson (separation of politics and administration), Taylor (scientific management), and Weber (hierarchical control). Orthodoxy, at its high point in the decades surrounding World War II, was a manifestation of the period that recent philosophers have identified as high modernism. We are referring to that point in time when the industrial economy matured and the ideology of technocracy and electoral-style procedural democracy prevailed in culture and politics, a period sometimes called “the American Century.”

Since then, orthodoxy has died a thousand deaths, by a thousand cuts. The ever-apparent discretion exercised by administrators in policy formulation—not only implementation—makes a mockery of the Wilsonian dichotomy. Taylorism has been savaged by at least three generations of human relations social psychologists. The effort to sublimate political conflict into technical-rational domains was only sometimes successful. Strict chain-of-command hierarchy has been challenged by humanistic management practices, Japanese management theory, and participative decision making.

Despite its death and regardless of the eager academic pallbearers, the spirit of orthodoxy hovers over the study of public administration, insinuating itself in all theories of governance and in every actual public agency. Orthodoxy now has the status of legitimizing myth. It is the background assumption of all mainstream reform efforts. The contours of orthodoxy continue to shape the modules and sequencing of academic curricula. Reform efforts seek not to go beyond orthodoxy, but to resuscitate it by making it still more efficient, rational, scientific, and/or progressive.

Uniquely, the field of public administration is poised between, on one side, the theoretical endeavors of political science, philosophy, economics, organization theory, sociology, and social psychology, and, on the other, the daily practice of governance. Public administration scholarship is well positioned to bury orthodoxy and propose alternatives to it. Because academic public administrationists find themselves between practice and theory—we have been charged to educate the governors—we have direct knowledge of the maladies of orthodoxy.

The separation of politics from administration has been retheorized in countless essays since Waldo’s Administrative State, but the representative democratic accountability feedback loop model blocks access to alternative democratic formulations of an administrative state. One of the paradoxical difficulties of the loop model of democracy is that the incessant demand for empirical verification and democratic accountability leads to the utter detachment of politics from democratic reality. As cynicism increases, managerial solutions deepen the problem. But first, what do we mean by the representative democratic accountability feedback loop?

The Loop Model of Democracy

It is widely assumed that in the United States the people are sovereign. Policy reflects their wishes. The majoritarian model of democracy is supposed to work like this:

1. The people are aware of what they want or need.

2. Competing candidates (or parties) for electoral office—political entrepreneurs—offer alternative packages of wants or needs that can be satisfied by particular methods.

3. People choose a representative by voting for which alternative package seems to best match their preferences.

4. Coalitions of winning entrepreneurs pass laws reflecting the people’s choice.

5. A vigilant populace pays enough attention to the process and the results to judge the elected representatives as either successful or wanting.

6. If satisfied with the results, people will reward incumbents with their votes; if unsatisfied, they will vote for alternative entrepreneurs offering alternative packages.

Although less purely democratic than direct democracy, in which the people would both make and implement policy (government of the people and by the people), the above process is often judged to be the best we can get in a complex mass society (see Bachrach 1967). Although others act for the people, they are accountable to the people through the ballot box. The ballot symbolizes the political side of the politics-administration dichotomy. On the administration side are hierarchy and chain of command, enabling elected officials to both control nonelected career officials and superintend their carrying out of the people’s will. Administrators must be neutral, malleable tools so that elected officials, who embody the will of the people, can have their way and be held accountable by the people for whatever does or does not get done.

Representation as Democracy

Among political systems, representation serves a parallel function in service to accountability: a promise of faithfulness to the democratic sovereign, the people. In this discourse, key terms supporting this promise of democratic faithfulness include majority, vote, election, legislature, and constitution. Policy reflects the wishes of the sovereign people.

The democratic overhead loop model presupposes the empirical presence of the people—but this is a highly problematic presupposition (Catlaw 2005). The phrase the people masks the radical absence of any such monistic aggregation, of any such consensus. Instead, there are multiple perspectives, multiple interests, and vast fields of conflict (Miller 2002).

Different types and intensities of conflict are expressed on multiple playing fields of public policy. Some conflict occurs against a background of subgroup consensus in a narrowly constituted policy community, and may be low intensity. At the other extreme, we might find broad-based ideological conflict over the role of government. Lowi’s (1964) classic article on policy arenas made this point aptly, and amendments to it have sharpened the analysis. Players in the policy process petition government not only about grievances, but also for largesse. Terms such as military-industrial complex, iron triangles, pork-barrel politics, and policy community capture the closed nature of everyday policymaking, directing the eye toward the particularistic and narrow perspectives that cannot credibly be said to be fundamentally concerned with the public interest.

Analyses in public administration/policy typically take for granted the legitimacy and functional success of the loop model, and further assume that elected officials represent the people in a nonproblematic way. But the robustness of venerable values such as the public interest, the common good, or the people’s will, as manifest in actions by the sovereign (represented by elected officials) now seems flabby and spongy. The loop is yielding some ground after years of criticism. It is too-readily apparent that particularistic policy actors dominate everyday, outside-the-limelight policymaking, and their interests only coincidentally embody less particular interests that would gesture more vigorously toward the common good (McConnell 1966).

The common good is not thereby rendered a futile concept. To the contrary, it is especially useful in conceptualizing “tragedy-of-the-commons”-type problems (Hardin 1968) in which community-regarding actions are undermined by self-regarding actions; useful, too, in public policy considerations such as common defense, old age insurance, health insurance, or unemployment insurance. On the other hand, many policy institutions allude to the name of the public interest while advancing particularistic interests. Defense contractors are notorious for this, but it is also notable that the food stamp program gets its political wherewithal not from poor people, but from agribusiness and grocers. The Food and Nutrition Service, which administers the program, is located in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Critiques of these aspects of particularistic, insider government have been standard for quite some time (see Fritschler 1975). The criticism we are offering is directed at systemic presuppositions. The complex web of relationships invoked by the network metaphor, privatization, interagency task forces, representative bureaucracy, or open-system organizations creates large problems for the sovereignty of the people. With knowledge as their key resource, public administrators and policy implementers lead others to value their expertise and understanding of important dimensions of the problem. Knowledgeable people, along with others in need of answers, join efforts and work together. In the process of interaction and reciprocal influence, the issues become clarified, relevant evidence is shared and debated, and alternative solutions are proposed.

These trends are not always favorably acknowledged. Lowi (1969) calls for a return to a formal, representative democracy, expressing a desire to reestablish the rights of the legislature. But the ever-increasing evidence of extraformal political dynamics reflects a desire for say-so in public policy debates, formalities notwithstanding. It would be hard to claim, any more, that these informal dynamics that operate in policymaking processes are a new phenomenon. Throughout the policymaking apparatus of government, collections of issue-conscious groups influence policy in a complex system of interrelationships. They have absconded with the sovereignty of “the people.” Public policy studies and public administration theory are at a reckoning point; the democratic arbiter has been reduced to a quotation-mark-bracketed shell of a political sovereign (“the people”).

The loop model, like a leaky bucket, fails to deliver the whole order. Public policy is subject to much more diffuse and multilateral influences than can be explained by the electoral democratic accountability loop. The name of the game is representation; yet symbolization has made off with the ball, the net, and the playing field.

Evidence That the Loop Model Is Mythical

Certain unpleasant realities of contemporary American political life place the electoral democratic accountability loop in doubt (see Pateman 1970). By the numbers:

1. The wants and needs of the people are, by and large, manipulated. There is no independent, popular will formation. News media, especially the electronic media from which most of the population gets its information, are managed more with an eye to entertain and titillate, to grab attention and sell air time to advertisers, than to politically inform.

2. Candidates for office rarely compete on the basis of complex policy alternatives. Image is much more important than substance. On campaign staffs, public relations gurus, advertising consultants, and style coaches are more important than policy analysts.

3. People do not vote for candidates on the basis of specific public policies, rationally considered. Majorities of the people often do not vote at all. Even if they did, a single-district, winner-take-all, two-party electoral system is an extremely blunt instrument for registering the people’s specific policy preferences (Duverger 1954; Page and Brody 1972; and see Prewitt 1970, on voters’ ineffectiveness in municipal elections). It is highly unlikely that a particular politician represents a particular constituent across the entire panoply of complex issues facing the nation. Single-issue voting further decreases the likelihood that the daily votes of legislators are inspired by the discipline of the electoral process. Those with more than one interest might get what they want on abortion or gun control, but not on capital gains or farm support. Indeed, it is mathematically impossible for “the people” to be represented on the entire concatenation of issues that affect their lives when choice is forced through the binary centrist narrows of our electoral system.

4. After elections, coalitions of political entrepreneurs are more likely to be influenced by lobbyists, special interest associations, and close-knit policy communities; the pressure group system is bolstered by the politician-entrepreneur’s need for campaign contributions, speaking honoraria, or well-funded ad campaigns (Blumenthal 1980). Nor does voting on the basis of party assure particular policy stances. Coalitions that do momentarily gel produce incoherent policy because they are contrived contingently to attract a legislative majority. Ambiguous, contradictory, and confused mandates will then plague the bureaucracy as it tries to figure out which politically generated command to neutrally implement.

5. If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, only radio talk show hosts seem willing to pay it. Americans frequently do not know their representatives’ names, much less their positions and their policy successes or failures. Vigilance is a thirty-second TV spot excoriating opponents out of context.

6. It does not seem to matter that people are generally dissatisfied with the performance of Congress; they will still reelect their own members. Instead, calls for term limits resonate across the electorate.

The above examples are drawn from the sphere of national politics in the United States, but we assert that most state and local politics also fit the generalization. State and local electoral politics are virtually devoid of competition on specific policy initiatives. City council elections are fought over who is the best “family man.” Many local governmental units in mass suburbia have been captured by various factions of real estate developer interests, if not by the local economic powerhouse.

Now, we do not want to be interpreted as asserting that because the loop leaks at every joint, and electoral politics is but symbolism removed from political events, that therefore there is no democratic accountability in the United States. We would not go quite that far in our critique. We do want to maintain that politics and public policy are subject to much more diffuse and multilateral influences than can be explained by the electoral democratic accountability loop. We also maintain that, along with the political insider influences rehearsed above, democracy flows from either side of the politics/administration dichotomy (which now should be thought of as a heuristic device). Robert Dahl (1971) and Charles Lindblom (1977) have insisted that this system be called polyarchy instead of democracy.

If policy directives do not flow in a direct channel from the people through elected officials, what of the otherwise unjustifiable top-down command structure that characterizes most public administration? This command-and-control apparatus has been imposed on public administration practice in the name of the sovereign people, but when the loop fails or is connected to interests other than the people, the command structure loses much of its reason for being. If the above analysis is even partly accurate, the people’s name is being taken in vain.

The Folly of Binding Behavior by Writing Rules

The staying power of classical orthodoxy is attributable to its logical...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Representative Democratic Accountability Feedback Loop
• 2. Alternatives to Orthodoxy
• 3. Hyperreality
• 4. The Social Construction of Government
• 5. Ideographic Discourse
• 6. Conclusion
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Authors