Public Affairs and Democratic Ideals

Critical Perspectives in an Era of Political and Economic Uncertainty

Curtis Ventriss

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438481265
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We live in an era where many citizens feel increasingly uncertain about their futures, having to deal with stagnant wages, globalization, and wealth and income inequality, while, at the same time, policymakers appear unable or unwilling to reach any viable policy consensus on a wide range of major issues. Public Affairs and Democratic Ideals addresses these vexing conditions and the challenge they pose for public management and administration. Curtis Ventriss argues for reordering intellectual and policy priorities with a focus on publicness and the role of critical democratic thought in public affairs. Too often, the assumptions that underlie the prevailing theory and practice of addressing major political and economic problems remain unquestioned, with economic and political conflicts displaced into issues of administration and leadership. Ventriss calls for a reinvigorated notion of publicness based, in part, on a public social science, civic experimentation, and policies designed and tailored to the unique needs of various publics. As a way to move forward, this book offers ideas for redefining professionalism, promoting civic initiatives, and rethinking professional education for public service.

1

Introduction

Our participatory model of politics, and the ethic of “publicness” that undergirds it, is at a crossroads. In Strong Democracy, Benjamin Barber calls for a revised understanding of citizenship in response to this crisis. His concept “rests on the idea of a self-governing community of citizens who are united less by homogeneous interests than by civic education and who are made capable of common purpose and mutual action by virtue of their civic attitudes and participatory institutions rather than their altruism or their good nature” (1984, p. 117). Three decades later, Barber’s call retains its urgent relevance.

It is particularly interesting that Barber framed this bold assertion without the slightest hint of self-doubt concerning its intrinsic political validity. Barber’s celebratory tone clashes with the tenor of much writing in contemporary public policy; yet, I find it both welcome and warranted. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, there is an uneasy tension in America between the exaltation of the market ethos (or more broadly, the ideal of individualism, the more rugged the better), while, at the same time, a genuine yearning for a sense of community sustained by strong civic-minded instincts. In the context of twenty-first-century globalization, this tension has flourished and spread. Following on de Tocqueville’s observations, I suspect that many, if not most social science scholars and practitioners would find Barber’s assertion unrealistic in its political objectives, and utopian in its societal expectations, especially in the rough and ready world of global (and domestic) politics. These are legitimate reservations, but they ignore what Irving Howe (1984, p. 138) so eloquently articulated, in a manner both somber and optimistic, that still resonates with me:

Today, in an age of curdled realism, it is necessary to assert the utopian image. But this can be done meaningfully only if it is an image of social striving, tension, conflict; an image of a problem-creating and problem-solving society.

Howe’s 1984 statement identifies a worrying trend—the discouragement of meaningful critique of political powers and mores by our overarching structures of governance—prescient on both ends of the political spectrum. Recently, for example, some have argued that American conservatism itself has lost its way by focusing on only one overriding concern: “[s]eeking advantage over our opponents, [which has] poisoned the civic foundation from which we all drink, with predictable results” (Flake, 2017, p. 94). At the same time, American liberalism is increasingly criticized for its unwillingness to tolerate ideological tension within the institutions where it reigns supreme, particularly university campuses (Stephens, 2017). This trend is worth pondering in that it is fair to assume that we teach and conduct research in public affairs (and in the broader social sciences) with the main purpose to nurture the ideals of a democratic ethos in an effort to better understand and resolve the major societal issues of the day. This rationale is predicated on another assumption that often goes unspoken: that social conflict represents, to large degree, a fundamental failure in policy design, implementation, and management, rather than the broader political contradictions and economic tensions condensed in the existing societal arrangements of political power. Not surprisingly, there has been an ongoing debate on how best to achieve the goals of managerial effectiveness and policy efficacy given that it relates directly to the raison d’être of public policy and public management/administration. However, I argue that too many scholars of both fields writing since the 1980s, have been content to take primarily a managerial and analytical perspective, which has undoubtedly advanced our knowledge and practice of public affairs. Likewise, many others have emphasized the varying normative aspects of public affairs in teasing out the philosophical implications (and ideals) of policy objectives. Regardless of the different approaches pursued and their respective validity in providing crucial insights, the current culture of both fields prompts us to contend that scholars and practitioners have, for the most part, become increasingly cautious in choosing the questions we believe are important to explore. That is, the questions posed have become ever more narrow and pedestrian, leaving untouched the “domain assumptions,” as Alvin Gouldner (1970) called them, that underlie the theoretical and pragmatic foundations of both public policy and public management/administration. This penchant can be seen in the paucity of recent scholarship exploring the relationship of public management and public policy with the modern state, and the inherent tensions of such a relationship. This tension, in part, is due to the theoretical uneasiness of the politics and administration dictotomy that continues to haunt both fields. After all, many in both fields would contend that we are at our best only when addressing primarily administrative questions central to the efficient functioning of the modern state. This book responds to these emergent norms by asking this crucial question: Are we as scholars of public management/administration and public policy willing to question the arrangements of modern power and governance under which we operate? By deemphasizing this question and its implications, we run the risk of both fields becoming nothing more than a legalistic, managerial, economic mode of inquiry with a procedural emphasis. To be sure, some might insist that this is precisely the role both fields should play in societal affairs. Generally speaking, I do not entirely disagree with this view. My contention is that we need to be something more in this time of political estrangement, polarization, and unequal democracy (Bartels, 2016).

To put this question in more provocative terms, does the relationship between public policy and public management/administration and the modern state inhibit the exploration of certain theoretical issues as politically infeasible and too controversial to pursue? To continue this same point but in a somewhat different direction, does the focus on professionalism—as critical as it is in an era of heightened politicized partisanship—carry with it potentially deleterious consequences that may erode democratic values considered pivotal in educating future policy analysts and public managers? Finally, and perhaps the most controversial point of all, have we in public policy and public management/administration—regardless of our empirical sophistication in analyzing complex social problems (and our confidence in doing this consistently in a rigorous manner)—become an intricate part of “a disguised normative dimension of the established power configuration” (Ramos, 1981, p. 4) and, knowingly or unknowingly, a managerial instrument of what some have referred to as a “good” techno-governance system (Mouffe, 2005; Dean, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2011; Purcell, 2008)? All of these questions are a reminder of Robert Lynd’s polemic observation, in the classic work Knowledge for What (1939, pp. 125–126), that the social scientists should never be afraid “to be troublesome, to disconcert the habitual arrangements by which to live along, and to demonstrate the possibilities of change in more adequate directions.”As cynical as these concerns may seem, and as understandably disconcerting, they nonetheless represent a cogent reminder of a point once made by John Dos Passos (1936), the novelist, who asserted that “the greatest enemy of intelligence is theoretical complacency.”

These assertions (and questions) alone should give us pause to reconsider some fundamental issues that go to the heart of public policy and public management/administration. However, recent events throughout a good portion of the developed world have added another level of complexity to these questions. Some academic critics of modern public affairs have questioned both whether the focus on policy analysis has caused us to deemphasize normative questions and whether the incessant emphasize on empiricist/positivist approaches can lead to naive inductivism (Andreski, 1972). And, as this debate is taking place in academic circles, many societies face a populist backlash (Moffitt, 2016) with critics from primarily outside academia questioning whether the detached, professional public analyst/administrator works for the broader public interest.

These recent complications of the relationship between the social sciences and the public especially highlight that we call ourselves “public” policy and “public” management/administration. In fact, until recently the concept of publicness (and its changing meaning over time) did not attract much intellectual attention in our theoretical and professional discussions (Stivers, 2010; Natabachi, 2010; Ventriss, 1987). After all, as argued in the chapters that follow, those of us who study and practice public affairs put the word public first not merely for semantic reasons, but rather because it conveys, or should convey, some salient ethical and societal implications for what we seek to achieve in the broader social context.

When I first raised this point (Ventriss, 1987), my focus was on the development of a theory of the public—a reconceptualization of the meaning of publicness. Yet the notion of the public was—and remains—a concept fraught with inherent theoretical ambiguity (Ventriss, 1987; Pesch, 2008). I anchored the idea of publicness predominantly in John Dewey’s terms; that is, as an integral aspect of the citizenry’s capacity and maturity in understanding the interactive societal consequences of public actions on others. Since that time there has been an emerging debate on what might constitute the meaning of “publicness” and what it implies for both public policy, public management/administration, and public affairs in general (Pesch, 2005, 2008; Bozeman & Bretschneider, 1994; Haque, 2001; Frederickson, 1997; Barnes, Newman, Knops, & Sullivan, 2003; Low & Smith, 2005; Moulton, 2009; Williams & Shearer, 2011; Nabatchi, 2011). Irrespective of the varying theoretical perspectives taken on this concept, I maintain (as I will make clear in this book) that publicness denotes something more than a concept coterminous with the role of the modern state, or a term so amorphous that it lacks any viable guide to how we should proceed on important policy matters. Instead, publicness is fundamentally an adherence to democratic ideals and democratic aspirations epitomizing the following general characteristics: (1) publicness is inherently a process of civic responsibility, consistent with Richard Flathman’s (1989) conception of high citizenship, that is, an inclusive critical learning process involving a network of different publics sharing crucial information in initiating and debating public action and, more important, critically examining the substantive impact of policy actions on others; (2) publicness also directly implies a responsibility for those in public policy and public management/administration in sorting out and exposing the misinformation and distortion of crucial data that can obscure the normative impact of certain policies on the citizenry (Stone, 2012); (3) publicness acknowledges the central validity of citizen dissent, or other venues of constructive public contestation, in publicly expressing concerns about unequal influence and societal impacts in the policy process, especially in this era of political and economic uncertainty; (4) publicness refers to the notion that, given there are so many “publics” in society, it is crucial to experiment with policies that are nonaggregate, that is, publicness requires the importance of including the unique and particularized knowledge of different publics into the policy process congruent to public service values; and finally, (5) in the face of the rise of pseudo-democratic populism often indifferent to factual information, a revigorated view of publicness is called for in confronting, among other things, the perils of interest-group liberalism and the growing distrust of governmental institutions. This later point will be discussed at length in subsequent chapters of this book.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of what could be considered as publicness and its relevance to those who practice and study public policy and public management/administration. However, I contend this approach to publicness can loosen, or at least weaken, the strong grip of an instrumental rationality and a market mentality that hovers over the theoretical landscape of public affairs. It is not claimed here that publicness would, or should, replace the value of other conceptual perspectives on public matters. Rather, a focus on publicness would demonstrate, and hopefully clarify, the limitations of these other perspectives. In short, it would have us refocus our role more attentively to the broader substantive obligations of those powerful residual political and economic conditions contributing to what David Harvey (1996) described as “parochialist politics” and “political passivity.” To many, this may sound not only pretentious to our modern pragmatic ears, but as an invitation to a Sisyphean exercise in intellectual futility. No doubt, this intellectual endeavor will not be easy. Nevertheless, this new theoretical and pragmatic trajectory could be crucial in facilitating a “problem-solving” approach emphasized earlier by Irving Howe. This book is written to move us closer to reinvigorating publicness in this era of political and economic uncerainty with all the inevitable theoretical twists and turns that are bound to happen in this intellectual journey.

Some might argue that neglect of the theoretical underpinnings of publicness is hardly surprising given that public policy, and in particular public management/administration, have little theoretical coherency to speak of. As Iain Gow puts it, “The field has a hard time getting respect from academic colleagues in the social sciences” (2010, p. 31). This has especially been the case relative to political science, which has often criticized the field for being atheoretical; focused on applied empirical research meant to improve governance, rather than theory testing about governance. Gow has dismissed these discussions, accepted that “[l]a science administrative est une science empirique par excellence” (1993, p. 87), and has termed this “pragmatic institutionalism.” The term nicely combines the emphasis on structure (institutionalism) and technique (pragmatism) in a single paradigm, and identifies this, for example, as “the default position in public affairs [and public policy] in Canada” (p. 10). He describes this paradigm as focused on being “comprehensive and accurate, to ‘get it right’ ” (p. 5).

However, for many scholars in public affairs, this pragmatic, intellectual mosaic of different disciplines, while commendable in this age of specialization, has especially taken its scholarly toll on the reputation of public administration/management. But truth be told, both intellectual enterprises (with a few exceptions who argue for a more critical perspective) suffer from a conceptual parochialism and intellectual ambivalence that has left theoretically untouched the Hobbesian/Lockean mentality in modern politics and the consequential residue of possessive individualism which continues to run rampant through our political veins (Macpherson, 1973). Public policy and public management/administration are, of course, historically and contextually specific to the country in which they are practiced and theorized. Even given this reality, a serious debate needs to emerge—a point I emphasize in many of these chapters—about the ideological, political, and economic forces that coalesce into a managerial consensual governing system that essentially undermines the consideration of different ways of incorporating democratic processes into community life (Ranciere, 1999). Peter Bachrach (1967, p. 99) correctly emphasized that what we face in modern politics is an uncomfortable Hobson’s choice: “a theory which is normatively sound but unrealistic, or a theory which is realistic but heavily skewed toward elitism.” While this theoretical dichotomy is admittedly overstated, this book echoes an approach that Foucault (in Simon, 1971, p. 201) emphasized:

What I am trying to do is grasp the implicit systems of thought which determine our most familiar behavior without our knowing it. I am trying to find their origins, to show their formation, the constraint they impose upon us …

Inspirations and Areas of Inquiry

This book builds on the ideas of many preeminent scholars, and in this respect particular attention is owed to Alberto Guerreiro Ramos. At least three of his works, The New Science of Organizations: A Reconceptualization of the Wealth of Nations (1981), A Reducao Sociologica (1958), and the essay Patologia Social do Branco Brasiseiro (1955), serve as a springboard for my argument. Guerreiro Ramos was one of the earliest scholars to point to the risks of a social science that took homo economicus as its referent. A solution that he offered was to recognize the importance of nonmarket settings in which people could pursue other, nonmaterialist interests. As a result, Guerreiro Ramos criticized both mainstream public policy and public management/administration (and social science) as reluctant, or more accurately, intellectually unwilling to comprehend the irreconcilable conflict between instrumental rationality and substantive rationality, and the consequential implications of this tension on the body politic.

In light of the increasingly narrow scope of both fields that I have mentioned earlier in this introduction, it should come as no surprise that many have responded coldly to Guerreiro Ramos’s thinking, with theoretical dismay or even “polite” neglect of his scholarship. This reception is primarily because, in Guerreiro Ramos’s typical sharply edged polemic tone, he criticized the conventional scholarship in public affairs as indulging in a theoretical self-deception camouflaged by a ubiquitous market ideology which has shaped the manner in which we formulate, define, and design policy approaches, points also echoed by Crouch (2004, 2011). That these trends persist despite nearly a half-century of critique, and do not necessarily command the respect of public affair scholars and practitioners, illustrates the intellectual malaise that this book aims to address.

It is, to reemphasize, not my purpose in this book to elucidate all the various nuances of Guerreiro Ramos’s thinking on political and administrative matters. Rather, it is to point out that Guerreiro Ramos tried, in his own way, to awaken us from our intellectual complacency and theoretical timidity—and, judging from where we are today, he has largely failed. This raises the question: What additional perspectives can we in public affairs bring to theory and practice to reinvigorate contemporary governance and participatory politics? Much like John Stuart Mill, Guerreiro Ramos reiterated the necessity of continuously scrutinizing the presuppositions of policy issues, thinking this intellectual posture could foster both a moral alertness and a more vibrant notion of “publicness.” As an Afro-Brasileiro scholar and public official growing up in highly segregated Brazil, he was keenly aware of those forces of political domination, both subtle and explicit, that can emerge in society and, just as important, what can occur when such forces are ignored and/or unchallenged. While I disagree strongly with many aspects of Ramos’s major arguments and his theoretical contentions (which will be explored later in the book), he did posit the need for theoretically unpacking, so to speak, the hegemony of deeply embedded belief systems that are often glossed over in our theoretical and pragmatic considerations of policy ends. The intellectual malaise, Ramos tells us, facing specifically public policy and public management/administration is not the result, as Udo Pesch (2008) has enumerated, of trying to reconcile various meanings of publicness or the inevitability of seeing publicness as an intrinsically ambiguous concept. The real issue, he emphasized, is how the notion of publicness itself has been eclipsed and distorted by “cognitive politics” (Guerreiro Ramos’s term), which “consists in a conscious or unconsciousness use of distorted language, the intent of which is to induce people to interpret reality in terms that reward it direct and/or indirect agents of such distortion” (1981, p. 76).

In many respects, Ramos’s conception of publicness is foundational to my own argument. Putting aside this awkward phrasing, Guerreiro Ramos illuminates a poignant issue missing in most of the literature in public affairs: that cognitive politics, in a chameleon-like fashion, has undercut the intellectual integrity of public policy and public management/administration—and much of the social sciences. This has resulted, in large part, in the legitimization of “the expansion of economizing organizations beyond their specific contextual boundaries by practicing a misplaced and mistaken humanism” (1981, p. 84). These fields, in other words, have become a mode of social inquiry peculiarly vulnerable to a utilitarian mind-set displacing social conflict and public dissent into new governance systems such as collaborative policy networks, participatory strategies, benchmarking for performance, or in new and revised managerial and policy strategies. Although these approaches are initiated for laudable reasons and are praised for their contributions to public affairs, little attention has gone into what this displacement means for our theoretical development and intellectual agenda. This neglect, Guerreiro Ramos would argue, has come, unfortunately, with a hefty intel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Section 1: The Importance of Publicness and Critical Democratic Thought
• Section 2: Contemporary Challenges
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover