ADMINISTRATIVE LAW AND JUDICIAL REVIEW – THE PRACTICAL EFFECTS QF DEVELOPMENTS OVER THE LAST 25 YEARS ON ADMINISTRATION IN CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

The writer of this article served in the legal civil service from 1951–1984, mainly in the Board of Trade and its successor departments but from 1980–1984 as Treasury Solicitor. The article reflects his personal views based on this experience. Its theme is that, although access to the courts has been made easier for the citizen aggrieved by an administrative decision, and court procedure has been greatly improved, the course of administration has been less dramatically affected – in fact little, if at all, by some important earlier cases. Nevertheless the spirit of administrative law is now becoming more widely diffused, the areas which are not subject to review are becoming less and a number of specific doctrines have been developed which affect administration. The following are particularly emphasized: (1) the courts’restrictive view of the ‘Wednesbury’ doctrine and their tendency to find other grounds to overide decisions which they find objectionable or unreasonable – a tendency which causes real administrative difficulty; (2) the recently enunciated doctrine of legitimate expectation whose limits are uncertain but which may have considerable effect on administration in future; and (3) the requirement that a person affected by a policy should be given an opportunity to show that he is a special case. Finally the writer has to emphasize that his personal experience ended in August 1984 when he retired. In a large organization such as the civil service a change of ethos is slow. He is assured by some, particularly Mr John Bailey cb , his successor as Treasury Solicitor, who has read this article in draft, that he understates the degree to which concepts of administrative law are infusing the whole spirit of administration, and even more directly, the short-term effects in individual departments such as the Department of the Environment which has been the subject of long-running campaigns directed by other bodies against it through the courts.     

T. H. GREEN AND THE ETHICS OF SENIOR OFFICIALS IN BRITISH CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

This article is an attempt to move away from microeconomics in the study of administration and to concentrate on British administrative ethics from a philosophical perspective. Thus, ethics is used here not in the sense of the ethics of managers dealing with accounts but as the ‘science’ of ranking moral values. The intention of the article is to examine how political theory can be used to help illustrate the dilemmas of public servants working in a climate which is distinctly hostile to disinterested ideals. The ideas of T. H. Green, the English Idealist philosopher who contributed so much to our understanding of public service, form the basis of the theoretical discussion, and the work of senior officials in Whitehall is the material used for illustrative purposes. Where do the loyalties of civil servants lie? What are their duties and responsibilities to ministers? To whom, for what, and how are civil servants accountable?     

HOW TRADITIONAL ARE THE AMERICAN,FRENCH AND GERMAN TRADITIONS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION? A RESEARCH AGENDA

Consistent with the notion of tradition, public administration scholars usually interpret and compare administrative developments in the US, France, and Germany as inheritance, assuming continuity. However, administrative traditions have thus far not been an object of systematic research. The present research agenda aims to address this research gap by introducing the transfer‐of‐ideas approach as a means to examine the empirical substance of national traditions. We claim that for current research, the benefits of this approach are twofold. First, the transfer‐of‐ideas approach contributes to comparative public administration since it reveals in how far intellectual traditions are hybrid instead of distinctively American, French or German developments. Second, the approach may help to address the polysemous meanings of and terminological difficulties within administrative concepts that prevail in Public Administration on both sides of the Atlantic.     

Welfare Administration Reform Between Coordination and Specialization

This article identifies transboundary coordination practices and related modes of specialization in welfare administration reforms. We describe how the 2005 reform of the welfare administration in Norway started as a process of integration involving merger and partnership, but later, following the 2008 reorganization, introduced re-centralization and re-specialization. The main research questions are how we can explain this change of administrative reform? Why was the integrative administrative reform not sustainable and reorganization through re-specialization seen as a better answer to the “wicked issues” of welfare services? To answer these questions we apply a structural-instrumental perspective and a cultural-institutional perspective.     

Leadership and innovation in the administrative state

The field of public administration, as well as the social science upon which it is based, has given little serious attention to the importance of vigorous leadership by career as well as non-career public administrators. The field tends to focus on the rigidities of political behavior and the obstacles to change. To reclaim an understanding of the importance of individual leadership the author suggests the use of biography and life history. The behavior and personality of the entrepreneur is an especially helpful perspective on the connection between leadership and organizational or institutional innovation. The case of Julius Henry Cohen, who played a pivotal role in the development of the New York Port Authority, is used to illustrate the connection between the entrepreneurial personality or perspective and innovation.

In the social sciences—and especially in the study of American political institutions—primary attention is given to the role of interest groups and to bureaucratic routines and other institutional processes that shape the behavior of executive agencies and legislative bodies. In view of the powerful and sustained pressures from these forces, the opportunities for leadership—to create new programs, to redirect individual agencies and broad policies, and to make a measurable impact in meeting social problems—are very limited. At least this is the message, implicit and often explicit, in the literature that shapes the common understanding of the professional scholar and the educated layperson in public affairs.⁽¹⁾ For administrative officials, captured (or cocooned) in the middle—or even at the top—of large bureaucratic agencies, the prospects for “making a difference” seem particularly unpromising. In his recent study of federal bureau chiefs, Herbert Kaufman expresses this view with clarity:… The chiefs did not pour out important decisions in a steady stream. Days sometimes went by without any choice of this kind emerging from their offices … If you need assurance that you labors will work enduring changes on policy of administrative behavior, you would do well to look elsewhere. ⁽²⁾

There are, of course, exceptions to these dominant patterns in the literature. In particular, political scientists and other scholars who study the American presidency or the behavior of other national leaders often treat these executives and their aides as highly significant actors in creating and reshaping public programs and social priorities. ⁽³⁾ However, based on a review of the literature and discussions with more than a dozen colleagues who teach in political science and related fields, the themes sketched out above represent with reasonable accuracy the dominant view in the social sciences.

The scholarly field of public administration is part of the social sciences, and the generalizations set forth above apply to writings in that field as well.⁽⁴⁾ (Indeed, Kaufman's book on federal bureau chiefs won the Brownlow Award, as the most significant volume in public administration in the year it was published.) Similarly, the argument regarding scholarly writing in the social sciences can be extended to the texts and books of reading used in courses in political science and public administration; what is in the scholarly works and the textbooks influences how we design our courses and what messages we convey in class. The provisional conclusion here, then, is that in courses as well as in writings the public administration field gives little attention to the importance of vigorous leadership—by career as well as noncareer administrators. Neither does it give much attention to the strategies of leadership that are available to overcome intellectual and political obstacles which impede the development and maintenance of coalitions which support innovative policies and programs.⁽⁵⁾

The further implication is that students learn from what we teach, directly and indirectly. Students who might otherwise respond enthusiastically to the opportunities and challenges of working on important social programs learn mainly from educators that there are many obstacles to change and that innovations tend to go awry.⁽⁶⁾ And there the education often stops, and the students go elsewhere, to the challenges of business or of law. Those students who remain to listen seem to be those more attracted to the stability of a career in budgeting or personnel management. Public administration needs these people, but not them alone. If career officials should have an active role in governance and if the general quality of the public service is to be raised, does it not require a wider range of young people entering the service—including those who are risk-takers, those who seek in working with others the exercise of “large powers”?

Taken as a class, or at least in small and middle-sized groups, scholars in the fields of public administration and political science tend to be optimistic in their outlook on the world. Informally, in talking with their colleagues, they tend to convey a sense that public agencies can do things better than the private sector, and they sometimes serve (even without pay) on task forces and advisory bodies that attempt to improve the “output” of specific programs and agencies and that at times make some modest steps in that direction. Why, then, do public administration writings and courses tend to dwell so heavily on the rigidities of political behavior and the obstacles to change?

One reason may be our interest, as social scientists, in being “scientific.” We look for recurring patterns in the complex data of political and administrative life, and these regularities are more readily found in the behavior of interest groups and in the structures of bureaucratic cultures and routines. The role of specific leaders, and perhaps the role of leadership generally, do not as easily lend themselves to generalization and prediction.

Perhaps at some deeper level we are attracted to pathology, inclined to dwell on the negative messages of political life and to emphasize weakness and failures when the messages are mixed. Here, perhaps more than elsewhere, the evidence is impressionistic. ⁽⁷⁾

Some of the concerns noted above—about the messages conveyed to students and to others—have been expressed by James March in a recent essay on the role of leadership. He doubts that the talents of specific individual managers are the controlling influences in the way organizations behave. He, however, questions whether we should embrace an alternative view—a perspective that describes administrative action in terms of “loose coupling, organized anarchy, and garbage-can decision processes.” That theory, March argues, “appears to be uncomfortably pessimistic about the significance of administrators. Indeed, it seems potentially pernicious even if correct.” Pernicious, because the administrator who accepts that theory would be less inclined to try to “make a difference” and would thereby lose some actual opportunities to take constructive action.⁽⁸⁾

March does not, however, conclude that the “organized anarchy” theory is correct. He is now inclined to believe that a third theory is closer to the truth. Administrators do affect the ways in which organizations function. The key variable in an organization that functions well is having a “density of administrative competence” rather than “having an unusually gifted individual at the top.” How does an organization come to have a cluster of very able administrators—a density of competence—so that the team can reach out vigorously and break free from the web of loose coupling and organized anarchy? Here March provides only hints at the answer. It happens, he suggests, by selection procedures that bring in able people and by a structure of motivation “that leads all managers to push themselves to the limit. “⁽⁹⁾     

The challenge of design of intergovernmental relations in economies in transition

The governments of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are at a crucial juncture in their movement from highly centralized command economies to more decentralized market economies. While there is a belief in these countries that decentralization brings greater economic efficiency, the reality is that such a transition is a difficult process. This paper examines what types of administrative reforms are needed for the decentralization process, how far along the countries are with respect to these reforms, and what reforms are missing. As we discuss, many of the necessary administration reforms are missing and we argue that more attention must be paid to these elements for successful decentralization of these governments.

This paper examines the recent experience and reform needs of the key administrative aspects of the design of intergovernmental relations in countries in transition in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union. There is a widespread realization in all of these countries that decentralizing government will help increase efficiency in the public sector just as privatization will improve efficiency in their economies. Decentralization of government operations is also attractive as a way to cement a democratic form of government. Despite the appearances of the existence of an already decentralized system, such as in the case of the Soviet Union, this experiment started in practically all cases with a lack of institutions and experience on how decentralized government operations should be organized.

As different as these countries are, there are many similarities in the reform process they are following in order to decentralize government structure. While the basic components of a decentralized system of government are emerging in many of these countries the structure of government has not fully evolved in a manner that can support such a decentralized system. Often, governments remain structured along a vertical hierarchy: information, budgetary authority, and revenue pass from the central government down to subnational levels of government while little communication or interaction exists at a horizontal level. In general, the assignment of revenue and expenditure has not been clearly defined among the two or three levels of government, central government transfers continue to occur in a relatively ad hoc manner, and the entire budgeting system still rests in many cases on more or less formal system of negotiations and bargaining among the different levels of government. There has been some change in this structure in certain countries. Over the last three years, both Poland and Hungary have legally increased the automony of subnational governments. In 1994 in Russia a new and more transparent system of intergovernmental grants has been established between the federal government and the regions. In 1994 also, Latvia introduced a more transparent formula-driven, transfer formula for the regional and municipal governments.

The focus of this paper is to develop a “blue print” for necessary changes in organization and administration of intergovernmental relations in countries in transition. While many experts have recently been discussing the public finance policy components of this new, evolving relationship among levels of government, less attention has been paid to the structural and administrative challenges and the information design issues that must be met in order to develop and support a system of intergovernmental relations.

The paper is organized as follows: First we review the major responsibilities and their allocation among levels of government, the assignment of revenue sources, and the system of transfers. We then turn to a discussion of the current experience of Eastern European and NIS countries in the context of the structural components of an intergovernmental fiscal system. Next, we analyze the organizational reforms that are necessary for the efficient functioning of a decentralized system of government in the economies in transition. Finally we “rate” the transition economies in relation to their current design of the system of intergovernmental relations and support mechanisms.     

Character ethics and public administration

Character ethics addresses the conditions, values, and ideas that give shape to our ways of life - to our character as a people. It has formed an integral part of political life and thought throughout history. It has, however, fallen to neglect during much of this century. We ignore it at our peril. A growing communitarian movement has renewed attention to character or “virtue” ethics in recent years, much of it focused on local, grassroots initiatives. This essay introduces the reader to some basic aspects of character ethics, and then presents an argument for its relevance to public administration. The argument focuses on the application of character ethics to organizational-economic arrangements and conditions which form a great part of the public administration's responsibilities. The organizational economy constitutes a vital foundation for shaping civic character. Since public administration influences the organizational economy, our ethical responsibilities should include continually examining practices in this arena for their general effects on our habits and dispositions as a people.

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.

James Madison⁽¹⁾     

Public administration in Marshall Dimock's textbooks

This article examines the relationship between Marshall Dimock's positive, broad-based concept of public administration and his approach to writing undergraduate textbooks. Analysis shows that both Dimock's American government and public administration textbooks provide a different slant on public agencies than that available in most current introductory volumes. In particular, his American government textbook is more positive in tone about agencies than are its modern counterparts. The public administration textbook has comparative material that rarely appears in introductory-level textbooks.

This article analyzes how Marshall Dimock's conception of public administration as an important area of study with links to policy and leadership anchored his textbook writing. In the 1950s Dimock co-authored two popular textbooks for basic undergraduate courses, one in American government and the other in public administration.⁽¹⁾

Scholars still debate what textbooks in either field should teach students about public agencies. Cigler and Neiswender argue that current American government textbooks portray administration in a negative light. All authors see bureaucracy as a problem of some sort, few explain the role administrators play in shaping policy and none discuss reasons to enter the public service.⁽²⁾ Cigler and Neiswender suggest that American government textbooks must change to aid accurate perceptions of the administrative role. In particular, they believe the texts must add material on the public service as a profession and compare American agencies with those in other nations.

Since public administration textbooks are a key way that majors in the field learn material, debate ensues on what material they should contain. Recent articles explore how textbooks define key terms such as policy and how they integrate the work of various theorists.⁽³⁾

While all widely-used textbooks deal with both the political environment and internal agency functions (e.g., personnel, finance), no consensus exists on how to allocate space between political and managerial concerns nor on exactly which subtopics should be covered. No consensus exists on how much space should be devoted to policy making and policy analysis with some textbooks covering this topic and others skimming it lightly.

One often cited problem with contemporary texts is the lack of a comparative focus and a concomitant need to internationalize the curriculum.⁽⁴⁾ The thrust of current proposals is that students need a more broad-based education to prepare them for global leadership.

Interestingly, Dimock's approach to public administration led him to write textbooks that in some ways surpass what is available today. While the majority of the topics he presents (and their ordering) are similar to current efforts, he offers unique emphases that deal with the above mentioned criticisms. Far from being an exercise in academic nostalgia, examining Dimock's textbooks is a useful way of giving current writers new insights.

To appreciate Dimock's approach to textbook construction we first have to identify the core concepts behind his approach to public administration education. Afterwards, we can analyze the treatment of public agencies in American Government in Action, relating it to Cigler and Neiswender's critique of contemporary textbooks, and -examine how various editions of Public Administration conceptualize the field.     

Public administrators in interactive democracy: a multi-paradigmatic approach

ABSTRACT

Currently, interactive forms of democracy that bring local politicians into dialogue and collaboration with relevant and affected citizens are mushrooming. While some research has investigated how interactive democracy affects citizens and politicians, we know little about what interactive democracy means for public administrators. This article presents the results of a case study of role perceptions and coping strategies among public administrators assisting a new type of interactive political committee in two Nordic municipalities. Guided by a multi-paradigmatic conceptual framework featuring public administrators’ roles and coping strategies in interactive governance, the study shows that individual public administrators identify with different administrative roles, and that political and administrative leadership sentiments condition their choice of coping strategies. Moreover, the coping strategy that public administrators select to handle intra- and inter-paradigmatic role dilemmas can have dire consequences for the interplay between interactive democracy and local representative government.     

Gulick's efficiency the administrative management view

The works of Luther Gulick rank prominently among the contributors who influenced the modern administrative state's development. This paper examines how Gulick played a significant role during the New Deal Era in promoting administrative management in government operations. His commitment to administrative management is further explicated by how he structured efficiency of operations into his now classic organizational perspective so as to make managerial priorities inevitable. While Gulick's efficiency therefore illuminates the supremacy of management purposes, it is also critically elucidated as limiting human development and general participation among organizational employees.     

Administrative characteristics and timing of governments' crisis responses: A global study of early reactions to COVID-19

In a crisis, fast reaction is key. But what can public administration tell us about this? This study develops a theoretical framework explaining how administrative characteristics, including fragmentation, capacities, legacies and learning, affect governments' response timing. The COVID-19 pandemic is exploited as a unique empirical setting to test this framework and its scope conditions. Region fixed-effects models and survival analysis of partly hand collected data for more than 150 national governments confirm some limited predictive power of administrative structures and traditions: Especially in developing countries, governments with a separate ministry of health adopted binding containment measures faster. Countries with hierarchical administrative traditions, for example, socialist, adopted some interventions like school closures faster than more liberal traditions, for example, Anglo-American. These characteristics increase threat perception and availability of a response, respectively. Results also suggest that intracrisis and intercrisis learning supply governments with response options. The study advances comparative public administration and crisis research.     

COMPARATIVE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN BRITAIN

According to a strict definition, comparative public administration in Britain is relatively undeveloped. However, once the definition is relaxed it is possible to see that scholars in the British Isles make a substantial contribution to the field. This contribution can be examined under four headings; single country studies, juxtapositions, thematic comparisons and causal explanations. While causal explanation must remain as one major objective of comparative study, such explanations are problematic, and not only in Britain. At best they can only deal in establishing the strength of the evidence supporting plausible hypotheses rather than offer more direct tests of causality associated with statistical techniques. The way forward in comparative research is not to be found in a search for an overall theory, or the institutionalization of administrative data gathering. Intellectually interesting questions are more likely to provoke data collection than the other way around. A stronger dialogue between contemporary and past studies as well as a broadening range of countries covered might help generate the projects which provide the systematic comparative data that many commentators believe we lack.     

Reforms to enhance accountability and citizen involvement: a case study of the hong kong hospital authority

The article begins by examining current issues in thinking about accountability, citizen involvement and empowerment. The discussion then moves to the particular context of Hong Kong. Recent reforms to public hospital services are reviewed in the light of the territory's traditional values of paternalistic bureaucracy and minimal citizen involvement. It is shown that despite good intentions to enhance public accountability and cgitizen involvement, in practice there has been little substantive change in the distribution of power between the ruling elite, health care professionals, and the actual service users. Whilst more information about service performance may now be available, opportunities for citizen involvement and representation continue to be carefully managed by the administration. The net result is that only a very few members of the lay public have been appointed to the new bodies that are now responsible for the governance of the public hospitals. Nearly all of those appointed to such bodies are unrepresentative of the normal service users being drawn, instead, from members of the mostly non-public hospital users - namely Hong Kong's very wealthy professional and business elites. For most of the general public, therefore, the reforms have been less about empowerment and involvement and more about informing them of the changes that have been introduced or of educating them so that abuses of the system can be reduced, or their help enlisted in locally organized fund-raising functions. The article concludes that however well-meaning the reformers might have been in terms of endeavouring to enhance accountability and citizen involvement, the impact of such efforts are likely to be seriously limited whenever underlying administrative or social values conflict with those that ostensibly guide the reforms.     

TAKING THE ‘HIGH ROAD’: DOES PUBLIC SERVICE MOTIVATION ALTER ETHICAL DECISION MAKING PROCESSES?

Although public administration scholars have long been interested in promoting administrative ethics, recent lapses in judgment by government employees make the study of ethics even more pressing. Yet, we know relatively little about how public values and publicly oriented motives influence the ethical obligations employees reference when confronting organizational problems. We employ Perry's (2000) process model of public service motivation to connect public values, public service motivation, and employees' understanding of their ethical obligations. Using data collected from over 1,400 managers in United States municipal governments, we present findings that suggest that public service motivation appears to be positively correlated with ethical obligations rooted in virtue and integrity, or high road ethics, for less professionalized employees. Further, broader constellations of public values encourage increased application of high road ethics for the same employees, but only to the extent that they foster public service motivation.     

Changing Municipalities in the Information age

Abstract

Political leadership at the local level has attracted growing attention in recent years in parallel with reforms of local government and of the municipal administration, as well as the debate on a shift from government to governance. Considering the power triangle of (i) the mayor, (ii) the municipal administration (executive officers) and (iii) the council, it is surprising that the latter has gained little interest so far. This article analyses how the roles of local councils as representative bodies are assessed by mayors from seventeen European countries and how differences in the perception of councils can be explained. Can differences be explained by institutional settings, the notion of the mayor towards the role of political parties or by the kind of interaction between the mayor and the council – or are specific local conditions and idiosyncratic personal factors crucial?     

COVID-19-induced governance transformation: How external shocks may spur cross-organizational collaboration and trust-based management

Persistent efforts to meet the demand for cross-organizational collaboration and trust-based management have been halted by a mixture of bureaucratic inertia and entrenched New Public Management thinking. This article explores whether the COVID-crisis has broken the reform deadlock. Based on a handful of recent surveys and interviews conducted by Danish public sector organizations, we look at the crisis-induced transformations in local public administration. The main finding is that the pandemic has forced administrative agencies to collaborate with each other to solve new and pressing problems in a turbulent environment. Similarly, it has urged public managers to trust the skills and motivation of their employees, who must solve administrative tasks in innovative ways and with limited managerial support, supervision and monitoring. While changes may amount to little more than a temporary departure from normalcy, lesson-drawing, learning retention and proactive leadership may help to produce a sustainable transformation.     

‘For you were strangers’: Jewish ritual,black musics,and commemorative politics in Tel Aviv’s Refugee Seder

ABSTRACT

Each Passover since 2009, hundreds of East African asylum seekers and Israeli activists have gathered for ‘Refugee Seder’, a public event to support Sudanese and Eritrean communities in Israel. Featuring a ceremonial seder meal, storytelling, speeches, and a dance party, Refugee Seder draws on age-old Jewish rituals and contemporary global black pop musics to symbolize Africans as members of the Israeli national collective. This article explores Refugee Seder’s modified commemorative practices, which engage dual narratives of Jewish nationalism and cultural cosmopolitanism. I show how seder rituals enable African participants to temporarily embody a Jewish spiritual identity, and how black pop musics help publicly reframe Africans’ ‘blackness’ as a cultural asset instead of a political liability. Ultimately, I argue that Refugee Seder distills larger ideologies of identity and belonging that are deeply rooted in Israeli collective consciousness, and which shape the trajectories of ‘refugee issue’ politics and policy-making.