The Sophisticated Public: The Effect of Competing Frames on Public Opinion

Deliberation is the current buzzword among democratic thinkers. Deliberative democracy assumes that deliberation has an effect on the people engaging in the deliberative process. Several studies have demonstrated that this is indeed the case: deliberation increases political knowledge and opinion consistency, as well as mutual understanding and broader tolerance among citizens. In order to verify the findings from these studies and to confront the problems of internal and external validity in the previous studies of deliberation, alternative methodological designs must be applied. Applying an experimental split-sample design using CATI on the Danish electorate reveals how arguments and frames influence public opinion. Across various frames and arguments and political issues, positive (negative) arguments tend to push opinions in a positive (negative) direction. When competing frames are presented to the public, people submit to neither ambivalence nor non-attitudes. Quite to the contrary, people tend to follow their predisposition and provide more consistent opinions. Thus, deliberation composed of various competing frames and arguments facilitates – rather than distorts – sophisticated and considered public opinion.     

Designing a Choice Architecture for Regulators

The emergence of behavioral public administration has led to increasing calls for public managers and policy makers to consider predictable cognitive biases when regulating individual behaviors or market transactions. Recognizing that cognitive biases can also affect the regulators themselves, this article attempts to understand how the institutional environment in which regulators operate interacts with their cognitive biases. In other words, to what extent does the “choice architecture” that regulators face reinforce or counteract predictable cognitive biases? Just as knowledge of behavioral insights can help regulators design a choice architecture that frames individual decisions to encourage welfare-enhancing choices, it may help governments understand and design institutions to counter cognitive biases in regulators that contribute to deviations from public interest policies. From these observations, the article offers some modest suggestions for improving the regulatory choice architecture.     

Of Citizenship, Virtue, and the Administrative Imperative: Deconstructing Aristotelian Civic Republicanism

Over the years, the public administration literature has generated many different strands in the definition and conceptualization of citizenship. In theory and in practice, our understanding of what it means to be a citizen is in danger of being muddled amid the diversity of perspectives and the epistemological confusion generated in the contemporary discourse on the subject. My aim in this article is to clarify and elaborate a common thread that runs through our contemporary understanding of citizenship and to advance the general thesis that our brand of theorizing reflects an earlier tradition that embodies the conservative ethos of Aristotelian republicanism. Can such a tradition survive in modern American society?     

当代公共管理研究的范式观--一项经验研究

以经验事实为依据,勾画出了指导当代美国公共管理研究的范式观.在经验分析的基础上,作者认为,有关公共管理领域是否具有知识核心及其与学科的发展之间的相关性的争论正越来越不重要,因为答案已经显现.重要的是从事公共管理研究的学者应具有清醒的学科自我意识以及对现有的范式有更为清晰的把握.公共管理学科对本领域的常规科学研究活动的自觉意识能够给本学科提供更为清晰的研究焦点,能够提升澄清谬见的敏锐性,进而推动公共管理理论的发展.     

Do consumers know enough to assess the true value of art? A study of beliefs and attitudes toward the NEA

Contemporary society tends to ascribe economic value to works of art, often neglecting the inherent cultural and social value of art in favor of an aesthetically driven conceptualization of “value.” The largest single financial supporter of nonprofit arts and arts education in the United States—the National Endowment of the Arts—is charged with supporting arts of all types, and not just those that the general public decides are of aesthetic or monetary value. This paper compares how the government of the United States funds nonprofit art initiatives through the National Endowment of the Arts, with how members of the American public perceive the importance and value of art being funded. It provides evidence of beliefs held by the general public about the inherent role and value of the arts in contemporary society. It also offers suggestions for how marketing principles and techniques might be engaged to reduce gaps in the public's knowledge about the arts.     

Consultocracy and its discontents: A critical typology and a call for a research agenda

In the past few decades, many sector‐specific case studies have been conducted on the use of consultants in the public sector. However, the overall picture of the qualitative changes facilitated by consultants remains fragmented, and a comprehensive framework on how “consultocracy” affects governance is lacking. This article shows how the increased use of consultants has impacted the operational logics of public administration and governance at large. Drawing from a large multisectoral case study from Finland as well as existing studies, a fourfold typology of how consultocracy shapes public administration is introduced. We argue that increased reliance on consultants contributes to the monopolization and privatization of public knowledge and ensuing dependencies, erosion of tacit knowledge, weakening of accountability, and strengthening of instrumental rationality. This research emphasizes the importance of understanding the links between these developments and the need to implement a comprehensive research agenda on consultocracy.     

政府公权力异化的微观经济机理研究

公权力问题是吏治的一个核心问题,政府公权力异化的预防和治理是当代中国法治政府和责任政府建设的一项重要内容。从微观机理探讨公权力异化的成因,以此为基础构建公权力治理的多种途径,对于当代中国吏治研究具有重大的理论和现实意义。     

The Question of Roles and Identities in Public Administration

The article argues that one needs to open up the question of what it means to be a civil servant today in order to understand the key characteristics of public administration in contemporary Western democracies. The role of the civil servant is characterised by a multitude of expectations deriving from old and new role demands that exist side by side. In this sense, the role is constituted of different archaeological layers. Which layers become the dominant ones are not given, but widely depend on the context within which the role is enacted and on the civil servant's individual role interpretation. The article presents the results of a case study carried out within three Danish government ministries on the role of the civil servant. It is shown how differently the role is interpreted in the Danish state administration depending on which of the archaeological layers are activated, and how these different interpretations all lead to role conflicts for the individual civil servant.     

Proverbs and the Evolution of Public Administration

Herbert Simon, in his 1946 essay “The Proverbs of Administration,” indicted public administration as having conflicting and contradictory theories and an absence of a knowledge base that could provide a guide to practice. Simon proposed that public administration define concepts, adopt efficiency as its objective, focus on the study of decision making, and construct models that could predict efficient results. This 75th‐anniversary article revisits Simon's essay in light of contemporary public administration. It examines the progress that has been made and what still needs to be accomplished, and it ends with a list of barriers to further progress.     

A MANAGERIALIST STRIKES BACK

Abstract : In view of a rather one-sided recent debate, "managerialism" in bureaucracy calls for a defence. The alternate paradigm, which is said to turn on legal as opposed to economic rationality, has not been systematically dealt with by the anti-managerialists. The functions to which it refers have always in practice been only a small element of public sector activity. The new artifacts of administration are properly viewed as a public sector reflection of wider thought on organisations and quality of working life. They have some common origins with contemporary private sector practice rather than being derived by copying the private sector. Management and policy skills are not mutually exclusive; indeed the contrary is true. Finally, in relation to broadly accepted ethical norms, modern public administration compares well with that which has gone before.     

Different paradigms of evidence and knowledge: Recognising,honouring, and celebrating Indigenous ways of knowing and being

Debates over evidence-informed policymaking are predominantly structured from a western paradigm of ontology and epistemology. Other ways of being and knowing are neither privileged by the policy space nor the discipline, certainly not in the same way or to the same degree. This is changing, however, in the face of cultural recognition and with diversity and inclusion agendas and within the contexts of post-truth politics and the questioning of expertise. This article explores the contribution of Indigenous ways of knowing and being as providing valid, alternative forms of evidence that ought to inform the policymaking process. Australian experience suggests that Indigenous evidence and knowledge offers unique, substantive insights that are offered as ‘gifts’ to inform policy and public administration communities. This contribution is unrecognised and unincorporated into public administration at Australia and the world's peril given that Indigenous approaches offer new exciting ways forward for engagement, sustainability, and policy innovation. It should not be co-opted or presumed. Indigenous peoples need to be given self-determination avenues to decide what they wish to share or not, why, and how.     

Cumulating the Intellectual Gold of Case Study Research

Two criticisms of public administration research have been leveled. First, knowledge in the field is not being cumulated. Second, the research has low quality. A preference for case studies as a form of scientific inquiry is behind both criticisms. The authors propose a solution to the first problem by showing how meta-analysis can be used to cumulate knowledge using case study evidence. Viewed cumulatively, case studies comprise an intellectual goldmine awaiting discovery. The authors challenge the second criticism, proposing that quality judgments should be based on the important principle of knowledge cumulation, which acknowledges the value of all research methods.     

The Role of IPAA: Public Presentation — Key Issues in Governance

In the December 1997 issue of this journal our editors expressed concern about the decline in teaching of public administration. This does not reflect any decline in the overall level of involvement by government in the economy or society. Rather it seems to reflect changing perceptions of what is needed to succeed in public administration.
This in turn raises the very important issue of what we as a society expect from our future public administrators. While many management skills are common to both business and the public sector, public administration needs to extend beyond the limits of business management to comprehend issues such as accountability, probity and policy processes. Indeed it is increasingly being recognised that what is at stake is not just management per se, but rather the broader array of relationships involved in good governance.
The Institute of Public Administration Australia has over the years played an important role in bringing practitioners and teachers together to help foster a better appreciation of these issues. Now more than ever, when the public sector is experiencing considerable change, there needs to be a lively forum where these broader issues of public administration can be debated and new approaches can be tested.
The National Council of the Institute has accordingly been considering how the Institute might encourage a wider public appreciation of good governance. In order to assist in this process and to provide some guidance to spokepersons, the Council has agreed the following Statement. We hope that all members of the Institute will find this Statement helpful and will be encouraged to promote the ideals it seeks to uphold.     

A comparison of management adaptations for joined‐up government: Lessons from New Zealand

Despite considerable attention, helping agencies to work more effectively together is one of the most important contemporary challenges of public administration theory and practice. The New Zealand Better Public Services (BPS) Results program has been an unexpected success in this area and provides a positive case study. In 2012, the New Zealand government set targets for solving 11 important social problems where responsibility crossed agency boundaries and has made significant measurable progress in all 11 problems. This paper explores the conditions that may have enabled the most progress and possible management adaptations when these initial conditions are not fully met. In particular, the case demonstrates how goal commitment can be supported where there exist a large number of potential actors and how interagency trust can be built in the absence of existing relationships.     

Beyond Bureaucracy—Public Administration as Political Integrator and Non‐Weberian Thought in Germany

The political role of public administration holds an ambiguous status in public administration theory. The dominant paradigms of the discipline offer more or less negative perspectives. Max Weber’s notion of bureaucracy conceives public administration as the apolitical tool of government, while the public choice school conceives it as the realm of individual selfishness and rent seeking at taxpayers’ expense. In this unfavorable epistemological environment, positive concepts of what makes public administration “political” can hardly flourish. However, as public authorities may organize clientele participation and consequently co‐opt stakeholders, they provide for symbolic sense making and create patterns of identity. Public administration thus works as a political integrator in its own right. Unfortunately, this subject is not prominent within contemporary scholarly research. German political integration through administration is analyzed here in order to address these and related theoretical questions.     

Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance

The multifaceted challenges of contemporary governance demand a complex account of the ways in which those who are subject to laws and policies should participate in making them. This article develops a framework for understanding the range of institutional possibilities for public participation. Mechanisms of participation vary along three important dimensions: who participates, how participants communicate with one another and make decisions together, and how discussions are linked with policy or public action. These three dimensions constitute a space in which any particular mechanism of participation can be located. Different regions of this institutional design space are more and less suited to addressing important problems of democratic governance such as legitimacy, justice, and effective administration.     

RNICE Model: Evaluating the Contribution of Replication Studies in Public Administration and Management Research

Replication studies relate to the scientific principle of replicability and serve the significant purpose of providing supporting (or contradicting) evidence regarding the existence of a phenomenon. However, replication has never been an integral part of public administration and management research. Recently, scholars have called for more replication, but academic reflections on when replication adds substantive value to public administration and management research are needed. This article presents the RNICE conceptual model, for assessing when and how a replication study contributes knowledge about a social phenomenon and advances knowledge in the public administration and management literatures. The RNICE model provides a vehicle for researchers who seek to evaluate or demonstrate the value of a replication study systematically. The practical application of the model is illustrated using two published replication studies.     

Promiscuously Partisan? Public Service Impartiality and Responsiveness in Westminster Systems

Public servants in Westminster countries are being drawn into the limelight by demands from their political masters that they publicly defend policies. Critics suggest these conditions undermine the capacity and willingness of senior public servants to manage the enduring Westminster tension between serving elected governments and remaining nonpartisan. Interviews with senior officials from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom challenge this pessimistic view, showing that officials consistently stress the importance of not “crossing the line” when dealing with their elected masters. Two exploratory case studies are presented—one of an Australian ministerial department (Treasury) and another of a Canadian quasi‐autonomous agency (Statistics Canada)—in which public servants faced pressure to defend controversial government policies. These cases show how contemporary public servants actively interpret, establish, and defend the line between appropriate responsiveness and inappropriate partisanship in Westminster systems.     

Introduction to the Symposium on Public Sector Management in Asia: What's New from the North?

What lessons can we draw from a symposium on public administration in Asia? Does Australia share common problems with our Asian neighbours? Are Asian countries adopting similar patterns of public sector reform, or diverging in their responses to contemporary problems? In this commentary David Corbett reviews the contributions to this symposium and finds Asian nations grappling with local issues and problems. And yet he considers there are many continuities which run across cultural and historical differences. Asia provides a patchwork of different public sector cultures and experiences on which, he suggests, there is much to reflect.