Unit 2: Growth and Trends in Public Administration

I. Orientation

Public administration developed from a classical concern with hierarchy, efficiency, and political neutrality into a broader field concerned with values, participation, markets, performance, and citizenship. Important shifts occurred from the late 1960s onward, especially in the United States and other countries influenced by administrative reform. The concepts in this unit represent competing and sometimes overlapping responses to dissatisfaction with traditional bureaucracy.

• Traditional foundation: Classical administration emphasized hierarchy, specialization, written rules, legal authority, and impartial implementation.
• Central tension: Public administration must balance efficiency with equity, responsiveness, accountability, and democratic legitimacy.
• Changing environment: Social movements, fiscal pressures, distrust of government, globalization, and information technology encouraged new administrative approaches.
• Main analytical question: Should public services be organized primarily through bureaucracy, markets, professional management, democratic participation, or networks?
• Important distinction: Public administration concerns collective purposes and public accountability, even when it adopts private-sector techniques.

II. New Public Administration — Equity and social relevance

New Public Administration (NPA) emerged in the late 1960s as a critique of traditional administrative theory. It treated administration not merely as a technical instrument for efficiency but as a moral and political activity that should respond to inequality and social problems.

A. New public administration

New public administration is an approach that places social equity, relevance, participation, and administrative responsiveness at the center of public service.

• Historical setting: NPA developed during the civil-rights movement, antiwar protests, urban unrest, and criticism of bureaucratic neutrality in the United States.
• Key event: The 1968 Minnowbrook Conference, organized under Dwight Waldo’s influence, is commonly associated with its emergence.
• Social equity: Administrative decisions should improve fairness in the distribution of public benefits, burdens, opportunities, and access.
  • Concrete focus: A welfare office should consider whether formally equal procedures disadvantage low-income or minority applicants.
• Relevance: Administration should address real social problems rather than concentrate only on internal procedures or organizational efficiency.
• Change and innovation: Administrators should be willing to redesign programs when existing structures fail vulnerable communities.
• Client orientation: Agencies should be accessible and responsive to citizens, particularly groups with limited political influence.
• Limits: NPA provides strong values and criticism but fewer universally accepted operational techniques for measuring equity.

III. Minnowbrook Conferences I, II and III — Stages of an intellectual movement

The Minnowbrook Conferences connected debates about administrative values with changing social and institutional conditions. They are best understood as linked discussions rather than a single doctrine.

A. Minnowbrook Conferences I, II and III

The three conferences marked successive reflections on the purpose, identity, and future of public administration.

• Minnowbrook I (1968): Held at Syracuse University’s Minnowbrook conference center and associated with younger scholars and the New Public Administration movement.
  • Main concern: Traditional claims of political neutrality and value-free administration were challenged.
  • Emphasis: Social equity, relevance, change, participation, and responsiveness.
  • Concrete context: The conference occurred during civil-rights struggles and widespread criticism of government institutions.
• Minnowbrook II (1988): Held approximately twenty years later, when public administration faced questions about fragmentation, implementation, managerialism, and the relationship between theory and practice.
  • Main concern: How could the field remain intellectually coherent while responding to changing governance conditions?
  • Emphasis: Public management, organizational change, democratic values, and renewed attention to administrative theory.
• Minnowbrook III (2008): Conducted amid globalization, digital transformation, terrorism concerns, environmental pressures, and increasing interdependence among public, private, and nonprofit organizations.
  • Main concern: How should public administration operate in a complex, networked, and globally connected environment?
  • Emphasis: Collaboration, governance, diversity, citizenship, democratic values, and public-service responsibility.
• Development across conferences: The sequence moved from criticism of bureaucratic neutrality in 1968, through institutional and managerial reconsideration in 1988, toward complexity and collaborative governance in 2008.
• Continuing significance: The conferences reinforced the idea that public administration is both a practical profession and a normative field concerned with democratic purposes.

IV. Public Choice Theory — Government viewed through incentives

Public choice theory applies economic reasoning to political and administrative behavior. It assumes that individuals, including voters, politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups, respond to incentives and may pursue self-interest within public institutions.

A. Public choice theory

Public choice theory explains collective decision-making by analyzing the behavior of self-interested actors under political and bureaucratic rules.

• Intellectual basis: Associated with economists and political economists such as James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, especially their 1962 work The Calculus of Consent.
• Human behavior assumption: Public officials are not automatically assumed to be disinterested guardians of the public interest.
  • Application: A bureaucrat may seek a larger budget, greater staff, or increased organizational influence.
• Bureaucratic expansion: Agencies may favor budget growth because resources can increase status, discretion, and organizational capacity.
• Rent seeking: Individuals or groups may use political influence to obtain benefits without creating equivalent social value.
  • Example: A protected industry may lobby for a subsidy or regulatory barrier that transfers costs to taxpayers or consumers.
• Collective-action problem: Individuals may benefit from a public good while avoiding its costs, producing free-riding and under-provision.
• Competition as remedy: Contracting, user choice, decentralization, and competition may limit monopoly behavior by public agencies.
• Government failure: Public choice theory highlights failures caused by political incentives, information problems, concentrated interests, and weak accountability.
• Limitations: It can understate public-service motivation, professional ethics, solidarity, unequal political power, and the importance of non-market values such as dignity.

V. New Public Management — Managing government for performance

New Public Management (NPM) became influential from the 1980s, particularly in countries such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. It sought to make public organizations more performance-oriented by adapting selected methods from business management and market economics.

A. New public management

New public management is a reform approach that emphasizes managerial autonomy, measurable results, competition, cost control, and customer-oriented public services.

• Historical setting: NPM grew during fiscal stress, dissatisfaction with large bureaucracies, and political movements favoring smaller or more businesslike government.
• Managerial discretion: Managers receive authority to allocate resources and organize work, while being held responsible for results.
• Performance measurement: Agencies use targets, indicators, audits, and evaluations to assess outputs and outcomes.
  • Distinction: Processing 10,000 applications is an output; improving employment among beneficiaries is an outcome.
• Disaggregation: Large departments may be divided into agencies or executive units with clearer responsibilities.
• Competition: Governments may use contracting out, competitive tendering, vouchers, or quasi-markets to compare providers.
• Customer orientation: Service users are treated as customers whose satisfaction, accessibility, and choice matter.
• Contractual control: Agreements specify expected services, standards, funding, reporting duties, and sanctions.
• Cost consciousness: Budgeting emphasizes efficiency, productivity, and value for money.
• Potential benefits: NPM can clarify responsibility, reduce unnecessary costs, encourage innovation, and make performance more visible.
• Risks and criticisms: Excessive target-setting may encourage gaming, short-termism, data manipulation, fragmentation, and neglect of citizens who are difficult or costly to serve.
• Accountability problem: A contracted provider may deliver an efficient service but still raise questions about transparency, equity, legal responsibility, and democratic control.

VI. New Public Service — Serving citizens and democracy

New Public Service (NPS) developed partly as a response to the market-centered assumptions of NPM. Associated especially with Janet V. Denhardt and Robert B. Denhardt, it presents public administration as democratic service rather than business-style customer management.

A. New public service

New Public Service is an approach that argues public servants should help citizens articulate and pursue shared interests, while protecting democratic values and public accountability.

• Central principle: “Serve citizens, not customers” distinguishes citizens, who participate in collective self-government, from customers, who primarily purchase services.
• Democratic citizenship: People are not merely service recipients; they have rights, responsibilities, and a role in defining public purposes.
  • Concrete implication: A transport policy should be shaped through deliberation about accessibility, environment, and community needs, not only passenger satisfaction scores.
• Public interest: The public interest is created through dialogue, deliberation, and shared values rather than simply calculated as the sum of individual preferences.
• Role of government: Government should facilitate collaboration, mediate interests, and create conditions for collective problem-solving.
• Public servants’ role: Administrators should listen, negotiate, inform, and support citizens rather than act solely as controllers or entrepreneurial managers.
• Accountability: Responsibility extends beyond financial results to law, professional standards, democratic processes, ethical conduct, and social equity.
• Trust and legitimacy: Participation and respectful engagement can strengthen the legitimacy of public decisions, especially where citizens disagree.
• Difference from NPM: NPM emphasizes customers, competition, contracts, and measurable performance; NPS emphasizes citizens, dialogue, collaboration, and democratic values.
• Difference from classical administration: Traditional bureaucracy stresses hierarchy and rule compliance; NPS retains lawful administration but adds participation, responsiveness, and shared governance.
• Limitations: Deliberative and collaborative processes can be slow, costly, conflictual, and difficult when participants possess unequal resources or information.

B. Comparative significance

The major approaches represent different answers to the question of what public administration should achieve and how it should be organized.

• New public administration: Makes social equity and relevance primary, especially for disadvantaged groups.
• Public choice theory: Warns that officials and institutions respond to incentives and may produce government failure.
• New public management: Uses competition, managerial autonomy, contracts, and performance measures to pursue efficiency.
• New public service: Reasserts citizenship, democratic participation, collaboration, and public accountability.
• Underlying contrast: Efficiency is necessary but insufficient; a public service may be inexpensive and measurable yet still be inequitable, unresponsive, or democratically illegitimate.
• Contemporary synthesis: Modern administration often combines performance management from NPM, equity concerns from NPA, incentive analysis from public choice theory, and participation principles from NPS.