HOW PUBLIC IS PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION?
A CONSTITUTIONAL APPROACH OF PUBLICNESS
Arthur Ringeling
Prof. em. of Public Administration
Erasmus University Rotterdam
ringeling@fsw.eur.nl
PAPER FOR PSG IX PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND TEACHING,
EGPA CONFERENCE, EDINBURGH, SEPTEMBER 11-13, 2013.
INTRODUCTION 1
According to Frederickson (1997, 4) there is a gradual loss of the concept of public in our
discipline. Sennett, for instance in his The Fall of Public Man (1977), states that ‘…no
recognizable public realm remains”. Kaufman (1984) describes a cyclical movement between
private interests on one hand and public action on the other. Concerns for efficiency,
economy and good management are alternated with concerns for responsiveness and
democratic government. Hirschman (1982) refers to shifting involvements between private
interests and public actions. Public in his view includes public action, action in the public
interest, and striving for public happiness.
Public is often defined by what it is not: in this case not private. Given the economic
superiority of the private one, the public sector is defined in terms of an aid to the private
sector (see Pesch 2005). The public sector comes to the stage when the market fails (see
Wolf, 1988). And many writers are inclined to reduce public efforts to private well-being,
private interests. Goods and services have to be delivered to individuals; individuals have to
be better off. Those seem to be advantages not at the public, but at the private side. Is there
still something to share in the public domain? All this refers to actions in the political realm,
to involvement of the citizens in civic and community affairs.
These insights can amaze us. Because the distinction between public and private is an
invention of great importance in political history. No longer countries were the private
property of the prince, the king or the emperor. No longer citizens had to obey and to serve
the ruler without any rights. No longer a regime was able to interfere unlimited in the
private sphere of its inhabitants. This was not a development that came overnight. It was
the product of a long struggle in history that in parts of the world still has not come to an
end.
There is a second reason why we should be amazed. Because how are we able to talk about
Public Administration when the public character of what we study becomes more and more
obscured. So, by addressing the concept of public we are confronted with a variety of issues.
Where is the idea of a public sphere, what is still publicness in a privatized world, is the
public domain substituted by the private, the citizen by the consumer and what is the
content of the concept of public interest in these circumstances? These developments make
the question important whether the concept public has not to be more central in what we
research and write. There is reason to ask: how public is Public Administration?
1
This paper would not be like it’s now if Loek van Rooij would not have criticized it and had done suggestions
for improving it. It’s clear I’m in debt. All flaws, however, are mine.
2
THE CONCEPTS ‘PUBLIC’ AND ‘PUBLICNESS’
The term ‘public’ (Gripsrud et al. 2010), carries at least four different meanings:
1. We refer to physical places, like squares and parks, as public when they are open to
all individuals. Some authors also use the term ‘the commons’ (see L. Ostrom, 1990).
The same is true for information that is accessible for everybody.
2. The term public is used as a social category with variations on the boundaries of a
specific public: all those active in a social construction or a specific public, public
events, a collectivity of citizens.
3. We distinguish between public and private concerns. Here public means that
something is the common interest to all those in a polity, while private lacks this
quality.
4. The term ‘public’ is also used as an indication of the aggregation of individual views,
as in public opinion, and public discourses.
So, there is something as a public domain, a public realm, public sphere, public sector, and
public interest. These terms all indicate there is a separate part in society with
distinguishable characteristics we call public. The term public as in public administration is
connected to interests, to what people in a polity have in common and the way these
interests are articulated.
But, as Pesch (2005) makes clear, public is an ambiguous concept. The use of it has never
been consistent. There are different philosophical approaches to the term with different
insights and consequences. One of these approaches is the liberal concept of publicness
which already has two different meanings. The first is an individualistic one, being one of the
most dominating, and the other an organic one. The first one presumes the ontological
precedence of the private sphere before the public one. So the public sphere is an artificial
construct. This is contrary to the classic insight that the Greeks had, in which it was the other
way around: the private sphere was that which was, by necessity, not public (Arendt, 1958).
In the individualistic conception the public sphere is derived from the aggregation of private
spheres. That is not the case in the organic conception where the public sphere is more than
the aggregation of private spheres. It transfers a shared identity to the private spheres by
organizing and integrating them.
In public administration, the organic conception has been and is still important. It relates
public activities to the values and principles that constitute the shared identity of a
community (Pesch, 2005, 183). These values and principles offer public organizations and
public officials a normative basis for their efforts. There exists a normative relationship
between public administration and the community it governs and serves. This, however, is
not a relationship of total congruency, of sheer harmony. Perhaps the best proof of the
3
existence of this relationship are the continuous tensions between government and those
who are governed.
All these different meanings are present in the term ‘public sphere’ or what is called in
German ‘Öffentlichkeit’.
“By ‘the public sphere’ we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which
something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all
citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in
which private individuals assemble to form a public body” (Habermas 1964, p.1;
reproduced in Gripsrud et al., 2010).
The author refers to ‘Öffentlichkeit’ as a sphere of open spaces and communication where a
public discourse on matters of common concern can take place and lead to the formation of
an opinion on part of a public of citizens that in turn may influence political decision making.
In his view, it is not an description of a network of institutions. Public arguing is central to
democratic politics. Elster (in; Gripsrud et. al, 2010) writes:
“The public sphere must be seen as a forum, a public and open activity in which
citizenship can be realized through participation in collective deliberation”.
That is quite another story than the mere aggregation of individual preferences. Arguing,
and deliberation are part of the public sphere.
Öffentlichkeit is not only a descriptive concept, it also has, in Habermas’ view, a normative
content, advancing a principle of democratic legitimacy: the exercise of state power should
be ‘public’ in contrast to secret. It also should reflect the power of a deliberating public of
free and equal citizens. In the good Kantian tradition, the concept unites insights on political
legitimacy with individual maturity and autonomy (Habermas 1959, xv; Frederickson, 1997
comes to the same insight). Behind it is the liberal idea of a reasoning public and not the
actual public spheres in welfare state democracies. There the public dialogue is replaced by
public relations work, by politicians explaining to a public again and again, and without a
public that is included in the public discussion.
This view can be related to three other insights. First to Dewey’s broad conception of
democracy, which is not only a decision making mechanism, but also a distinctive form of
society and a way of life (Gripsrud et. al., 2010, xviii). The second reference is to Rawls’
concept of public reason: a concept that belongs to the conception of a well-ordered
constitutional democratic society (Rawls, 1997). And third, McCollough (1991) coins the
concept of public as a realm, a space in which free and equal citizens hold each other
accountable for what they know and value, for their insights as well as their acts. Officials
are hold accountable for responding to human needs. The public realm requires a citizenry
that can reason together. With Habermas, all these authors connect the public sphere with
democracy values and ways in which public deliberation should be shaped.
4
Two misunderstandings, however, have to be taken away. The first is, as Frederickson
(1997) remarks correctly, the public sphere is not the same as the state. In most of its
activities, it is a dominant actor in that sphere. But that concept offers the possibility that
more actors are active in that sphere, citizens, foundations, sometimes companies.
Characteristic for all these institutional arrangements, to be called public, is that they
produce something with public value:
“By reducing the term public to mean government, we limit the capacity of people to
be public. As an idea, the public means all people coming together for public
purposes rather than for personal or family reasons. The public as capacity implies an
informed active ability to work together for the general good. ………public
accountability and responsibility lies in enabling citizens to set agreed-upon
community standards and goals and working in the public’s behalf to achieve these
goals. …..One cannot hide behind labels of ‘private’ and ‘public’ to escape
responsibility to the public” (Frederickson, 1997, 52).
The second misunderstanding is that the concept of public is unusable because it is
complicated and refers to many different phenomena. Box (2009) argues that publicness is
not just important, but that it is crucial, in particular under circumstances of unclear
boundaries of public, quango’s, non-profit, ngo’s, private and whatever it was called. Beck
Jorgenson (1999) refers to these institutional arrangements as ‘in-betweenness’, a diffuse
sector with ‘role indeterminateness’. Because the interesting question of all those inbetween constructions is which normative schemes are applied formally and in practice. We
can’t do both when dealing with the distinction between public and private, stating that the
private sector is superior to the public and making clear that the distinction does not mean
much and is not clear what so ever. Let’s elaborate these positions somewhat more.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
Often the distinction between the public and the private sphere is used, as if it is a clear one.
But the distinction between public and private is not a naturally given phenomenon (cf. Pesch,
2005, 182). Public and private are constructions, made during a long history. The meaning of
this construction changed during time as well as place. Moreover, reality is somewhat more
complicated than we would like it to be. Even when the concept would be stable theoretically,
it does not offer any guarantee for the significance of the terms in practice. Because, what
exactly is distinguished and compared?
There must be no misunderstanding: private is a fuzzy term too. On one hand it can refer to
the private sphere as a personal domain (i.e. privacy). On the other hand it can refer to the
private sphere as an economic domain (the private sector, i.e. business or markets). This in
5
itself caused a hopeless confusion between judgment of individual activities and what
economic organizations do.
As will be showed in the next sections there are two different discussions. The first one is the
normative, ideological if preferred, discussion about what the state and what the market
should do. The second one is the empirical discussion about whether private organizations
perform better than public ones.
What the state should do
The private sector, meaning the economic or market sector, is confronted with the public
sector or the state (see Pesch 2005). Public Choice and Governance theories that have
stimulated the fuzziness of public and private. The public choice theory had two points of
departure: an individualistic one and an economic rationalistic one. Self-interested rational
individuals, aimed at maximizing satisfaction of preferences, based on an weighing of utility.
Individuals, whether citizens, politicians or public officials, want to be better off. They are
self-interested rational individuals, aiming at maximizing the satisfaction of their
preferences, based on a weighting of utility their alternatives include. They try to maximize
their income, their power or their budget. The public, in this view, is the aggregation of the
efforts individuals make. Both theories contributed to the characterization of the public
sector by what it is not: private. Neo-liberalistic thought (see Schultz, 2010) made clear what
was preferable: the market, government being the problem given its inefficient production
of goods and services.
Compared to private organizations, the Grace-commission stated:
"…government has no such incentive to survive, let alone succeed, nor any such test to
meet. The Government, unlike private sector enterprise, is not normally managed as if it
were subject to the consequences of prolonged managerial inefficiency or persistent
failure to control costs" (PPSS 1984).
So 'Run government as a business' was its advice. The message was that public affairs would be
cared for better and results would improve if the public sector would adopt more business-like
methods and if more governmental tasks would be implemented in private organizations. With
this advice, it reinforced the endeavors for privatization of governmental tasks that has gotten a
new stimulus at the end of the seventies and in the eighties.
Perhaps The President's Private Sector Survey of Cost Control, as it was formally named, was an
extreme defender of this point of view. But the view expressed by the Commission can be
heard more often and is connected to popular beliefs despite all the beautiful and balanced
research that Rainey and collaborators did (Rainey 2003; see also Bozeman 2007). Behind that
advice is to be found the old idea about the performance of government organizations
compared to private organizations. Most observers have little doubt about the superiority of
the latter. The reasons are repeated many times. Government organizations lack the challenges
6
of the market. They are budget-organizations, and so more directed to input than to output.
These organizations are little client- and performance-directed. Consequently, they perform
poorly. They work inefficiently and distribute their goods and services unevenly. Economists
sometimes would add that public sector involvement results in loss in social efficiency
(Buchanan 1985). When these statements are correct, at least the differences between both
kinds of organizations must be clear.
Sayre formulated long ago the famous aphorism that public and private organizations are alike
in all unimportant respects . Allison (1979, 27-41) picked up the statement later and tried to
prove the extent to which it was justified. His conclusion was:
"... that public and private management are at least as different as they are similar, and
that the differences are more important than the similarities" (Idem, p. 37).
We note that this view, how important it may be, concentrates on differences in management
of organizations in both sectors. So the question how to guide or steer public and private
organizations is at stake. This is an important question. Without any doubt there is a strong
connection to structural and functional characteristics of these organizations and the way
public and private organizations have to be managed. But it is another question than the
question in which degree those types of organizations differ.
The discussion concerning the differences between public and private organizations was
continued by Bozeman. He reverses Sayre's statement by advancing private and public
organizations only differ in the unimportant things. Whether these organizations have a public
status or not is not very important. In his view all organizations are public. Public in his terms
means:
"... the degree to which an organization is affected by political authority" (Bozeman
1987, xi).
Organizations are not alike in their publicness. Like the equality of Orwell's animals, the degree
to which public organizations are public is not the same. It is too easy to state that, based on
their behavior, public organizations are more public than private. On the contrary, some private
organizations are more public than public organizations. This is especially true for types of
semi-public organizations. So, in this way the distinction is hardly sharp.
But Bozeman mixes up two different concepts of public, being affected by political authority on
one side and fulfilling public functions on the other. Public tasks are not realized by public
organizations only. And governments tasks are, as we saw, not only performed by
governmental organizations. Also quasi-governmental and private organizations contribute to
the realization of public goals. And variations among public organizations are as frequent as
similarities. But the rule-structures of configurations, in government as well as outside
government, differ. So, the differences imply more than gradual ones. To illustrate this, the
New Public Management movement traded in the role of citizens as voter to citizens as
consumers. Intellectually, there is some affinity with the Public Choice theory. Economic
7
rationality is central. Maximizing had been replaced by optimizing, but is still concerned with
obtaining more benefits than costs. The role of citizens is modest. They are the receivers of
public goods and services, often metaphorically referred to as clients. But clients without
possibilities to choose between different suppliers or a role in the decision making on what
is delivered.
Moe (1987, 454), correctly, returns to the original point of view of Sayre, stressing the
importance of public law for the conduct of public organizations. It is more than the
interference by political authority, it is more than the legal status, and more than the kind of
tasks that are served that makes the difference between public and private. It is the rolestructure that brings these differences together. Is the performance also a crucial point?
Comparing Public and Private Organizations
Comparisons between public and private organizations were made in different ways. First, the
Grace-commission compares government with private sector enterprise. One can ask whether
that comparison is justified. Can government be compared to a business firm? What kind of
conception of government is used in that case? Methodologically, it has to be called a fallacy of
the wrong level. Because government is compared with a market party, not with the market as
such.
Second, there are analyses on what we would call system level. some authors take a higher
level of abstraction and compare the public sector with the private sector. Both sectors in this
approach have specific traits. The state is compared to the business world, hierarchies with
markets. But this comparison brings with it a number of problems. Mostly, there is a serious
omission. This approach overlooks all those organizations performing governmental tasks,
while they have a private status. The status according to the law is, we saw before, not the only
important indicator. So, what have to be compared is the public and the private sector,
broadening government to the public sector, and including quasi-public organizations. But the
variety of structures and operation is so large that there is hardly a basis for comparisons that
makes sense.
The third comparison is that between the performances of public and private organizations.
Private organizations are presumed to work much more effective and efficient than public
organizations. So a number of authors directed themselves towards the consequences of the
potential differences in performance of public and private organizations. Especially economists
had a very morose view to the effectiveness and the efficiency of public organizations. But
again, whether this view is correct can be disputed. So Savas (1982, p. 111), more or less the
champion of privatization, concludes:
"No universal or generalizable conclusions can be drawn, […though….] it is safe to say,
at least, that public provision of services is not superior to private provision, while those
who believe on a priori grounds that private services are best, can find considerable
support for their position".
8
Sometimes beliefs and strong convictions seem to be valued higher than empirical evidence.
Donahue (1989) compares a number of studies and concludes that for specific tasks private
enterprises are more efficient. But a lot of factors, the kind of tasks, the number of suppliers
and buyers, diminish their advantages in practice. The advantages of private above public
organizations differ from task to task and over time. Downs and Larkey (1986, 16) put forward:
"...it is very difficult to know just how efficient any particular government agency or
business firm is and virtually impossible to fairly compare the relative efficiency of these
two types of organizations".
Their study makes clear that in many circumstances the efficiency of private enterprises can
hardly serve as an example for public organizations. Goodsell (1983) correctly indicated that for
a number of governmental tasks there hardly exists a private organization alternative. And so
the comparison in performance only can be a partial one.
To that must be added that decision-making of quango's is mostly not based on explicit
measurable criteria because of the broad purposes these organizations usually have. This
means that it is difficult to find adequate evaluation standards for these organizations. Mostly,
these standards are more concerned with processes in the organization than with its products.
It must make us very careful in judging the performance of these organizations (Wolf 1988, 90).
These considerations make that can be agreed with Waldo (1980, p. 20) who states:
"I believe the idea that the 'private sector' is generally more effective and efficient than
the 'public sector' is untrue. Or more precise, I believe that a gross comparison is not so
much untrue as unrealistic, meaningless".
The discussion about the results of public and private organizations leads to less clear results
than the advisors about the superiority of private organizations tried to make us belief. We may
conclude that also on the level of discrete organizations the distinction between public and
private is not as sharp as necessary for obtaining clear differences in orientation or results?
A non-satisfactory discussion.
Governmental organizations experience difficulties in implementing public decisions. That is not
so much a difference with private actors. It results fom the fact that more people with more
different and conflicting interests are participating in the implementation of governmental
tasks and that authority is more dispersed. It is also the consequence of the fact that public
organizations have to perform tasks that are unique and to attend goals that are hardly
attainable. Public intentions often lack clearness. Consequently, difficulties to evaluate arise.
These characteristics influence as well the contracting out of those tasks as the evaluation of
the performance of the implementing organizations. The problems are twofold. The many
different pay-offs lead to as well vague, misleading, multiple and conflicting goals as well as
diverging evaluation-standards.
9
Nevertheless the last decades has shown enormous changes in the relationships between
public and private. Neo-liberalism was highly influential in what governments were doing and
not doing, in what they did themselves, and what was delegated, outsourced, and privatized.
Privatized here also had that double meaning as we saw before, brought to individual citizens
as well as to business or in between organizations.
Discussions like this are for Pesch (2005) a reason to distinguish a third concept of publicness,
that he calls the economic variant of liberalism. In this view the private sphere becomes the
domain of the market, where the public sphere is the domain of the state. By doing so the
ambiguity of the concept of the private sphere increases tremendously. The concept private
gets as well the significance of what belong to individuals as to market parties. With it comes
the secret presumption that there is no conflict between the two, that individuals cannot
become the victim of companies vice versa.
Arendt (1958), however, argues strongly that market reasoning is private, and should have no
place in the public sphere, because there is a fundamental conflict of interests between market
rationality and public rationality. Elster (in: Gripsrud et al. 2010, 153) joins that position by
stating that the market-driven view of democratic politics is hopeless inadequate in addressing
the allocation and redistribution of collective resources and ensuring just outcomes that strike a
balance between individual interests and the common good. And Bozeman (2007, 177)
concludes:
“… that the idea of market failure, property rights, and principal-agent theory, three of
the strongest arguments for the inherent superiority of market approaches, are all
based on assumptions that, remarkably, have rarely been submitted to strong empirical
test and, when they have, yielded ambiguous results”.
The discussion about the public-private comparison turns out not to be a very fruitful one. Not
only different discussions and different comparisons are at stake, they also do not lead to clear
answers on the question what distinguishes the public from the private sector. Neither juridical
status, orientation or performance create clear divisions between public and private
organizations. Is it possible, one can ask, to do it better and to develop a more promising
approach?
Perhaps, another approach to the theme of private and public organizations , based on the
theory of rules guided behavior, may help to improve our understanding of the distinction in
practice. The foundations of this approach are laid by Kiser and Ostrom (1982). By rules is
meant in this context the prescriptions commonly known and used by a set of participants to
order repetitive interdependent relationships. Normative points of view are to some extent
replaced by observations about how rules work in practice. If government is not an actor like
other actors in a policy network, it has to show from the rules that are used in the functioning
of the institutional arrangements in that sector. The central element of this view, reasoning in
10
terms of rules in action, I will use in my approach of the public sphere, what I call a
constitutional approach.
A constitutional approach can also stimulate to reject a number of presuppositions that were
used in the economic approach of governmental affairs. Mostly, it seems the models used in
that approach refer to, in the Weberian term, ideal types. But the types do not fit very well.
They are so sketchy that differences in public systems seem to have not any consequences for
the games played and their results. Institutional theory can offer useful help in reorganizing our
thinking on the public-private distinction. It offers a framework for a more organized distinction
between public and private institutions. We have to study the rules used in practice in
organizations with a public character.
A CONSTITUTIONAL APPROACH
The insight of Frederickson (1997, 44) is that there have to be four requisites for a general
view of the public in public administration. First, as we saw before, there have to be
constitutional foundations, related to the principles of popular sovereignty, representative
government, the rights of citizens, procedural due process, and the balance of power. In an
earlier paper I used the German term (democratic) Rechtsstaat for it (Ringeling, 2012).
The second requisite must be an enhanced notion of citizenship, what he calls ‘the virtuous
citizen’. The term is derived from Hart (1984) who connected four aspects to the concept.
First, the citizens should have a civic life of which the making of moral judgments is a
significant part. Second, the citizen must believe in the values of the regime. Third, the
citizen should take individual moral responsibility. And fourth, he shows forbearance and
tolerance. One would possibly consider this requisite as too idealistic. But the significance of
it is that highlights the intense relationship between the public and citizens. Perhaps the
ideal picture can be substituted by the vision of what is called ‘neo-republican citizenship’
(Van Gunsteren, 1998). Van Gunsteren develops that concept as a result of a critical analysis
of liberal-individualistic, communitarian and republican theories of citizenship.
Characteristic for his specification of citizenship is the awareness amongst citizens of their
destiny of fate and their active role in the polity.
The third requisite is the development and maintenance of systems and procedures for
hearing and responding to the interests of the collective as a whole or organized interests,
but also to the inchoate public. Frederickson (1997) offers two different perspectives, a
legislative and a pluralist perspective. The public in the legislative perspective are the
population of a political community: a state, a region or a municipality. It is represented by
political parties and politicians in parliaments and councils. These representational bodies
decide on the rules, not only of the game, but also of the policies that governments have to
11
execute. Individual citizens have one task: to choose their representatives. Than still the
problem is which insights are represented, all, a number of ideas or the will of the majority?
The pluralist version of the public is the product of a political science approach. It is based on
the idea that politics is grounded on diversity of insights. These different insights are
organized in interest groups that struggle for power, and deal and wheel. The public is
represented by these groups in multiple ways. The public interest is the result of this
representation. This implies to leave old pluralism behind us as the exclusive solution for the
aggregation of preferences and to open new ways of participation and deliberation among
citizens. Consumer satisfaction and grievance procedures are necessary ways of
organization. But we still have to search for new ways in making public decisions.
The fourth requisite for a general theory of public has to do with the relationships between
citizens. The neo-republican citizen is not only governed, but is also governing him- or
herself. From it follows that representative government is a partial answer to the role of
citizens. They also have to take individual responsibility for what happens in a political
community. That presumes a sphere of tolerance with respect for the insights of others.
Benevolence is the key in the interaction of one citizen to another. Because we have to cope
with diversity in society. That is the difference with Rousseau’s idea of the ‘volonté
generale’. He presupposed unanimity and overlooked the problem of different opinions and
minorities. Well, we all are different; we think differently, we have different insights and
convictions about what is and what should be in society. The central question is how we can
live with one another, without having fights all over. Given a democratic regime, the attempt
is to reconcile the differences of opinions in one way or another. Gawthrop (1984) describes
the public both as an idea and as a capacity. The idea refers to an ethic of civility in which we
function under the rule of law, based on written codes and standards, rather than of people.
The capacity here is the structured pattern of interactions between public administrators,
interest groups, elected officials, and citizens to find the evolving and changing public will.
At the same time, Frederickson (1997, 49) makes clear, political communities form a republic
of strangers, individuals that have only limited elements in common:
“Public life can be the encounter of strangers occupying the same territory,
impressed with need to acknowledge the fact and the impulse to get along… A
healthy public life involves continual interaction with other individuals moving in and
out of one another’s lives in an endless panorama of meeting, interacting, leaving,
and meeting again. This public life is as authentic and valid a form of human
experience and is as able to authenticate common and shared beliefs as are other
more intimate forms of human interaction. It is the public as both an idea and a
capacity…”.
The political community is not governed with neither for friends or relatives, but by people
with a shared destiny of fate and with shared as well as different values.
12
With the constitutional approach we are back to fundamental insights on the modern state.
The democratic Rechtsstaat is founded on the sovereignty of the people. Citizenship is a
public function, next to other public functions like representative, minister or administrator.
As a consequence citizens have rights and obligations. And it is a crucial function, that
cannot be substituted by representatives or interest groups. In this perspective, the public is
the living state, government as well as society. Amidst the varieties of interests, public and
private, there are also forms of solidarity between citizens. There are shared fate and
common future. For this constitutional approach two concepts have to be explored more:
public interest and public values (cf. Bozeman, 2007).
PUBLIC INTEREST
The concept of public interest is applauded as well as belittled. Some references to how the
concept went up and down in Public Administration makes that clear. Compared to business
organizations, government organizations can , according to Appleby (1953, 61), be
distinguished by the breadth of scope, impact and consideration of their activities. Public
administration is said to serve the public interest. Public organizations must operate, or appear
to operate in the public interest. Again Appleby (in: Waldo 1953, 62) can be mentioned as an
example here:
"No organization works more in the public interest".
The interesting insight this remark offers is that the public sector is not the same as the public
interest. There can be a discrepancy between what public organizations do and the public
interest.
The emphasis that is put on serving the public interest fulfilled several functions. It was a means
to distinguish between the activities of organizations in the public and private sector. The latter
are directed to the production of private gains, where the public organizations had to serve the
community as a whole. Within the public sector it is also a mechanism to distinguish between
what political organizations and public organizations are aiming at. Politicians seek the
party-interest and public officials try to serve the public as a whole. The argument was stronger
in those countries where parties played a prominent role in public affairs. It means an effort to
maintain and keep alive the distinction between 'politics' and 'administration'. But it also
expressed how superior the work of public officials is, compared to that of entrepreneurs and
politicians. The crucial task of public officials is to make the public interest concrete as a
standard for the way they do their work. So contrary to what the Public Choice theory says,
Frederickson (1991, 415) maintains:
13
“The pursuit of self-interest through government, while commonplace, must be
resisted when either citizen or public servant self-interest erodes the general
interest”.
In the nineties, the concept of public interest received renewed attention. As well in the
Blacksburg-manifesto (see Wamsley et al. 1990) as in the study of Reich and his colleagues
(Reich ed. 1988), the concept plays a central role. Goodsell (in: Wamsley et.al, 1990, 96-113)
attends to the significance of the concept of public interest and the role public administration
plays in the different stages of the policy process to give explicit form to it. The distance of
administration to political actors has been diminished. Both segments of the political system
are presumed to contribute to the realization of the public interest.
But there are serious problems in the conceptualization of the concept of public interest. Policy
decisions could have various contents and the public interest could hardly be used as a decision
criterion. Besides, public organizations are disputing with each other about what is the
'common cause'. As a result Stillmann (1985) wrote:
"The Public Interest became the public interest: i.e., clouded, more fragmented, less
easy to know or act upon and, hence, it became a subject few administrative theorists
addressed or even tried to assert as an important or worthy guide for administrators
action".
Empirical evidence about the distinct patterns of behavior of officials and politicians or between
private and public organizations was even harder to get. Also is pointed to the political
character of the activities of public organizations, a quality that private organizations lack:
"Government is different because it is politics",
was Appleby's conclusion (1945, 63). At the moment he made that statement, it was daring. It
signifies the denial of the politics-administration distinction that was held for so long. But it
does not take us much further. Because the next question is, what is politics? And consequently
the question rises whether that phenomenon is absent in private organizations.
In their vision of what is called the New Public Service, Janet and Robert Denhardt (2003)
state that public administrators must contribute to building a collective, shared notion of the
public interest. And they add:
“The goal is not to find quick solutions driven by individual choices. Rather, it is the
creation of shared interests and shared responsibilities” (idem, p. 65).
Their vision on the way shared values are defined is very much that of the deliberating idea
of democracy. They are the product of a public dialogue. Then what is ‘the public interest in
this reasoning? Shared interests and shared responsibilities? Shared by whom and to which
extent? Pesch (2005, 182) brings forward that the values conveyed by the public interest can
be reformulated in individualistic terms. Individualistic values like efficiency and economy
14
are in the public interest. That may be right, but it does not complete the concept of public
interest. The distinction between public interest and self-interest is by all authors
mentioned taken for granted. Still the question is what is that general interest that is
different from self-interest? Is there something like a public interest? Or if so, isn’t it plural?
What we can do is making a distinction between the same interests, common interests and
public interest. People can share a particular interest, they can have all the same particular
interest, which we will call a common interest.
Much of the discussion on the concept of public interest was about the question whether
public interest contained more than the aggregation of individual interests (see Leys, 1952).
Is even a majority of citizens enough to define the public interests in the way they define the
concept? If there is a public interest, can it conflict with the interests people share?
Box (2009, 6-7) distinguishes between two types of public interests: aggregative and
substantive. The first one consists of the sum of individual preferences, the pooled wishes of
everyone who expresses a preference. Voting and surveys are ways to find the aggregative
public interest. In Denhardt’s treatment of the concept of public interest, the aggregative
elements are strong. Still the public is the aggregation of individuals. Both follow an
individual approach to the public sphere. This discussion on the concept of public interest
was caused by the pluralistic conception of the political process. Shortly formulated: from
the clash of group interests the public interest would result. A lot of empirical research had
slaughtered that insight (recently Stigliz, 2011). It presumed that interests were represented
on an even basis, that no representing organizations had control over more power than
others and that every interest was of the same weight as the others. These three
presumptions have been proved to be wrong.
It was part of the discussion whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Sure it is. A
beautiful building is more than a heap of stones. Also an ugly building is. In the political
realm it is difficult to aggregate all individual interests, because they differ in most cases.
That’s where politics is for, to deal with different values and, as a consequence, different
interests. The figures seldom can be counted straight. As an alternative the public interest
would be what the interest of a majority is. The simple question is: what do we do with the
minority? The more difficult one: are there specific elements we have to add when a
collectivity is more than the individuals added up? But also that reasoning runs awry,
because a stable minority can become a threat for the society as a whole.
The substantive public interest is a more elusive concept, consisting of whatever would be in
the best interest of the public over a longer time span than at a certain moment. But how do
we determine that? A possibility is to think about what the majority of people would have
chosen if they had full information on an issue, the opportunity to interact with others
whose interest may be different, and time to consider the long-term effects of each
potential policy alternative. Box adds that that achieving this level of sophistication in
determining the public interest is difficult and unusual. Nevertheless it is a level of
15
sophistication we need for a constitutional of approach of public interest. Even then the
argumentation used refers to the public interest. Even self-interested actors have to justify
their proposals with reference to the public interest, in which way defined (Gripsrud et.al.
eds., 2010, xix).
PUBLIC VALUES
There had been major efforts in the history of thinking about the public domain to
reintroduce the problem which values are central in the public sector. Already Vincent
Ostrom made clear that the concentration on the bureaucracy side of public administration
made the discipline blindfolded for the democratic aspect of it (Ostrom, 1973). That means
that Public Administration should involve more than making the public bureaucracy work
better. The subject of Public Administration is not only management of public organizations.
It is not only an organizational theory for the public sector. It is about how the democratic
Rechtsstaat works and should work. It is about organizing democratic decision making and
the rule of law. Ostrom’s insights meant a redefinition of the domain of Public
Administration.
For a long time neo-positive thinking dominated the social sciences. Values hardly could be
given the place they deserved, in particular in the public sector. ‘Scientific Value Relativism’
was more or less the maximum one could get. Instrumentalism implied that design of public
policy could be done on the basis of given goals. And the goals were given by politicians. So,
instrumental thinking fitted perfectly in the distinction between politics and administration.
Or it should be formulated better the other way around: the distinction between politics and
administration was the product of instrumental pragmatism. Public policy design concerned
the optimizing of given goals. Where politicians got those goals from, remained out of sight.
Whether they were good or bad, favorable or abject, and for whom also. That seemed to be
a minor handicap in a world of values, to phrase it somewhat ironically.
The pragmatist claim, however, did not succeed. It was impossible to keep values out of the
practice of public administration. And it was impossible to keep it out of the discipline. So I
argue, in order to discover the place and role of public administration again, we have to
scrutinize the values in which public administration is embedded, to analyze the values of
the doctrines that are applied in the public sector and to reflect about new relationships
between politics and administration, normatively as well as in practice.
When we do so, it turns out that next to developments and values that we can see globally
we discover ideas that have everything to do with the political-administrative system that
we study. What we discover are universal values as well as regional or national ones. We
discover global trends on one side, and diversity on the other. And the development is not
16
one in which globalization is the only development that counts. We have to take the
diversity of Public Administration into account, not as a temporary phenomenon, but as
something that follows from the values we stand for, locally, regionally, nationally and
internationally.
With the concept of normativity Lasswell (1971) refers to the value-laden character of public
policy. This has consequences for the student of the policy sciences: he is not able to study
his object without interacting in one way or the other with its normative content. Values, or
more specific public values, play an important role.
What Lasswell stood for, was contradictory to a lot of work that was published in political
science. Most of these, and often that was their great significance, were empirical in
character. In Public Administration, the distinction between politics and administration had
effect. Politics was a synonym for values, administration for facts (see Waldo, 1948). A
double reduction of a complex reality was the result of the interpretation of politics as
politicians, or better: institutionalized politics. And the aims of politicians were centered
around obtaining and preserving power. Values became a phenomenon out of sight, both in
political science and Public Administration, and political philosophy followed. Hardly any
attention was given to the value-laden character of the public sphere.
Where do goals come from and what is their relationship with other political goals, became
important questions. Goals were no longer a-moral nor justifying themselves, like efficiency.
Political philosophy experienced something like a revival. Both Moore (1995) and
Frederickson (1997) searched for other values than efficiency alone (like I did in Ringeling
2004). Frederickson adds social equity next to effectiveness and legitimacy in his attempt to
formulate a New Public Administration. A firm discussion was the result.
In the eighties and nineties, there was an ‘argumentative turn’ in the policy sciences. Fischer
and Forester (1987) asked for analyses of the normative aspects of public policy. The idea
was to bring values back in. However important this idea was, it remained limited to the field
of public policy. And even within that field, there was only limited adherence. Most studies
were concentrating on given goals, goals given by the responsible politicians. Evaluation
studies became an industry, evaluating what was accomplished of these given goals. Too
seldom researchers asked themselves the question where the goals came from and whether
the results of a policy had to do with these goals and with the circumstances in which the
policy was implemented.
From the idea that there is a variety of values, we also can understand why thinking in terms
of optimizing and the best solution is obsolete. We differ on what the best solution is, have
different ideas about it. The reason is that our values differ. Not always, not with every
decision that has to be taken. But often enough to realize the diversity that is characteristic
for our societies. And that it is worthwhile to study the normative side of the public sector
intensively. We must distinguish between two different discussions. One is the discussion on
17
values. The other is a discussion about solutions, given a shared framework of values. The
second presupposes the first, but at the same time it is the raison d’être of the first. Because
policies and institutions are expressions of solidified values in which citizens can recognize
the common or shared values.
Values are central to what governments do. It is not only David Easton who made that clear
(Easton, 1954). His famous expression is that the function of the state is to allocate values in
a society authoritatively. It is also central in the line of thought of the democratic
Rechtsstaat. The state is about values, public values to be more precise. Moore (1995)
emphasizes the role of public managers in promoting public values for the public. It is more
than an empirical observation. In his view it is their task to do so. Values are not in a
normative sense the exclusive domain of politicians and politics. About the question which
values have to be promoted, this author is less explicit. And he keeps silent about the ways
conflicting values have to be handled and by whom. There are still important areas to
discover.
We conclude that those in power are not allowed to do what they want or what they think is
desirable. Moreover, a lot of alternatives for handling and governing are not allowed. The
reason is not only because the law forbids them to do so. Or that they don’t have rules at
their disposal that allows them to do so. But because it conflicts with more fundamental
ideas about law, about legality, and about the way the state is organized and the
fundamental principles on which the organization rests. The concept of the public sphere
brings with it normative insights about government and administration. Public values limit
as well as offer opportunities for public activities.
CONCLUSIONS
1. The concept public is a complicated concept. But because of that reason it is not
unusable. On the contrary, for the study of public administration it is a necessary
concept in order to understand its subject. For studying the public sector a better
comprehension of the concept public is necessary. We have to regain ideas about the
public sphere again in Public Administration.
2. The distinction between private and public is a first order invention in the history of
political philosophy. No longer the state was a possession of the king or another
ruler. And the public sphere could not intervene any longer in what was private.
Neglect of the concept of public implies the loss of this heritage and with it the
foundations of the modern state too.
3. Public is not identical to the state or government. There are many organizations
fulfilling public functions, apart or at a distance of the state. They are active in what is
18
called the public sphere, the public realm, the public domain and the public sector.
State as well as society fulfill public functions.
4. In the normative sense, the state is not there only when the market fails. The
economic concept of publicness fails in itself. The state is not there for individual
consumers looking for their biggest benefits. Systematically this approach
underscores the public character of the state and society.
5. Whether the economic approach is as useful for empirical research of the diversities
between public and private organizations as in organizing the discussion is still a
question to be answered.
6. There is not one specific rule-structure for public organizations. Some governmental
organizations have a rule structure that looks very much alike those of private
enterprises. Others have more traits that make them look like the caricatures that
Public Choice and New Public Management adherents draw. Diversity is an
characteristic of organizations formally belonging to the public sector.
7. It is in particular difficult to make sharp distinctions between public and private
configurations on a network level, because also within network organizations, tasks,
structure and functioning differ. We can only speak of public-private collaboration if
there is some degree of clearness what the terms public and private mean in terms of
tasks, functions and responsibilities.
8. Publicness is the common denominator for entities active in the public sector. There
is no other owner than the society as a whole. In democratic countries the expression
is that the public realm belongs to the people, indicating the sovereignty of the
citizens.
9. People are private, pursuing their own political and economic interests and their own
values. At the same time they are public in their role of citizen. The citizen is
essentially a public figure with rights and responsibilities. This has consequences for
his or her relationship with public organizations.
10. When we lose the notion of public we lose the notion of citizen too. He is organized
outside the public realm and reduced to his role of consumer, mostly an involuntary
consumer. To paraphrase Appleby: a theory of public administration is also a theory
of democracy and citizenship.
11. Public interest is a normative standard for the public sector. But we should not
confuse normative and empirical reasoning. In practice a lot of efforts is made to give
private interests a public character. Even then the argumentation used refers to the
public interest. Even self-interested actors have to justify their proposals with
reference to the public interest.
12. The values public institutions embody or promote can be considered as a link between
public values and social ethics. There is a role for all those active in the public sphere to
deal with public values, citizens, politicians as well as administrators.
19
LITERATURE
Allison Jr., G.T., Public and Private Management; are they fundamentally alike in all unimportant respects?, in;
Setting Public Management Research Agenda's, proceedings for the Public Management Research Conference,
November 19-20, Washington D.C., 1979, 27-41.
Appleby, P., Big Democracy, Knopf, New York, 1945.
Appleby, P., Government is different, in: D. Waldo (ed.), Ideas and Issues in Public Administration, McGraw-Hill,
New York etc. 1953, 57-63.
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958.
Beck Jorgensen, Torben, The Public Sector in an In-Between Time: Searching for New Public Values, in: Public
Administration, Vol. 77, nr. 3 (1999), 565-584.
Box, Richard C., Public Administration and Society: Critical Issues in American Governance, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk –
London, 2009.
Bozeman, Barry, All Organizations Are Public: bridging public and private organizational theories, Jossey-Bass, San
Francisco 1987.
Bozeman, Barry, Public Values and Public Interest: Counterbalancing Economic Individualism, Georgetown
University Press, Washington D.C., 2007.
Buchanan, James M., Liberty, Market, and State: Political Economy in the 1980's, New York, 1985.
Denhardt, Janet V. and Robert B. Denhardt, The New Public Service: Serving, Not Steering, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk –
London, 2003.
Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems, Swallow Press, Chicago, 1954.
Donahue, John D., The Privatization Decision: public ends, private means, Basic Books, New York 1989.
Downs, George W., Patrick D. Larkey, The Search for Government Efficiency; from hubris to helplessness, Temple Un.
Press, Philadelphia, 1986.
Easton, David, The Political System; An Inquiry into the State of Political Science, A. Knopf, New York (1953)
1971.
Fischer, Frank and John Forester (eds.), Confronting Values in Policy Analysis, Sage, Newbury Park etc., 1987.
Frederickson, H. George, Toward a Theory of the Public for Public Administration, in: Administration and
Society, 22, 4 (1991), 395.
Frederickson, , The Spirit of Public Administration, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1997.
Gawthrop, Louis C., Public Sector Management, Systems, and Ethics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1984.
Goodsell, C.T., The Case for Bureaucracy: A Public Administration Polemic, Chatham House, Chatham N.J., 1983.
Gripsrud, Jostein et. al. (eds.), The Idea of the Public Sphere; A Reader, Lexington Books, Lanham, 2010.
20
Habermas, Jurgen, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Frankfurt am Main, 1959 (English translation 1962).
Hart, D.K., The Virtuous Citizen, The Honorable Bureaucrat and Public Administration, in: Public Administration
Review, March 1984, 44, 111-119.
Hirschman, A.O., Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action, Princeton University Press, Princeton N.J.,
1982.
Kaufman, Herbert, Time, Chance, and Organization, Chatham House, Chatham N.J., 1985
Kiser, L.L. and E. Ostrom, The Three Worlds of Action, in: E. Ostrom (ed.), Strategies of Political Inquiry, Sage,
Beverly Hills etc. 1982, 179-222.
Lasswell, H.D., A Pre-View of the Policy Sciences, Elsevier, New York etc., 1971.
Leys, W.A.R., Ethics for Public Decisions, Prentice Hall, New York, 1952.
McCollough, Thomas E., The Moral Imagination and Public Life; Raising the Ethical Question, Chatham House,
Chatham N.J., 1991.
Moe, R.C., Exploring the Limits of Privatization, in: Public Administration Review, 47 nov./dec. 1987, 453-460.
Moore, Mark H., Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, Harvard University Press, Cambridge
–London, 1995.
Ostrom, Elinor, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge – New York, 1990.
Ostrom, Vincent, The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, University of Alabama Press, University
Al., 1973.
Pesch, Udo, The Predicaments of Publicness: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Ambiguity of Public Administration,
thesis, University Leiden, 2005.
Rainey, H.G., Understanding and Managing Public Organizations, Jossey Bass, San Francisco, 2003.
Reich, Robert B. (ed.), The Power of Public Ideas, Ballinger, Cambridge Mass. 1988.
Ringeling, Arthur, Het imago van de overheid (The Image of Government), Elsevier, Den Haag, 2004 (originally
1993).
Ringeling, Arthur, What we seem to forget in modern Public Administration, paper for the GRID-SPEA
conference, Speyer, 2012.
Savas, E.S., Privatizing the Public Sector: how to shrink government, Chatham House, Chatham N.J. 1982.
Schulz, David, The Crisis in Public Administration Theory in a Postglobal World, in: Donald C. Menzel and Harvey L.
White, eds., The State of Public Administration, Sharpe, Armonk – London, 2011, 453-463.
Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man, Knopf, New York, 1977
Stiglitz, Joseph E., The Price of Inequality; How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, W.W.Norton and Cy.,
New York – London, 2011.
Stillman, Richard J., The Romantic Vision in American Administrative Theory: retrospectives and prospectives, in:
International Journal of Public Administration, 7 (1985).
21
The President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government (Grace Commission), A Report
to the President, Washington D.C., 1984.
Van Gunsteren, Herman R., A Theory of Citizenship: Organizing Plurality in Contemporary Democracies, Westview
Press, Boulder Col., 1998.
Waldo, Dwight, Ideas and Issues in Public Administration, McGraw-Hill, New York etc. 1953.
Waldo, Dwight, The Enterprise of Public Administration: A Summary View, Novato Ca., 1980.
Wamsley, Gary L. et al., Refounding Public Administration, Sage, Newbury Park etc. 1990.
Wolf Jr., Charles, Markets or Governments: choosing between imperfect alternatives, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass. - London, 1988.
22