WILSON's VIEW OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION,NEW PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION,PUBLIC CHOICE APPROACH,GOOD GOVERNANCE,NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT

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So as mentioned in the previous blog,this blog is to cover the topics : Wilson's view of public administration,New Public Administration,Public Choice Approach,Good Governance and New Public Management.

 

Here it begins.

WILSON's VIEW OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION:

 

Wilson's complete essay : http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=465

 

Wilson is regarded as the founder/father of public administration courtesy his special attention to the art of public administration in his seminal essay mentioned above.

 

In the U.S during the last two decades of the nineteenth century there was a movement started that was a response to increasing Urbanization, immigration, the seeming loss of traditional values, inefficiency,Corruption, etc. The spoils system in administration was given the patronage of president jackson and thus loyal supporters of the victorious party were given plum administrative posts whether they merited it or not.

 

Woodrow Wilson was influenced by this movement and thus published his essay that insisted on major reforms in the govt. and administration to make it efficient and also this gave birth to the thought of public administration holding enough substance in itself to be a seperate study/discipline independent of Political Science which was popularly referred to as ' politics - administration dichotomy'.

 

He defined public administration as the detailed and systematic application of law. He believed that politics is about policy formulation and public administration is concerned with the execution of the same. And if both are mixed up then it will only lead to confusion,overlapping,inefficiency and not a stable administration.

 

He stated that public administration was businesslike and mechanistic and not laced with the ups and downs of politics. He asserted that politics did not have answers to most of the questions of administration and thus is to be out of the sphere of administration and vice versa

 

According to him administration is to be technically competent and politically neutral for a democracy.

 

Politicians were elected by people whereas civil servants were trained for the job and were technically sound to carry out the job in the best possible way.

 

Thus for Wilson, it is said, the Study of public administration, derived from the Study of politics, was to be distinguished from it, but never divorced from its “maxims” and “truths”. To Wilson, public administration was much more than technical detail and it was to be conducted in a political context .Thus he treated “politics and public administration as two sides of a coin”.

 

NEW PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION:

 

NPA through the Minnowbrook Conferences was the response to the world wars and social upheaval in the 20th century and how traditional public administration was not equipped to respond to this and the societal needs.

 

It put a lot of emphasis on having values in public administration instead of just bothered about production and profit all the time and make policies for the underprivileged and society.

 

It was a humanist approach to traditional public administration being practiced at that time.

Its themes were:

1. Relevance: Traditional public administration has too little interest in contemporary problems and issues. Social realities must be taken into consideration.

2. Values: Value-neutrality in public administration is an impossibility. The values being served through administrative action must be transparent.

3. Social Equity: Realization of social equity should be a chief goal of public administration.

4. Change: Skepticism toward the deeply-rooted powers invested in permanent institutions and the status quo.

5. Client Focus: Positive, proactive, and responsive administrators rather than inaccessible and authoritarian "ivory tower" bureaucrats.

Since it was very prescriptive(instructive) and not descriptive ( detailed and practical) as in very preachy without any means to practically implement them, it could not prevail for long or have a bang on impact as scholars were unsure and confused because of the abovementioned.

It was criticised that though it brought public administration closer to political science, it was criticized as anti-theoretic (not having any theory and not following any pre existing theory) and anti-management(not businesslike). Robert T. Golembiewski describes it as radicalism in words and status quo in skills and technologies.  Golembiewski considers it as a temporary and transitional phenomena. Further, it must be counted as only a cruel reminder of the gap in the field between aspiration and performance. So, NPA is important for the change in thought it brought about viz. the practice of traditional public administration.

 

PUBLIC CHOICE APPROACH:

Public choice approach is the use of modern economics tools to study problems that traditionally are in the province of political science. Please note that 'public' here refers to the administrators and the choices they make while implementing and formulating policies. From the perspective of political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that models voters, politicians, and bureaucrats as mainly self-interested. In particular, it studies such agents and their interactions in the social system either as such or under alternative constitutional rules and on what basis do they take decisions while implementing policies and also formulating policies.. These can be represented in a number of ways, including standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. Public choice analysis has roots in positive analysis ("what is") but is often used for normativepurposes ("what ought to be"), to identify a problem or suggest how a system could be improved by changes in constitutional rules, the subject of constitutional economics.

Public choice theory is intimately related to social choice theory, which uses mathematical tools to study voting and voters. Much early work had aspects of both, and both use the tools of economics and game theory. Since voter behavior influences the behavior of public officials, public choice theory often uses results from social choice theory.

 

GOOD GOVERNANCE:

 

 Governance describes "the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented (or not implemented)".The term governance can apply to corporate, international, national, local governance or to the interactions between other sectors of society.

 

It looks to reform governance through a variety of ways like comparitive studies and democratisation and decentralisation,transparency,etc. All international organisations like the UN, IMF & World Bank have put their weight behind this movement.

 

The criticism it has invited is that these very same international organisations who are behind it should not arm twist governments in all countries especially underdeveloped and developing ones into following their ways of functioning because their is a sea of difference.

 

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT:

 

It advocates the incorporation of more management practices into public administration to reform it and make it more efficient.

 

It proposes reforms such as incentives for administrators,deadlines and contracts outsourced and more public-pvt partnership.

 

However,the criticism it has drawn is that this needs to be implemented with caution especially in countries like India where administrators are still not evolved and will become all the more selfish and would only be bothered about profiteering.