This essay summarizes the book by Michael Spicer.
In his book, Michael Spicer seeks to resolve was he sees as a conflict between the “optimism of public administrators and the view of most economists. His thesis, which he expands later in the book, is that
“[M]any, if not most, public administration writers exhibit a rationalist worldview that places great faith in the powers of human reason, the Founders held … a more anti-rationalist worldview that stresses the limits of reason. This conflict in worldviews … makes it difficult for us as public administration writers to argue for the legitimacy of public administration on constitutional grounds. (P. xi).
This observation immediately begs the question, “Why should we care about legitimacy in this context?” This is not a trivial question; Americans in general dislike and distrust bureaucracy and to submit to its authority they must believe that public administrators have a right to make a certain number of decisions for them.
Spicer points out that as partisan politics have gotten progressively uglier, Americans increasingly tend to view public administration through the prism of their own ideology. Conservatives see public administrators as “obstacles” to their “attempts to increase liberty”; liberals see public administrators is “preserving and reinforcing existing social and economic inequities…” (P. 4).
The Essay on Public Personnel Administration
Public personnel administration is a branch of human resource management that is concerned with the acquisition, development, utilization and compensation of a public organization’s workforce. The term “public personnel administration” includes three key words. First, “public” refers to regional and local governmental agencies as well as non-profit ones. &# ...
In a climate marred by such hostility it’s no surprise that public administration is no longer regarded as legitimate.
Spicer says that this lack of legitimacy can have “real costs.” (P. 4).
First, if talented people do not believe government service is legitimate and worthwhile, good candidates will not come forward for possible employment and the overall quality of public administration will suffer.
Second, public perception that public administrators are incompetent undermines their morale. Third, if political leaders perceive a lack of legitimacy in public administration, they may “impose overly restrictive controls on public administrators that that damper their flexibility and raise the costs of providing services to taxpayers. (P. 5).
Spicer acknowledges that rules are necessary to a functioning bureaucracy; what he objects to is a sort of “micro-management” technique that stifles effective administrative action and is counterproductive. (P. 5).
Finally, lack of legitimacy can “contribute to erosion of public regard for the law.” (P. 5).
Given that most people’s only point of contact with government is at the local level, this is an important point.
Having established that it is important for public administration to have legitimacy, and having also presented two views of it (rationalist and anti-rationalist), Spicer goes on to consider the matter in much greater detail; this consideration forms the bulk of the book. He quotes authors who believe that the Founding Fathers empowered modern public administrators “to play an independent constitutional role by choosing among their constitutional masters, who may sometimes be in conflict with one other.” (P. 6).
Others agree with the interpretation that the Constitution gives public administration its legitimacy, since it dictates the rules under which public administration operates.
Constitutional critics disagree. They see the system of powers guaranteed by the Constitution as an obstacle to objective governance, and the Constitution as a “constraint on the actions of an effective administrative state.” (P. 9).
Book Review On Public Administration
H. George Fredericksons The Spirit of Public Administration is an informative yet drab look at motivating public administrators. Frederickson discusses a wide variety of topics that would be useful to any public administrator, but the verbiage used is a bit difficult for an individual that may be entering into the service field The Spirit of Public Administration is broken down into three parts. ...
What these conflicting views truly represent, Spicer says, is a conflict in worldviews. He comes back to his thesis here (or rather enlarges upon it):
“The central argument of this work is that any attempt to establish the legitimacy of public administration on the basis of the Constitution must reflect, to a significant degree, elements of the worldviews of the Founders.” (P. 11).
Recall that the Founders were all white, all men, all well-to-do and all landowners, and it will readily become apparent that their way of looking at things is substantially different from that of a minority single mother. Spicer suggests that we have to remember what their worldview was before we can make sense of the Constitution and what they foresaw it would mean for public administrators.
Further, he concludes that the Founders’ worldview was essentially anti-rationalist. There seems to be a pejorative connotation here; it seems as though “anti-rationalist” should mean “irrational” but it does not. It merely means that there are limits to what men can do with reason. This is the view of the Founding Fathers, and Spicer embraces it.
After examining the arguments of both the rationalists and the anti-rationalists, he concludes that his vision of public administration is “the idea, embraced by the Founders, that the discretionary power of government officials, both political leaders and public administrators, should be constrained or checked.” (P. 97).
This is the anti-rationalist view, because it depends on checks and balances rather than reason to operate effectively. It allows public administration to function well without risking that administrators, left entirely on their own, will become tyrannical.
Reference
Spicer, Michael. The Founders, the Constitution and Public Administration: A Conflict in World Views. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown U. Press, 1995.
