Femocratic Administration

Those who implement policies have the discretion to shape democratic values. Public administration is not policy administered, but democracy administered.

A timely new perspective on the impact of populism on the relationship between democracy and public administration.

'Governance' has become a key word in the lexicon of international relations over the last twenty years. It is used, loosely, and invariably in a liberal idiom, by scholars, activists, civil society organizations, politicians and the voluntary sector. In many respects it has attained the status of a fetish, yet 'governance' remains a notion that has multiple definitions, a concept in-the-making. Notwithstanding the imprecision with which the term is employed, it has become an inescapable paradigm for the politics of development. The contributors to this book, drawn from among some of the world's best area studies specialists, from North and South, offer a diverse global critique of 'governance' as deployed in several key areas: institutions and state actors; the rule of law, democracy and human rights; decentralization and state power; development and, last but not least, international cooperation and the role of the World Bank, the IMF and NGOs. The geographical spread of the volume ranges from Africa to Latin America, from Asia to the Middle East. Their objectives include: a reassessment of 'governance' in its many manifestations; an attempt to free the term from its often unhelpful linkage to the state, and thereby apply it to other organizations and actors; a re-evaluation of the Western-dominated use of the term politically and an attempt to broaden its application beyond issues such as transparency and the fight against corruption; and a search for innovative applications of the term, driven by a consensus that transcends current economic and political inequalities.

Explains how administrative government maintains mutual respect among citizens, legitimates administrative government under law, and supports a realistic vision of democracy.

After a quarter of a century of implementation of New Public Management (NPM) reform strategies, this book assesses the major real outcomes of these reforms on states and public sectors, at both the organisational level and a more political level. Unlike most previous accounts of reform, this book looks at how reform has changed the role of the public administration in democratic governance. Featuring case studies on the UK, Germany, France, Norway, Ireland, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Post communist states, Mexico, South Korea, Turkey and the European Commission, and focusing on two issues this book: Examines the significant variations in the "trajectories" of administrative reform among West European countries on the basis of empirically rooted research on different national case studies. Assesses the extent to which these "constitutive" public policies have affected the institutions of government and the governing processes of our democratic occidental states and ask how have NPM-inspired programs, with their exclusive focus on managerialist objectives and instruments, challenged the political and democratic nature of public administration? Looking at the broader issues relating to the current recompositions of democratic states, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of all matters relating to public administration and governance within political science, management, public law, sociology, contemporary history, and cultural studies.

The contributors to this volume contend that the North American political system is undergoing a serious governmental crisis - political leaders know only how to campaign, not how to gain consensus on goals or direct a course that is to the good of the nation. Public administration is therefore forced to compensate for the growing inadequacy of the 'leaders', and with a normative-based body of theorizing, perform its key role of governance within a democratic system of polycentric power. The book offers a revisualization of the relationship between public servants and the citizens they serve, and a continuing discourse on how public administration can constructively balance forces of change and stability in order for democracy to evolve and mature.

Democratic Governance examines the changing nature of the modern state and reveals the dangers these changes pose to democracy. Mark Bevir shows how new ideas about governance have gradually displaced old-style notions of government in Britain and around the world. Policymakers cling to outdated concepts of representative government while at the same time placing ever more faith in expertise, markets, and networks. Democracy exhibits blurred lines of accountability and declining legitimacy. Bevir explores how new theories of governance undermined traditional government in the twentieth century. Politicians responded by erecting great bureaucracies, increasingly relying on policy expertise and abstract notions of citizenship and, more recently, on networks of quasi-governmental and private organizations to deliver services using market-oriented techniques. Today, the state is an unwieldy edifice of nineteenth-century government buttressed by a sprawling substructure devoted to the very different idea of governance--and democracy has suffered. In Democratic Governance, Bevir takes a comprehensive look at governance and the history and thinking behind it. He provides in-depth case studies of constitutional reform, judicial reform, joined-up government, and police reform. He argues that the best hope for democratic renewal lies in more interpretive styles of expertise, dialogic forms of policymaking, and more diverse avenues for public participation.

Though his term in the White House ended nearly a century ago, Woodrow Wilson anticipated the need for new ideas to address the effects of modern economic and social forces on the United States, including increased involvement in international affairs. Democracy and Administration synthesizes the former world leader's thought on government administration, laying out Wilson's concepts of how best to manage government bureaucracies and balance policy leadership with popular rule. Linking the full gamut of Wilson’s ideas and actions covering nearly four decades, Brian J. Cook finds success, folly, and fresh thinking with relevance in the twenty-first century. Building on his interpretive synthesis, Cook links Wilson’s tenets to current efforts to improve public management, showing how some of his most prominent ideas and initiatives presaged major developments in theory and practice. Democracy and Administration calls on scholars and practitioners to take Wilson’s institutional design and regime-level orientation into account as part of the ambitious enterprise to develop a new science of democratic governance.