Beneficence in Public Administration Research,or Who Needs the NSF Anyway?

Introduction

Once upon a time that seems to have been forgotten, Paul Appleby argued that the larger the dimensions of the program and the more powerful the beneficiary public, the heavier was the moral obligation of administrators to seek flexible dilutions of the majority insistence with a factor of empathy for minorities and individuals. Or as he put it, “The weaker and less privileged the clientele, the greater should be the administrator’s concern to realize the full dimensions of the majority assent (1950, p. 175).” Appleby was asking that public administrators behave, as Schubert (1957) would classify them, as “Administrative Platonists,” finding and maximizing the moral good in their public careers (pp. 349-357). Appleby and Schubert, and many others, questioned the good that public administrators should do. In this disputatio, I want to ask, at what level should public administration researchers do good?

The question about the good wrought through public administration research, still a subset of political science in many universities, is a timely one. The recent debate over the Coburn Amendment and the Flake Amendment, both of which proposed to defund political science research funded via the National Science Foundation (NSF), brought to the fore the lingering question: What is the public value of political science research? Considering that public administration researchers, both in the United States and abroad, use and contribute to NSF-funded data, the defunding of political science is a matter that should provoke serious concern for public administration scholars (Jordan & Gray, 2013a). ¹

Coburn and Flake, unsuccessful and successful, respectively, defended their proposals to defund political science research, specifying it by name and asserting that political science contributes little to the technological and economic advancement of the United States. Both argued that continuing to fund political science research would do harm to the financial fitness of the United States (H.AMDT. 1094 to H.R. 5326 and H.R. 933). In the proposal, passed on March 21, 2013 (as H.R. 5326 by the 2013 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Act), Senator Tom Coburn (an MD), challenged the director of the NSF to defund political science on the grounds that

Studies of presidential executive power and American’s attitudes toward the Senate filibuster hold little promise to save an American’s life from a threatening condition or to advance America’s competitiveness in the world . . . Research institutions and academic associations should support these investigations with their own resources. Discontinuing funding for these types of studies will increase our ability to fund research into basic fields of mathematics and science such as engineering, biology, physics, and technology. (Coburn, March 12, 2013)

One could only hope that Senator Flake’s derision of the study of “American’s attitudes toward the Senate filibuster” did not come to haunt him during the recent filibuster efforts regarding implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Or, perhaps, an astute observer of the history and implementation of science and technology policy could point out to Senator Coburn that a very similar argument against the physical sciences was made in the framing of the Stevenson Wyndler Act, the Bayh-Dole Act, and the Federal Technology Transfer Act (Lane, 2008, Note 29).

Although we might forgive both senators for their overly enthusiastic and sincere, but incorrect, belief that basic research in bench science disciplines flows neatly and directly to the bedside or the marketplace, what these amendments bring to the surface is a lingering tension—a disputatio—about the role of beneficence, whether a beneficent intent or beneficial outcomes, in research. In this disputatio, I will take the position that public administration research does meet the standard of beneficence as an ethical imperative for researchers, but only when the benefits to society or social benefits are discussed in a qualified manner as benefits to a locality.

Both Representative Flake’s and Senator Coburn’s proposals implied that social science research does not meet a standard of beneficence—it is more harmful to fund the research than it is beneficial to conduct it. When asserting that only research that generates technological goods or products—for example, blockbuster drugs and devices, a yet-smaller microchip, or a better mousetrap—has merit, these Congressmen seemed to have forgotten that public administration research, improves the administrative apparatus necessary to approve those blockbuster drugs efficiently, or ship those microchips overseas safely, or place better mousetraps in subway tunnels more cost efficiently, safely, and effectively. In a way reminiscent of the “bureaucrat bashing” days of the Reagan administration, Senators Coburn and Flake campaigned on a platform of attacking political scientists who study bureaucrats and bureaucrat bashing, arguing that allocating funds to their research is a waste of resources and does not further U.S. economic competitiveness.

To bring this dispute to the doorstep of the reader, it may be helpful to remind the reader that active public administration researchers confront the challenge of demonstrating beneficence in our research regularly. Beneficence or maximizing benefits while minimizing harms, is a core tenet of research ethics but is also a core motivating principle for public administrators, whom we academics serve in the classroom or in our research offices. Within the context of research, public administration researchers using data from living individuals or identifiable secondary data must justify their research to human research protections boards (e.g., Institutional Review Boards [hereafter, IRBs]) explicitly on the grounds of beneficence. In IRB review, beneficence, or the maximization of benefits and the minimization of harms that arise to participants in research during and after participation in a research project, can be difficult for public administration researchers to demonstrate. When researchers are called upon to identify physical, psychological, or economic benefits of their research to individual participants or to society, they find it difficult to justify it on the grounds that it provides direct benefits. Instead, in the process of defending their research, public administration (and political science) scholars might rely on the defense that our research will produce social benefits or benefits to society. Although these diffuse, catchall categories might help us to pass the low (but irritating) bar of an IRB review, it is unclear whether using these terms could help to make a public case that public administration research does benefit society. Would claiming that our research benefits society be a strong enough retort if we were invited to the Hill to defend our field of research and practice against any further threats of defunding at the hands of a fiscally concerned House and Senate?

Answers to these questions would require substantial empirical research, including clarification of the concept “social benefit” or “benefits to society.” I take up this challenge below, fully hoping that another disputant will emerge from among Administrative Platonists, Rationalists, or Realists to claim that my concept of “the social as the local” is inadequate (Schubert, 1957).

Social Risk and Social Benefits in Research

The phrases social risk or social benefit are used frequently, if not flippantly, in discussions about research. But, what is a social cost or benefit to society? Defining these terms means first addressing what is meant by “publicness,” “public interest,” “society or social.”

Robert Levine (1978), one of the key medical ethicists behind the U.S. Belmont Report and Common Rule, describes distinctly social risks as “inextricably entangled with issues of confidentiality” and describes the risks to society as “derivative physical risks to the individual” (pp. 2-16, 2-20). For Levine, a risk to society would be illness, disability, or death that affects the lives and livelihoods of others associated with individuals participating in research, while violations to reasonable privacy expectations or data protection laws would be a social risk. Regarding social benefits, the social benefits from research are expressed in terms congenial to the arguments of Flake and Coburn; social benefits emerge from technological innovations that improve overall economic productivity or individual and societal well-being (Linder & Jarrett, 1978).

One way that recent regulatory reformers attempted to clarify the meaning of social risk is by tightening the definition of social risks to mean only harms to informational privacy of participants. In the “Advanced Notice for Proposed Rulemaking” issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2011, the authors reduced social, economic, and legal risks to a new category of informational risks (Office of the Secretary—Department of Health and Human Services, 2011, p. 44522). The ANPRM definition of an informational risk is

Informational risks derive from inappropriate use or disclosure of information, which could be harmful to the study subjects or groups. For instance, disclosure of illegal behavior, substance abuse, or chronic illness might jeopardize current or future employment, or cause emotional or social harm. (Office of the Secretary—Department of Health and Human Services, 2011, p. 44515)

However, even though informational risks were suggested to be a clarification of social risks, it is unclear what social risks might be mitigated by reduction of informational harms as the definition relies on the prior articulation of social harms, which are used to illustrate informational risks. Thus a circular reference emerges that points up a bigger problem in research risk and benefits review.

There is anecdotal and some limited empirical evidence that researchers, reviewers, and research ethics scholars have no definition of “social” or “society” for assessment of social risks or benefits to society for any type of research, whether social scientific or clinical scientific (Pritchard, 2011). The consequence of this conceptual befuddlement in practice is that research regulators like the U.S. or U.K. Office of Research Integrity, or the U.S. Office of Human Research Protections, or the Health Research Council of New Zealand Ethics Committees, and their local delegates serving on institutional research ethics review boards assess the costs and benefits of research according to symbolically and politically loaded terms. This opens the door to the intercession of individuals, like Congressmen Coburn and Flake, to challenge the utility of the social sciences research using whichever definitions of social benefits permit them the greatest opportunities for political victories and public credit claiming. Thus, when we cannot define what social benefits our science can produce, we invite critiques from individuals who wish to define a social science and its benefits in their own self-serving way.

The difficulty of articulating a clear, regulatory, specific, meaning for the term social is that the connotations and denotations for the term are as numerous as the people using the terms and the purposes for which they use them. To provide an illustrative example, if we follow the logic of the arguments against political science research in the Coburn and Flake Amendments, then what is “social” is what advances basic science and technology, and increases the well-being of a nation’s economy and individual citizens. If we accept the classifications of federally fundable political science research described in SA 26, the amendment to H.R. 933 or the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, then “only political science research that promotes “national security or the economic interests of the United States” ought to be funded. If one combined the specific examples given by both congressmen and applied them to medical science, it would mean only those studies producing technologies that restore bodily function following injury or improve forecasting that prevents adverse sequelae from natural disasters would be considered deserving pursuits, as they enhance security or economic fitness. Given this, a research study could be said to be socially valuable to the extent that its results present benefits to individuals and communities that are short- or long-term improvements to bodily integrity or the integrity of individual and firm credit; improvements to perceptions of bodily safety or financial stability; and/or improvements to economic competitiveness of the U.S. vis-à-vis competitor nations, whether competitors for economic (hard) resources or values (soft) resources. Social benefits could also include improvements leading to reversal of feelings of “anxiety and stress . . . sadness or even depression . . . betrayal,” that do not induce “exacerbation of underlying psychiatric conditions,” or prevent disclosure without authorization information that “might jeopardize” individuals’ secure social standing (Office of the Secretary—Department of Health and Human Services, 2011, pp. 445615-445616).

This range of potential social benefits from research can help to point to areas where public administration research certainly does help individuals—to overcome, for example, fear of applying for welfare benefits (health insurance?) from the state due to concerns about privacy or national financial stability. Yet, who would be in a position to determine whether a public administration project contributed to improved security or economic fitness for any one citizen or group of citizens who participated in a research project? And would this benefit be enough to satisfy a sufficient number of relevant constituents’ concerns that this study ought to be funded at a governmental, rather than institutional, level?

The Social as the Local

Lost in the emotive and, at times, hyperbolic, debate over the value of social versus “hard” scientific research or the need for NSF funding for political science research is the point that both Representatives Coburn and Flake made social science research should be funded “close to the source” at the local level through private or public organizations (e.g., universities). Neither Congressman advocated that political science or public administration researchers should be tossed out of their role as researchers, but they both maintained that the majority of this research should be funded nearer to the population that would possibly benefit (Schroeder, 2007). If we overlook the immediate reaction to our livelihoods as researchers, what we find is an argument rooted in concepts like decentralization, subsidiarity, and slogans like “think globally, act locally.” This argument hearkens to arguments that persist (albeit cyclically) in the literature of public administration research, for example, the importance of local knowledge, context, and engagement in civil society or community as a source of effective management of limited resources in a plural society.

Reflecting on this, perhaps the way to muddle through the definition of what is social and what is socially risk or valuable is to reflect on local group preferences. For example, a redefinition of social risk could mean a harm (including economic harms and/or breaches of individual informational or physical security), that is reviled at a known level in an identifiable group of individuals or affiliated groups. A “benefit to society” could then be defined as a preferred good that is more than a physical, psychological, or informational gain that generates positive accumulation of security or economic fitness for an identifiable group or affiliated groups. Given these definitions and the localist argument implied in the amendments, making “the social” into “the local” seems to be the only conceptually plausible way to account for the range of preferences, including those of these legislators and their constituents, and the values of public administration researchers. Likewise, making the social the local might further satisfy the goal that Coburn (March 12, 2013) ascribed to the research funded by the NSF, “increase our investments in transformative science and basic research by simply setting priorities and better managing the resources available.”

As scholars of public management know well, efforts to define efficiency at a federal program level (e.g., through Government Performance and Results Act [GPRA] reporting) or efficacy at a state level (e.g., through Patient-Centered Outcomes assessments) are routinely plagued by conceptual, measurement, and relevance problems. In this way, Senator Coburn has only now discovered now what public administration researchers have known all along—our research is effectual when we work hardest at the local level. For example, efforts to measure efficiency, equity, efficacy, or [fitness of the] economy, when we have high resolution data from a set of organizations operating at a similar level. Localized studies are more likely to be successful analytically, but, importantly, are more successful in democratic terms—they satisfy the needs of the people served by the policy. It would seem to follow, therefore, that risks and benefits that accrue from research projects conducted to assess the effects of administrative behavior, managerial entrepreneurialism, policy subsystems, or the value of networking in public organizations would also be better measured, mitigated, or maximized at the local level of society.

Conclusion

In the introduction to this Disputatio, I asked, Ought scholars studying the administration of public goods bring any distinct goods back to the public they study? For the moment, I answer these questions with a qualified, yes. Public administration researchers should strive to address the benefits of their research to local problems. Of course, if at some point the mandate behind Senator Coburn’s push for U.S. global competitiveness comes to pass, the “national” will come to be thought of as “local” anyway.

With no sense of irony implied, whether we can defend our research discipline as beneficent—as economically or technologically beneficial for the local context in which we perform it—is a matter for more rigorous research into the lingering consequences of public administration researchers’ influence on the organizations they study. Also useful would be a more in-depth analysis of the degree to which public administration students implement in their daily practice the knowledge acquired in Masters of Public Administration (MPA) programs.

The questions raised above are those for which funding must be obtained, however. Whether this funding is provided through the NSF or through local initiatives is, I contend, an irrelevant question. Comparatively few public administration projects are funded by the NSF and few public administration researchers explicitly rely on NSF-funded data sets for their research (Jordan & Gray, 2013b). Thus, regardless of Senator Coburn’s success, public administration scholars will find a way to muddle through, working away as minority interests in a field dominated by political scientists who are themselves struggling to prove their worth in comparison with seemingly fantastical physicists and physicians able to translate bench research to bedside with a wave of a hand.