How public is public administration? A constitutional approach of publicness

Abstract

Both in Public Administration and in practice, there is a loss of the concept of public. A view became dominant in which markets were superior to governments and public to private. Not only did the esteem of the public sphere diminish, but also its significance in our reasoning and teaching. It became less clear what the public sphere stood for. In this contribution, renewed attention for the concept and for related concepts like public interest and public values is asked for. Attention for these concepts should stimulate the reflection of our students on the relevance of the publicness of public administration, the relevance of the public sphere, the discussions about these subjects and of the study they follow. We should do so because this theme is crucial for our discipline and what it can deliver in education.

Keywords

public administration public and private public interest public sphere public values publicness

Introduction

According to Frederickson (1997: 4) there is a gradual loss of the importance of the concept of public in our discipline. Sennett (1977), for instance, states that “… no recognizable public realm remains”. Kaufman (1985) 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.

But these remarks can be considered almost marginal when we look which developments have taken place in many Western countries. What was later on called the Reform movement brought us a perspective in which the public sector was only relevant when markets failed (see Wolf, 1988), bureaucracy was used in its non-Weberian sense, and public organizations could improve performance by using market-related means of governing. Public is often defined by what it is not, in this case not private (see Pesch, 2005). The dominant view was that markets are superior to governments and, in line with this, private organizations superior to public ones. Some 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 on the public, but on 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. The public sphere has the traits of an endangered species. The bitter irony of the last years is that it was government that had to save market parties and stabilize markets as a whole.

Public Administration underwent effects of this dominant view of public and private. Administration became management, and management was strongly influenced by an economic approach. Performance was a central object for study, costs more than benefits became a crucial concept, and efficiency the dominant value. This was not exclusively an American or Anglo-Saxon affair. Europe followed this perspective to a large extent, but in a more balanced way (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). In the governance approach, the distinction between what was public and what was private even seemed to disappear. More and more it became unclear why we called it Public Administration. Perhaps this era asks for reconsideration of what public is.

These insights can amaze us, because the distinction between public and private is an invention of great importance in political history. No longer were countries the private property of the prince, the king or the emperor. No longer citizens did have to obey and serve the ruler without having any rights. No longer was a regime 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 historical struggle 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? The developments in Public Administration 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?

The concepts “public” and “publicness”

The term “public” (Gripsrud et al., 2010), carries at least four different meanings:

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 Ostrom, 1990). The same is true for information that is accessible to everyone.

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.

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.

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, a public sphere, a public sector, and a public interest. These terms all indicate that there is a separate domain in society with distinguishable characteristics we call public. The term public used as in public administration is connected to specific 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, and most dominant, is an individualistic one, and the other an organic one. The first one presumes the ontological precedence of the private sphere over the public one.

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. Here, 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 still is 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 existence of this relationship are the continuous tensions between government and the 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, 1964/2010: 114)

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 by a public of citizens, which 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 (1986/2010: 153) states: “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 a different 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, 1962: xv; Frederickson, 1997 comes to the same insight). Behind it is the liberal ideal 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 (1954) 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, 1997/2010). 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 held 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 democratic values and ways in which public deliberation should be shaped.

Two misunderstandings, however, have to be taken away. The first is, as Frederickson (1997) correctly remarks, the public sphere is not the same as the state. In most of its activities, it is a dominant actor in that sphere. But the concept contains the possibility that more actors are active in that sphere: citizens, foundations, and 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 ambiguous 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, NGOs, private or whatever the configurations were called. Jørgensen (1999) refers to these institutional arrangements as “in-betweenness”, a diffuse sector with “role indeterminateness”. Because the interesting question regarding all those in-between 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, as well state that the private sector is superior to the public as claim that the distinction does not mean much and is unclear. Let’s elaborate these positions somewhat.

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 from place to 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 may refer to the private sphere as a personal domain (i.e., privacy). On the other hand, it may refer to the private sphere as an economic domain (the private sector, i.e., business or markets). This in itself caused a hopeless confusion between individual activities and what economic organizations do and the potential tensions between individuals and business organizations.

As will be shown in the next sections, there are two different discussions. The first is the normative, ideological if preferred, discussion about what the state and what the market should do. The second is the empirical discussion 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 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 of their alternatives. They try to maximize their income, their power or their budget. The public, in this view, is the aggregation of the efforts individuals make. Neo-liberalistic thought made clear what was preferable: the market, government being the problem given its inefficient production of goods and services (see Schultz, 2010).

Compared to private organizations, The President’s Private Sector Survey of Cost Control in the Federal Government (Grace Commission, 1984) 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.

Its advice, “Run government as a business” was an echo of Wilson’s insight, a century earlier. The message was that public affairs would be better cared for and results would improve if the public sector would adopt more business-like methods and if more governmental tasks would be implemented by private organizations. With this advice, it reinforced the endeavours for privatization of governmental tasks that had gotten a new stimulus at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s.

The Grace commission, was an extreme defender of this point of view, fitting in a North-American line of thought. But the view expressed by the Commission can be heard more often and is connected to popular beliefs despite the balanced research that Rainey and collaborators did (Rainey, 2003; see also Bozeman, 2007). Behind that advice lies the old idea about the inferior performance of government organizations compared to private organizations. Most observers have little doubt about the superiority of the latter. The reasons are often repeated. Government organizations lack the challenges 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. Hear, hear, Mrs Thatcher would react. Some economists 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 (1958) long ago formulated the famous aphorism that public and private organizations are alike in all unimportant respects. Allison picked up the statement 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” (Allison, 1979: 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 to what degree these types of organizations differ in performance.

The discussion concerning the differences between public and private organizations was continued by Bozeman. He reverses Sayre’s statement by advancing that 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 behaviour, public organizations are more public than private. On the contrary, some private organizations are more public than public organizations. This especially holds for types of semi-public organizations. So, in this way the distinction is hardly sharp.

However, Bozeman conflates two different concepts of public: being affected by political authority on the one side, and fulfilling public functions on the other. Public tasks are not realized by public organizations only. Governments’ tasks are 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 their 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 the role of citizens as voters for citizens as consumers. Intellectually, there is some affinity with the Public Choice theory. Economic rationality stands central. Maximizing may have been replaced by optimizing, but its adherents are still concerned with obtaining more benefits than costs. The role of citizens is modest. They are the passive 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 Sayre’s original point of view, 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 constitutes the difference between public and private. It is the role-structure 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 as a whole 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. However, this comparison brings with it a number of problems. Often, there is a serious omission. This approach overlooks all those organizations performing governmental tasks, while having a private status. The status according to the law is, we saw before, not the only important indicator. So, in the comparison of the public and the private sector, the first has to be expended from government to the public sector, and include quasi-public organizations. However, the variety of structures and operations 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 on the effectiveness and the efficiency of public organizations. But again, whether this view is correct can be disputed. Savas (1982: 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.

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 shows 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 alternative. And so the comparison in performance only can be a partial one.

To that must be added that decision making of quangos 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. This must make us very careful in judging the performance of these organizations (Wolf, 1988: 90). These considerations lent support to Waldo (1980: 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 claim of the superiority of private organizations tries 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 would be necessary to ascertain clear differences in orientation or results.

A non-satisfactory discussion

Governmental organizations experience difficulties in implementing public decisions. This is not much different with private actors. It results from the fact that more people with different and conflicting interests participate in the implementation of governmental tasks and that authority is more dispersed than in a private firm. It is also the consequence of the fact that public organizations have to perform unique tasks and to attend goals that are hardly attainable. Public intentions often lack clearness and precision. These characteristics influence the implementation of these tasks and the evaluation of the performance of the implementing organizations. The problems are twofold. The many different pay offs lead to vague, misleading, multiple and conflicting goals as well as to diverging evaluation standards.

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 these are for Pesch (2005) reasons to distinguish a third concept of publicness, what 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 refers both to the significance of what belongs 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, strongly argues 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 (1986/2010: 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 are different discussions and different comparisons at stake, they also do not lead to clear answers to the question what distinguishes the public from the private sector. Neither juridical status, orientation, nor performance create clear divisions between public and private organizations. That accountabilities differ seriously between public and private organizations is left out of sight. That political accountability is a special category that have to be studied in order to understand relationships in the public sector is lost in the discussion. Is it possible, one can ask, to do 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 behaviour, 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 in this context are meant 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. I will use the central element of this view, reasoning in terms of rules in action, in my approach of the public sphere. I call it a constitutional approach.

A constitutional approach can challenges a number of presuppositions that were used in the economic approach of governmental affairs. Mainly, the models used in that approach refer to, in the Weberian term, ideal types. But the types do not fit very well to practice. They are so sketchy that differences in public systems seem to have no consequences for the games being played and for their results. Institutional theory can offer useful support 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. I have earlier used the German term (democratic) Rechtsstaat for it (Ringeling, 2014).

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 should show forbearance and tolerance. One would possibly consider this requisite as too idealistic. But it is significant because it highlights the intense relationship between the concepts public and citizens. Perhaps the ideal picture can be substituted by the vision of what is called “neo-republican citizenship”. Van Gunsteren (1998) 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 shared destiny 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 of 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 refers to 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 execute. Individual citizens have one task: to choose their representatives. Then the problem is still 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 that we leave the old pluralism behind us as the exclusive solution for the aggregation of preferences and open new ways of participation and deliberation among citizens. Consumer satisfaction and grievance procedures are necessary ways of information. 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 this, it follows that representative government is only a partial answer to the role of citizens. They also have to take individual responsibility for what happens in a political community. This presupposes a sphere of tolerance with respect for the insights of others. Benevolence is the key of the interaction between one citizen and 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 under the rule of people. The capacity here is the structured pattern of interactions between public administrators, interest groups, elected officials, and citizens in order to find the evolving and changing public will.

At the same time, Frederickson (1997: 49) brings forward that 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 and for friends or relatives, but by people with a shared destiny and with shared as well as different values.

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, which 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 further: 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. Appleby (1953: 62) can again be mentioned as an example here. His position is that: no organization works more strongly 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 put on serving the public interest fulfils several functions. It is 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 has to serve the community as a whole. Within the public sector it is also used as a criterion to distinguish between what political organizations and public organizations are aiming at. Politicians are presumed to seek the party interest and public officials try to serve the public as a whole. The argument is stronger in those countries where parties play a prominent role in public affairs. It means an effort to keep alive the distinction between “politics” and “administration”. But it also expresses 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 a concrete standard for the way they do their work. So contrary to what the Public Choice theory says, Frederickson (1991: 415) maintains: “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 1990s, 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, 1988), the concept plays a central role. Goodsell (1990) 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 it an explicit form. The distance between administrative and political actors has been diminished. Both segments of the political system are presumed to contribute to the realization of the public interest.

However, 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 the “common cause” is. 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 behaviour of officials and politicians or between private and public organizations was even harder to get. Some authors 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” (Denhardt and Denhardt, 2003: 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) puts forward that the values conveyed by the public interest can be reformulated in individualistic terms. Individualistic values like efficiency and economy 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 taken for granted by all authors mentioned. Still the question remains 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 make a distinction between the same interests, common interests and public interest. People can share a particular interest, they can have all the same particular interests, 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 interest? 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 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 and Denhardt’s treatment of the concept of public interest, the aggregative elements are strong (Denhardt and Denhardt, 2003). Still the public is considered as 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 has slaughtered that insight (recently Stiglitz, 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. An ugly building is too. In the political realm, it is difficult to aggregate individual interests, because in most cases they differ. Politics is meant for dealing with different values and, as a consequence, with different interests. Preferences are difficult to aggregate. As an alternative, the public interest would be what is in the interest of a majority. The simple rebuttal to this conviction is: what do we do with the minority (see Scharpf, 1970)? The more difficult rebuttal is: are there specific elements we have to add when a collectivity is more than the individuals added up? But also this reasoning runs awry, because a stable minority can become a threat for a 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. But how do we determine this? 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 interests may be different, and time to consider the long-term effects of each potential policy alternative. Box adds that achieving this level of sophistication in determining the public interest is complicated, perhaps a reason to refrain it. Nevertheless, it is a level of sophistication we need for a constitutional approach to 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 whichever way defined (Gripsrud et al., 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. 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 could hardly 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. Alternatively, it should be better formulated 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, favourable 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 rediscover the place and role of public administration again, we have to scrutinize the values in which public administration is embedded, to analyse 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 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.

The position of Lasswell contradicted 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.

The “rebirth” of political philosophy made the question “Where do goals come from and what is their relationship with other political goals”, important. 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 1980s and 1990s, 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 anything to do with these goals and with the circumstances 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 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 was not only David Easton (1954) who made that clear. 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 stays 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 free 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 allow 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.

Consequences for what we teach

The practice of the last decades has been that we were confronted with the absence of the concept of public and a number of other concepts referring to the public sphere. The fuzziness can’t be a reason to refrain from dealing of these concepts. On the contrary, it is the reason we have to pay attention to it. Because in the study of Public Administration, it is a necessary concept in order to understand its subject. We have to regain ideas about the public sphere in Public Administration, because public life is more than a business of production and consumption.

Neglect of the concept of public implies the loss of a historical heritage of Europe and the United States and with it insights on the foundations of the modern state. The Reform movement of the last decades seems to have washed away this kind of crucial insights, replacing it with a business-like managerial approach, where “costs” was the central concept and efficiency the dominant value. Public Administration programs that are the consequences of this kind of reasoning are handicapped programs, because they miss what is characteristic for the public sphere. They take public activities for a business.

A necessary insight is also that the concept of public is not identical to the state or government. There are many organizations fulfilling public functions, apart or at a distance from the state. They are active in what is called the public sphere, the public realm, the public domain and the public sector. State as well as society fulfil public functions. In the normative sense, the state is not there only when the market fails. The economic concept of publicness fails in itself. The public sphere is not the arena for individual consumers looking for their biggest benefits. Governance is more than deliverance of goods and services to clients. Systematically the dominant approach underestimates the public character of the state and society.

Also, there is not one specific rule structure for public organizations. Some governmental organizations have a rule structure that looks very much like those of private enterprises. Others have more traits that make them look like the caricatures that Public Choice and New Public Management adherents draw of the public sector. Diversity is a characteristic of organizations formally belonging to that sector. 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 clarity what the terms public and private refer to in terms of tasks, functions and responsibilities.

Publicness is the common denominator for what entities active in the public sphere do. This kind of basic insight hardly seems to have any consequences for what we teach. At best, we organize an ethics course (see Ringeling, 2013). The problem area we explored is a much-encompassing one, referring to the fundamentals of our discipline. Public interest can be considered as a normative standard for the public sector. But we should not confuse normative and empirical reasoning. In practice, a lot of effort is made to give private interests a public character. Even then the argumentation that is used to realize these private interests refers to the public interest that could be served.

Public organizations pay attention to particular public values. Not only in the way that they operate, but also because they committed to certain goals that are the expression of these public values. 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 the people active in the public sphere to deal with public values, citizens, politicians as well as administrators. We should begin with our students for two reasons. First, to make them alert to the phenomenon of the value-embeddedness of much of the discussion and action in the public sphere. And second, in order to stimulate the development of their own normative ideas.

The concepts we paid attention to in this contribution are all crucial concepts for Public Administration. The concepts are not unproblematic nor undisputed. That is the reason why we should pay attention to them in our curricula. Public Administration programs can’t do without reflection on what is public. Defining it is insufficient, because these concepts of public and public sphere are complex. Nowadays and in history there are many different ideas and insights on the democratic Rechtsstaat and the public values connected with it. We have an obligation to stimulate the reflection of our students on the public character of Public Administration. So, first of all this essay asks attention for a theme that in my view has been neglected in recent times. Students of Public Administration should be sensitive for this subject, because they must have an idea where the state is for.

That leads to the next question: in which ways should this be done? Public Administration programs run the risk of becoming instrumental in themselves by giving much attention on management techniques, but little on political philosophy. Changes in the curriculum in order to stress the uniqueness of the public sector would be welcome. But there are also educational means that could be applied. Policies and decisions could be analysed on the values that they contain and where these values are derived off. Case-studies, and studies of the practice of government could stimulate more attention for the normative side in our programs of what public organizations do. Discussing contrasting cases about public and non-public decision making may help, but also the study of the evaluation reports of organizations like for instance the General Accounting Offices or government committees are useful to explore a spectrum of values, public as well as private, their similarities and their differences.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

This contribution would not be as it is now if Loek van Rooij would not have criticized it and had made suggestions on how to improve it. All flaws, however, are mine.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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