Public Administration & Public Policy: Lectures 1-5

Lectures 1-5

• Public Administration (PA) embraces Public Policy (PP) as an academic discipline.
• PP is a process that includes the work of PA.
• PA encompasses research in internal and external public management, urban studies, and public policy analysis.
• PP involves problem identification, agenda setting, policy making, implementation, and evaluation.
• Government participates in PP but is not the sole actor,acting as an evaluator of policies.
• Public administration draws from psychology, economics, sociology, and political science.
• Contracting involves economics and sociology, intergovernmental dynamics relate to political sciences and public policy integrates multiple disciplines like history, sociology, and economics.
• Easton's political system model illustrates policy context as a "blender" with inputs (fruits) from policy problems, outputting a "smoothie" of selected policy tools and involves multiple actors
• Kingdon's multiple streams model addresses problem, policy, and politics to identify different types, interests and factors impacting policy making
• Public choice theory suggests individuals are inherently selfish affecting government and incentives that influence behaviour
• Principal-agent theory acknowledges that leaders delegate authority, potentially leading to misaligned gaols and information asymmetry.
• The politics-administration dichotomy involves separating or integrating political neutrality and technical competence.
• Public administration is described a serving the public good, it studies how the public sector serves the public good and aims for efficiency, effectiveness, and rational policy development.
• Macro policy change involves visible transformation, and governments chose actions in response to public problems or needs
• Governments consist of bodies governing organized communities broader than just the administrative branch but there are limitations such as term limits
• Governments are needed because they need authority, population, territory, sovereignty and the social contract that people give up rights to allow them to govern
• Nature of human beings lead to social dominance and system justification.
• Religious convictions, force, and the need for collective actions are rationales for government existence.
• Government provides collective goods, which may not supplied otherwise, like public goods.
• Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, creating challenges like free riders and potential overproduction.
• Government size increases and that then increases inefficiency
• Solutions involve charging fees, taxes, and passing provision to the private sector, the latter known was New Public Management (NPM)
• NPM is driven by support for less intrusive government, growing debt concerns, and a belief in smaller democratic units.
• NPM reframes PA as a business which has weaknesses like the lack of comparison and creation of fragmented authority.
• Problems with NPM include citizens being treated as customers and public goods being inequitably provided.
• Government ensures equal distribution and corrects inequality (important reason for government)
• A state is a political institution, a country is a geographic and cultural entity, and a nation shares a common identity.
• Government involves the collection of political and administrative bodies whose authority is allocating public value and services.
• Government originates evolutionarily, through force, divine right, or a social contract, and reasons include to maintain social order, provide protection/security, manage resources, regulate economic activity, instill religion/kingship and address the nature of humankind.
• NPM responds to inefficacies of public goods, incentivises efficiency, enhances market mechanisms and decentralises power.

Lecture 3

• Government structure can be viewed from macro (nation level) and micro perspectives (public agency).
• Local governments deliver public services, regional governments achieve economies of scale state/central government has a head of state and head of government.
• Centralization has the tendency towards a dominant central government and relies on a common languages, while decentralization avoids one-size-fits-all governance.
• Local governments can have issues from equality, free-riders and limited problem solving capacity, and centralization means centralized policies that require regulation to check
• Micro-level view of bureaucracy with bureaucrats serving as public employees functions through different structures such as the line, and apex
• Advisory and Support staff handle the business operations of organisations
• Mintzberg's Structure Configurations include simple structure, machine bureaucracy, professional bureaucracy, divisional form, and adhocracy.
• Structures range from centralized (vertical/horizontal) to decentralized (selective) and coordinate through mechanisms like direct supervision or mutual adjustment.
• Weber's concept of bureaucracy replaced relationships with legal-rational authority, formalizing leadership positions and is based on fixed division of labor, hierarchy, rules and professional selection.
• Bureaucracies were initially thought to not handle stereotypes, but in fact governments can be held accountable, and the public needs to maintain unbiased services to citizens
• Neutral descriptions of bureaucracy include sometimes being slow in reaction to a crisis and bureaucracy can be efficient in certain circumstances.
• Problems of the past stemmed from big size, leading to privatization and market competition.
• NPM intends to change government bureaucracy by flattening hierarchy, removing rules and simplifying procedures, shrinking in size

Lecture 4

• Elected officials include legislators and executive leaders, while some legislators later become executive leaders in parliamentary systems.
• The process may exclude issues that require long-term investment or lack universal appeal, and a candidate can use issues to attack political enemies
• Political decisions are complicated, which means elections aren't that simple
• Legislators do casework, oversight, field hearings, and policy drafting, but challenges include logrolling and pork barrel.
• Executive leaders have legal power and leverage like persuasive capacities and access to information, but can exclude legislation with skips
• Traditional leadership theories include trait theories that argue leadership personality is inherent while behaviours are trainable.
• Contemporary approaches include charisma, using persuasiveness, and inspirational, transformational and also transactional leadership.

Lecture 5 & 6

• Non-elected officials include bureaucrats (public servants) and judges.
• Meritocracy is the basic rationale, but in reality East Asian states make tough exams and make sure to set appropriate rules.
• Recruitment and career focus on major tasks, career expectations of public servants in the public sector.
• Some people perceive that bureaucrats are the limbs to the politicians so they just implement but it does not always work this way
• Merit protection ensures job security, preventing political patronage unlike previous eras
• Civil servants should maintain high moral standards to prevent corruption/cheating.
• They should display integrity, honesty, legality, unbiasedness, and political neutrality
• Civil servants must maintain a service and patriotism
• Difficulties faced include large size organizations, communication with accountability concerns, and bureaucracy that leads to red tape, which means losing morale and generates spillover effects
• Solutions include working conditions, socialization and better management
• Working conditions will stem from the basics of good management
• Bureaucrats must learn to acquire the ability to internalize organization and learn new skills and values to fit in
• Public service motivation (PSM) refers to the forces that inspire people to work in the public sector
• America has been experiencing a decrease in interest of public service motivation compared to other nations, perhaps due to culture or less freedom
• Factors that can change the view that there are attractive benefits for the public sector include a lack of job security, social influence and a better wage.
• The general policy environment is made up structural, social, economic, political and other factors influenced by policy making
• A major type of these factors are the social environment like aging, gender/feminism and ethnicity
• Political environment concepts include recession and depression.
• Economic environment concepts like GDP and Unemployment affect a nation's cohesiveness.
• Citizens' role in government includes questions such as public interest.
• Their voice matters especially because the decisions usually fail to live up to expectations
• Their views are usually ignored but they can become influenced from internet and social media.

Interest & Policy

• Defining the public is not simple and may have special interests that need looking at to be addressed in groups
• Interest groups comprise a unified group advancing policy outcomes and their roles include peak organisations or influential unions, sometimes with institutional vs membership.
• Contributions of interest groups include articulating citizens wants and information to representatives
• Factors that contribute to strong groups that can control policy and can create advantages in power
• Governments must face external pressure and handle politics to implement a project successfully while working with a changing environment that comes from economic gaols clashing and pressure from external factors
• Unofficial actors like citizens or social movements and external factors may vary through the process
• Political changes may vary from growth to demographics such as political power.
• PESTEL gives a framework that assesses changes in technology, and environment that has been effective

Overview of the relationship between Public Administration (PA) and Public Policy (PP). PA encompasses PP as an academic discipline, while PP is a process within PA. Key aspects include research, policy analysis, government participation, and integration of multiple disciplines.