REPGOV examines a very old question: How does public administration fit within a representative democracy? The project is ‘through-composed’ in that each stage in our research described below reveals a response to that question in a somewhat different way. And like all projects, real timelines are more flexible than imagined ones. We are actively working on aspects of all stages of the project described below at this writing. Consequently, we will revise this page as the project progresses, so please check back from time to time.
REPGOV intends to recast contemporary research about how public administration and its organizations work into explicitly democratic terms in a new and important way. Our hope is that by treating the concept of democracy seriously in our theoretical and empirical explorations, scholars and policymakers will understand the ways in which public administration can make representative democracy work better.
REPGOV is ambitious in that it aims to provide new and integrated normative and positive theories about the relationship between democratic values and the institutions and practice of public administration. This begins by considering two crucial actors.
The policy worker must act to further the aims of laws duly enacted by the authorized representatives of the people, such as an environmental law that aims to reduce nitrates in groundwater. Policy workers are not only bureaucrats, but contractors or employees of non-profit organizations producing public services or maintaining public spaces. They may be private actors mandated to co-produce public services, as restaurant workers have been when jurisdictions have mandated coronavirus vaccination for indoor dining.
The champion advocates a particular institutional design, say, one that directs accountability toward outcomes that explicitly suggest nitrate reduction rather than specifying a process for reducing nitrates. Champions are found in interest groups, in government, in universities, and in many other places.
The democratic theory we have developed contends that because policy workers are bound to act responsibly, that is, to reduce nitrates without violating the law or upsetting the balance of democratic values of the state they serve, champions must design institutions to reinforce the democratic values of that state. Thus, if outcome accountability is too strong for a more pluralistic state, champions must recognize this, and they must engineer a means for more perspectives to be heard. That will restrict the autonomy of policy workers, who will not be able to use whatever process they find best to achieve the outcome of nitrate reduction. In this way, the democratic values of a state are maintained in its public administration. And this value reinforcement obligation becomes a hypothesis for the remainder of the REPGOV project.
As a threshold matter, we conducted a large-scale systematic review of democratic values in public administration research. Our positive theory-building strategy uses encounters like the problem of roles to build two strands of theory.
An institutional theory conceives of administrative law in continental European states as a network of principles of good public administration. We have theoretically connected a set of essential principles in the law to core values of democracy, and our institutional theories make claims about how those principles become embedded into the law.
A behavioral theory explains how policy workers and ordinary people confront and transform their beliefs about ‘good’ public administration and democracy itself. This theory, too, places attitudes and beliefs within a network and predicts stability shaped by experience. At the heart of REPGOV’s normative theory are some important instances in which ordinary people and are challenged to reinforce democratic values. For example, a problem of roles occurs when a policy worker may freely and openly disagree with a policy aim or the means the state uses to achieve it as a citizen but cannot responsibly act against either the aim or the means in the role of policy worker. These encounters provide important elements of learning and experiencing responsible public administration.
REPGOV evaluates different aspects of these theories through an ambitious mixed-methods design.
What types of beliefs do policy workers develop in regard to democracy and good public administration? Do these beliefs lead to behaviors that promote responsible public administration? Do they reinforce values in encounters such as the problem of roles? REPGOV engages in a program of qualitative research to address these questions that has two components.
We are undertaking a program of semi-structured interviews and participant observation to understand how public officials define and conceptualize democracy. Our most in-depth focus is on an agency that preserves national cultural heritage, which has important overtones of democracy with different contours across the countries where our research is being conducted. Additional work examines European Union regulators. We also examine these questions at the grassroots—within food policy networks in Spain, Belgium, Italy and the UK.
Our analysis shows how political action embeds essential principles into the law and predicts temporal and intergovernmental stability in the normative framework for governance and public administration. In the United Kingdom, we qualitatively and quantitatively examine the relationship between civil servants and the judiciary, with a particular emphasis on impartiality.
How do the values of public administration connect with other social and political attitudes in mass belief system? And how do people understand and apply the essential principles of governance? In the final stage of REPGOV, we use attitudinal surveys as well as survey experiments to test the claims of our behavioral theory of value reinforcement. This proceeds in two stages.
First, we will implement attitudinal surveys that compare the belief systems of policy workers with those in the mass public in several countries in Europe and the Americas. Second, to further investigate the criteria at work when confronting the problems of roles and levels, we will conduct survey experiments employing hypothetical structures of public administration via an experimental analogue to the thought experiment common in normative political theory. This permits within-subjects factorial designs that vary essential rules and procedures, while allowing the REPGOV team to control key socio-economic and political aspects of each of the four countries we are studying. It also allows us to learn how respondents think about the principles of governance we argue are essential to democracy.
An overarching goal of REPGOV is to use the collective lessons of our research to develop a strategy for the assessment of democratic performance by public organizations. Our aim is to use the real-world understandings that we glean from our study to develop a textbook and case program. Created in conjunction with practitioners, it will be designed to give policy workers a clear understanding of their responsibilities to a democratic public and to the leaders of the organizations in which they work to support.
