The History of Public Administration

In many ways, local governments constitute the heart of American democracy. We’ll unpack why this might be in this course. The role of Local governments has changed dramatically during the rise of the administrative state, both in scale and function.

Similar to the growing role of nonprofit organizations, these changes in local government have created governance challenges for local administrators. Since the New Deal, five factors have greatly influenced the growth and autonomy of cities and special districts.

The expansion in the number, complexity, and role of local government jurisdictions since the New Deal has greatly increased the challenges for those who govern. At an administrative level, they have to coordinate more of their work with other jurisdictions.

New Public Management (NPM), took the business or market model as the standard for measuring government success and has applied it in successive waves of administrative reform since the early 1980s. There is general agreement among scholars and practitioners alike that these efforts to measure what gets done have produced a variety of worthwhile results.

To summarize, the New Public Management agenda is based on a truncated view of the purpose of government. Government is not simply the agent of accountability to citizens or the agent of efficiency and effectiveness. It is also responsible for collecting the values of the community and creating integrated responses to these values across increasingly fragmented government systems.

New Public Governance (NPG) emphasizes the importance of taking a collaborative approach with partners within and across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors in providing public services. This movement emphasizes three trust and legitimacy building characteristics of public governance that are ignored and undervalued by NPM. New Public Governance is more emergent and bridges aspects of the nonprofit sector with aspects of the market model.

The following five stages of evaluation include distinguishing characteristics of public administration philosophy over time have shaped public administration today. In delivering public value, it is important for administrators to be mindful of the historical legacies they can draw on to inform, guide, and validate their work.