Democracy administered: How public administration shapes representative government (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Policy State Conversation (seminar of the key theme the state as producer of public policies)

Sciences Po, 1 place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris

In the traditional narrative of public administration, democratic values are confined to the relationship between representatives and managers through various configurations of rules and organizational forms. This narrative balances the accountability of managers to representatives, a problem of control, with the need for administration to work effectively, a problem of capability. The problem of how governance structures influence managers’ democratic belief systems—arrangements of democratic values and attitudes—has remained latent. Bertelli rigorously argues that the democratic values of administration ought to complement the democratic values of the representative government in which it is done. Consequently, control, capability and value reinforcement must jointly render public administration into democracy administered. This book also offers a novel framework for empirically understanding how democratic value complementarity has (or has not) been respected in existing governance, and it contains a guide for those who champion reforms to clear a path toward democracy administered.

Speaker

Anthony M. Bertelli is the Sherwin-Whitmore Professor of Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State University and Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals. He is the author of seven books including Public Administration and Democracy: The Complementarity Principle (2023), a member of the National Academy of Public Administration, and winner of the Herbert Simon Award for career contributions to the study of bureaucracy.

Chair

Philippe Bezes, Sciences Po, CEE

Discussant

Cyril Benoit, Sciences Po, CEE, CNRS