Abstract
As an emerging field, behavioral public administration (BPA) has spurred important new research, documenting human biases and heuristics in public sector contexts. In doing so, it has embraced Herbert Simon’s call to draw from psychology to understand administrative behavior. To fulfill its potential,BPAshould also pursue another goal of Simon: a normative aspiration toward design science, using its powerful analytical techniques to solve, and not just document, real administrative problems. Another challenge for BPA is understanding where it fits in the constellation of public administration research. One critique of BPA is that a focus on micro-level behavior leads to a neglect of big questions that were once central to public administration. But this tension may also signal the possibility of a productive division of labor, with a micro and macro public administration that addresses distinct questions, but which are connected by common research concepts.
Highlights
As an emerging field, behavioral public administration (BPA) has spurred important new research, documenting human biases and heuristics in public sector contexts
Behavioral public administration (BPA) has been defined as focusing on micro-level behavioral processes within the context of public services, and it draws strongly both from psychological theories and from the experimental approach favored by that discipline
While it might seem that the launch of a new Journal of Behavioral Public Administration (JBPA) is perhaps not the occasion to consider the negative aspects of this approach, I take some heart in the knowledge that BPA’s dedication to transparency and the self-criticism implied by replication will allow me to offer some critical observations without causing too great offense
Summary
A starting point for my critique is the self-conscious echo between “behavioral public administration” and “behavioral economics.” The context of economics is quite different from public administration in a way that matters for how we situate BPA as either an evolution or revolution within the field. The concept speaks to how state capacity is needed to design and implement basic mastery of the tasks that are important to citizens, something we often take for granted in liberal democracies, becoming a crisis only in its absence (Roberts, 2017a) Such concepts offer a means to build conversations between scholars in micro and macro public administration. A more pluralistic approach is consistent with the broader methodological toolbox of psychology, which has devoted significant scholarly attention to descriptive tools, such as validated scales of personality, incentivized measures of altruism, and various indirect ways of capturing individual differences in implicit bias or dishonesty Such tools are obviously relevant to public administration. Even as Herbert Simon warned us of cognitive limitations, he balanced that warning with a portrayal of administrators as intendedly rational, working in goal-oriented organizations
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