Play It Again, Sam; It's Still Not Right: Searching for the Right Notes in Administrative Reform

Abstract

The 1980s and 1990s have been marked by a recurrent and remarkably similar set of administrative reforms in western industrial democracies. Surprisingly -- or perhaps not, given their dominance in international organizations -- western reform solutions have found their way onto reform agendas of nations in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. The simple frequency of reform efforts raises one set of questions -- commonality of reform ideas across national boundaries. The levels of economic development and stress and scope of government raise others. The experience of American federal government clearly reflects continuing nature of reform. As James Carroll noted, there is a constant in American public administration, it is search for change (Carroll, 1996, 245). The lack of comfort with a strong public bureaucracy and long-term inability to define proper role of bureaucratic institutions in democratic government have plagued United States since its founding (Wilson, 1887; Rohr, 1986; Ingraham, 1995). The assumptions of American brand of democracy -- in Dwight Waldo's words, the fact that democratic ideology and institutions grew up in association with belief in an underlying harmony, a belief that things need not be `managed,' but will run (1948, 101) -- necessarily collide with reality of large public institutions, which not only create a management imperative, but serve as an inevitable locus of power. If institutions are not only unnecessary but assume an inappropriate power and policy role, they are doubly discordant. Still, idea of a permanent public service that embodies democratic values and broader good is difficult to discard. The more recent emergence of essentially same problem in parliamentary democracies is summarized in Aucoin's (1995) account of rise of a different set of theories with which to anchor expectations for government performance and reform. Describing central role that agency and public choice theories have played in defining need for reform in United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, Aucoin argues: The principal intellectual challenge to idea of career public service as a condition of good government came from public choice theory.... The closed nature of administrative state in each of four Westminster systems could not but invite suspicions about self-serving bureaucrats and bureaucratic abuses of power.... Agency theory is as equally persuasive as public choice theory in explaining why agents are so powerful in relation to their principals... Agents have an inherent advantage over their principals due to their knowledge and practical experience in application of knowledge (Aucoin, 1995, 35-36). The theoretical and intellectual arguments for reform were supplemented and strengthened by very real practical considerations. Economic constraints mandated that size and cost of government be reconsidered. Intensely ideological politics captured citizen dissatisfaction and translated it into demands for leaner, more focused, more responsive government. The same citizen dissatisfaction reflected a general lack of trust in, and misunderstanding of, all government officials and institutions if services they provided did not serve citizens directly or clearly. This is a complicated mix of problems, problem definition, incentives for change, and potential solutions. From cacophony, however, a relatively coherent set of reform ideas emerged. These ideas diffused rapidly from one national reform agenda to another. To be sure, ideas were put together in different ways and were adopted in different sequences. They also had different outcomes. In many ways, however, commonalities are more important than differences. As a result, reform ideas and models lend themselves to a lessons learned analysis and to preliminary evaluation. …