Abstract
The complexities of Public Administration have gained the growing attention of scholars around the world, mainly due to the impacts of the reforms implemented under the doctrine of New Public Management (which aims to apply concepts and practices of private management in public management) on civil servants. The aim of this study is to find out how Portuguese citizens evaluate the Portuguese Public Administration under the aspects of bureaucracy, organisation of human resources, innovation, skills and attitudes of civil servants, its motivation and recognition; and to verify if there are differences of opinion between respondents working in public sector and respondents from other sectors. This study follows a quali-quantitative approach, and data were collected through an online survey in the period from June to December 2020. The survey was answered by 1119 citizens from all districts of Portugal. The main findings reveal a still high level of bureaucracy in the Portuguese Public Administration; weaknesses in the management of human resources, namely regarding the motivation and recognition of civil servants; and difficulties in the establishment of a meritocratic system of recruitment and performance evaluation of civil servants. Statistically significant evaluation differences (chi-square test and non-parametric Mann–Whitney U tests, involving five hypotheses) were found between the public sector and other sectors, except for the motivation variable.
Highlights
There were participants living in all the districts of mainland Portugal and the Autonomous Regions of Madeira and Azores, with the largest percentage living in the districts of Aveiro (17.2%), Lisbon (13.7%) and Porto
The results indicate that the sector of activity has a significant effect on whether the participant is in favour of recognising civil servants (Z = 2.87; p = 0.004), with participants who work in the public sector being more in favour of recognising civil servants than participants who work in other sectors (Table 7)
We perceive that our study has reached the proposed objectives, and its findings add to the corollary of contributions from theoretical and experimental research on such an instigating and complex theme as Public Administration (PA) and motivation in public service
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Public Administration (PA) presents an increasing complexity throughout its evolution as a science worldwide. Governance models have been transforming through history, especially in the contemporary era, as a response to profound social, economic, cultural and political changes in countries (Wright 1997; Lane 1995). The advent of economic globalisation generated the need for PA modernisation, guided by an essentially bureaucratic model until the 1980s. Principles of New Public Management (NPM), a new management model based on paradigms and practices of private management, were widely disseminated in the Western democracies (Gruening 2001; Hood 1994), leading states to implement reforms in their public administrations at the central and local levels
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