Specialists In Public Administration Research Articles

СОЗДАНИЕ УГОЛОВНОГО ЗАКОНОДАТЕЛЬСТВА В РОССИИ И ЗАПАДНЫХ СТРАНАХ: ВЛИЯНИЕ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИХ ПРОЦЕССОВ, ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО УПРАВЛЕНИЯ, РОЛЬ ЭКСПЕРТОВ

In the new millennium, in Russia and the West alike, criminologists regularly complain about a diminishing role for experts in the making and administration of criminal policy - in the West, because of pandering to the public (penal populism), and in Russia, a failure to take a systematic approach to crime control. In both places, this paper argues, these appraisals are based on idealized and unrealistic images of the way criminal law developed in the past. In North America, criminal policy-making has never conformed to a rational model as favored by some specialists in public administration. In Russia, the European ideal of a major role for criminal law scholars has been confined to periods of codification and has not served as the norm most of the time. In both parts of the world, it is essential that scholars study how criminal policy develops, in order to understand the current situation and find ways to contribute to its making.

Innocents Abroad: Reflections from a Public Administration Consultant in Bosnia

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a veritable army of Western consultants--economists, lawyers, management specialists, and others--has marched east, across the plains of Poland, through the valleys of Hungary, and on to the farthest fragments of the former Soviet empire. Funded by the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the European Union (EU), and scores of other governmental and non-governmental entities based in the West, the mission of these consultants has been enormously challenging: to help the post-communist governments of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) develop legal, political, administrative, and economic institutions appropriate to democratic, market-based societies. American specialists in public administration--practitioners and academics--have been prominent among them, offering advice on everything from management in Armenia to civil service reform in Kazakstan. This influx of Western consultants is interesting for at least two reasons. First and most obviously, their work may well have a bearing on the ability of these nations to integrate fully and successfully into a competitive, democratic, and peaceful global political economy. Second, the nature of their mission--building institutions in the image of the West--represents in many respects a return to a foreign assistance tradition that had been largely abandoned in the 1960s, superseded by the more culturally sensitive insights of development administration.(1) These two points of interest set the purposes of this article, which reports on my experience as a public administration consultant in postwar Bosnia. The first purpose is to distill some hard-won lessons that other short-term consultants might put to good use. The second is to reflect on the apparent disconnect between what public administration consultants are now being sent abroad to do and what we as a profession ostensibly learned decades ago. The two purposes intersect in several key respects. It is in the nature of the above-mentioned disconnect that much of what I learned in Bosnia had been ably noted by an earlier generation of scholars; indeed, the value of my lessons may inhere less in their originality than in their timeliness and accessibility. What may be of more interest is a set of abashed reflections on why I had to learn these lessons at all. I had, after all, taught comparative administration for many years before going to Bosnia, and had even written a bit in the field. How could I have been so naive? The extended answer to this question contains lessons, too, both for other would-be consultants and for those concerned with the problems of trying to transplant homegrown administrative ideas into foreign soil. Given the number of Western experts now afield, the scope and variety of projects underway, and the stakes involved, these are lessons worth weighing. Background The multi-sided war that tore apart the former-Yugoslavia from 1991-1995--a war that first escaped and then absorbed the attention of the rest of the world--was far too complex even to summarize here.(2) Suffice it to say that Bosnia-Herzegovina was a reluctant participant in what was to become Europe's bloodiest and most destructive conflict in fifty years.(3) As the most multi-ethnic and centrally located of Yugoslavia's six former republics,(4) Bosnia's leaders correctly surmised, long before the war broke out, that any cracks in Yugoslavia's facade, fueled by nationalist apparatchiks in Serbia and Croatia, would run deepest through Bosnia.(5) But caught tragically between the ambitions of Belgrade and Zagreb and subjected to the horrific depredations of cleansing, the people of Bosnia were forced to fight, to preserve both a semblance of territorial integrity and their lives. All attempts to mediate the conflict started from the premise that whatever might be the external borders of a postwar Bosnia, new internal boundaries would need to be drawn to accommodate the warring ethnic groups. …

The Brownlow–Brookings Feud: The Politics of Dissent Within the Academic Community

In January 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt submitted an ambitious plan for administrative reform of the national government to Congress. Roosevelt's reorganization bill was based on a report produced by the President's Committee on Administrative Management–a panel of three “specialists in public administration” appointed by Roosevelt in March 1936 and led by Louis Brownlow, who was perhaps the best-known expert in the field. The Brownlow recommendations produced intense debate in Congress; and the reorganization proposals were ultimately defeated in March 1938 in what historian William Leuchtenburg has described as “the worst rebuff Roosevelt was ever to suffer” in his twelve years as president. The public aspects of the battle over the Brownlow proposals have already received extensive scholarly attention. Some of the most important skirmishes in this battle, however, were not fought in public, and even after half a century they remain largely obscured from public view. One such skirmish was the contest within the academic community about the recommendations on administrative reform that were to be put before Congress.

The political economy of an African public enterprise: A longitudinal case study of the administrative and economic operations of the Sierra Leone Port Organization

AbstractIn most of the post‐colonial states of sub‐Saharan Africa, both the size of the state bureaucracy has grown and its functions proliferated. Whatever the economic rationale of public sector organizations, they do not exist and operate in a social and political vacuum. This paper argues that they are typically an integral part of a patron clientelist political and economic system on which the foundations of government sometimes depend. The consequences for the economic performance of public sector organizations arising out of this socio‐political context is now widely recognized in the growing literature on African public enterprise. Contributions to this discussion, however, have tended to be dominated by economists and public administration specialists who have generally adopted a technocratic problem solution approach. In isolating their analyses of the performance of African parastatals from an appraisal of the role of the state, this approach fails to situate adequately the problem of performance in its proper context. This paper provides a case study which examines the administrative and economic operations of the Sierra Leone Port Organization in the colonial and post‐colonial states. In arguing that problems of performance of African public sector organizations also require political solutions this discussion extends the discussion beyond a technocratic focus.

Policy Making and Service Delivery on the Margins of Government: The Case of Contractors

odern government defies definition. It grows, but it also declines. It does more while doing less. It confounds those who would understand it, while adding to the benefits offered the people. Its own officials will not-or cannot-report the true size of the budget or workforce. Because they cannot say exactly what it is, policy makers have problems in controlling it while observers have problems in describing it. Academic specialists in public administration and political science suffer from confusion about the thing that is central to their careers. Officials do more while they do less by assigning activities to bodies that are not, strictly speaking, part of the government. Just how this happens depends on conditions within each country. The national government of the United States has, in certain respects, actually shrunk in size during the period 1955-1976. Its number of employees declined from 146 per 10,000 population to 134 to 10,000 population. Yet, no one should claim that the national government did less in 1976 than in 1955. It shrunk by hiving off new activities and some old established programs. Washington transferred some activities to state and local governments. It assigned others to special authorities, and to private firms and foundations operating as contractors for government agencies. This essay deals with contractors that operate on the margins of American governments. Yet, central features of this analysis apply to other kinds of bodies that operate on the margins of this and other modern governments. The inclination to use business firms or other private bodies as contractors is distinctly an American style of conducting public activities on the margins of government. By tradition the United States is a country of free enterprise. It is fitting to use business corporations to design, implement and monitor many of the programs that have turned the United States into one of the most generous of welfare states.

Role of Generalists and Specialists in Public Administration

Role of Generalists and Specialists in Public Administration