Public Administration and Public Deliberation: An Interpretive Essay

How should public administrators decide what to do? Elected officials often will not or cannot tell them.Statutes tend to be written in vague language, unhelpful for "hard cases" of the sort that the legislative drafters never contemplated or did not wish to decide.But it will simply not do to allow public administrators unbridled discretion.Unelected officials are, after all, unelected.Why should citizens trust their judgments?The first part of this essay is about how our society has come to answer these questions, how it views the place of public administration within a democracy.The second part contains a critique of this dominant view, which through its emphasis on administrative process has led us to focus on how the administrator operates, and overlook the social import of what he does.The final part of the essay suggests an alternative approach to public administration, an approach designed to nurture public deliberation and the discovery of shared public values.