Rationalism Politics Impacts Public\'s View the Six

¶ … Rationalism Politics Impacts Public's View

The six deadly sins in public administration are mandated in Drucker's "The deadly sins in public administration." The first one is to have too great of a "lofty objective" (Drucker, 1980, p. 103) in the aim that a program is trying to achieve. Programs need to have objectives that are specific and not targeted towards some general good. The next one is to incorporate too wide a scope of objectives in programs. It is much better to start out with a finite (or a single) objective and then attempt to move on to another initiative than to do too many things at one time. The third deadly sin is overstaffing. Simply by sending a great number of people to address a problem will never replace adequately thinking through a solution.

The fourth is to not sufficiently test a theory before applying it. Administrators need to research their positions more. The fifth is a failure e to learn from mistakes, which is a result of not properly planning and thinking through initiatives. The sixth is not knowing when to give p a stance or an initiative, despite evidence to the contrary.

The influence of rationalism in politics is a fairly strong one. It has been prevalent at least since the Renaissance times in Europe (Oakeshott, 1947). What it attributes the most, however, is an independency of thought in which all political maneuvering or stances are viewed. Therefore, in terms of the public's view of government services, rationalism enables the public to be highly discerning regarding the latter's services.

In fact, the best summary of the public's view is characterized by a pair of adjectives, skeptical and optimistic. Upon initial glance these adjectives appear to be contradictory, but they suitably describe the public's rational viewpoint. The degree of skepticism which rationalism endows is because the true rationalist believes that everything related to government services can be scrutinized; optimism stems from the belief that the rational application of reason can improve government service.

So-called "backseat driving" and "hands off" controls pertaining to performance controls in public management are antipodes of one another. Backseat driving implies taking a firm degree of control over the management of public resources, personnel, and initiatives. However, there is also a degree of doing so from a removed perspective in which the individual or collective which is actually in control is cleverly hidden in the background, effectively beyond the reach of the general public.

Hands off controls, however, are akin to laissez fare financial systems in which the controls in place for public management are lax, if not outright non-existent. Usually this sort of control is implemented if there are certain facets of the public sector that are producing boons for the private one. These benefits are largely financially related. Controls are just one aspect of proper public management (Behn, 2003, p. 586).