Research Paper Undergraduate 4,090 words

New public management and democracy

Last reviewed: December 5, 2006 ~21 min read

New Public Management Reforms

The Implications of New Public Management for Democracy Today

Among the plethora of issues arising out of the preeminence of New Public Management (NPM) reforms over the past decades is the question of democracy - the changing nature of Public Administration under managerialism is said to be altering the concept of governance and affecting democratic politics. According to Lane (2000), "NPM as managerialism focusing upon contract making and enforcement seems to take government once and for all out of the Weberian framework of bureaucracy" (6). Although NPM enthusiasts continue to laud their efforts to move the ordinary citizen closer to the public administration machine and thus provide them with greater choice and input in the delivery of public services, a closer investigation into the reform structure indicates something very different. The decentralization of public administration - one of the core elements of NPM reforms - seems to be disconnecting civil society further away from the decision making apparatus of government and reducing accountability of elected officials. New Public Management's idea of empowerment seems more focused on empowering the 'consumer' in making purchases with their dollar, than empowering the 'citizen' to make political choices which directly affect the quality of their lives. The purpose of this study is to further explore this idea of the democratic deficit under NPM reforms and elaborate the discourse on this subject. An analysis of the process by which managerialism is hollowing out democracy is conducted on two fronts: (a) the fundamental change of societal values that NPM is seeking to institutionalize, and (b) the structural changes under NPM which have made democratic politics more difficult for the general populace. This analysis is followed by a discussion of current and future trends in NPM and a summary of the research and salient findings in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Background and Overview.

According to King, Feltey, and Susel (1998), there has been an increasing amount of attention given to the appropriate role of the public component of public administration in recent years, but the issue about the role of citizens in a democratic republic is as old as the debates that characterized the Constitutional Convention in 1787. In this regard, Black's Law Dictionary (1990) defines the important role of "citizen" as being, "One who, under the Constitution and laws of the United States, is a member of the political community, owing allegiance and being entitled to the enjoyment of full civil rights" (244). In fact, the Founding Fathers carefully considered the proper role of the average citizen in the new democratic experiment upon which they were embarking, with many of the Convention delegates suggesting that the masses could not be entrusted with the heavy responsibilities that were to go hand-in-hand with citizenship in a democratic republic (Hall 366).

Clearly, then, these are not new issues but the impact of globalization and the changing nature of the threats arrayed against the United States and its allies have forced public administrators to make some tough choices in recent years. Furthermore, shifts in the social contract at home and abroad combined with powerful market forces have compelled public administrators in the West to take a hard look at their traditional way of doing things to see what could be improved. In this regard, King and her colleagues note that, "The contemporary movement to examine the role of the public in the process of administrative decision making has come about in response to problems in the latter half of this century and as a result of concern on the part of citizens, administrators, and politicians over citizen discouragement and apathy" (317).

In reality, some observers might suggest that active citizen participation in the democratic process has been dampened in recent years by the lack of responsiveness on the part of the public sector, but the historic trends that have fueled the drive for NPM reforms are clear and appear inexorable today. For instance, according to Ferlie and Steane (2002), "Global developments have meant that nations increasingly compete on a variety of levels. The basis of competition between nations is not only in terms of market share, but also in the scale, shape and role of their public sectors and the regulatory regimes that are emerging within them" (1459). These processes were accelerated during the 1990s when a number of Western governments (Japan is frequently cited as the sole exception) have sought various types of public sector reform. According to Lane (2000), the concept of public sector reform is too broad to embrace the various initiatives that have been witnessed in recent years: "Some countries have tried one or two of these kinds of reforms whereas other countries have embraced all of them: decentralisation, privatisation, incorporation, deregulation and reregulation, the introduction of executive agencies, internal markets or the use of the purchaser-provider split, as well as tendering/bidding schemes" (Lane 6). Consequently, such public reform initiatives have come to be referred to as New Public Management with some common reform goals included in the concept; these include (a) the attempt to employ new governance mechanisms in the public sector that go beyond the traditional institutions of governance such as the bureau and the public enterprise and (b) those that employ or imitate market institutions of governance (Lane 6).

On their face, many of the goals of the NPM reforms appear at least benign and potentially even valuable insofar as they serve to improve citizenship participation in the democratic process and improve the responsiveness of the public sector to their needs, values and wants, but some critics maintain that these reforms can go too far when they seek to institutionalize selected social values that may not have the best interests of the citizenry in mind and these issues are discussed further below.

Fundamental Change of Societal Values that NPM is Seeking to Institutionalize.

As members of a nation's political community, citizens have both rights and responsibilities, but their ability to secure the benefits of either have been diminished in recent years by virtue of some of the New Public Management reforms. For instance, in her essay, "How New Public Management Reforms Challenge the Roles of Professionals," Sehested (2002) reports most Western European countries have been involved in New Public Management reforms over the past two decades with the goal of changing the functioning and culture of the public sector. This process has been described by Pierre (1995) as being "a managerial revolution" in public bureaucracies (8). According to Sehested, "During the 1980's and 1990's, the concept of New Public Management became the dominating discourse concerning the 'proper' development of public administration sustained by enthusiastic governments in the U.S.A. And in the Anglo-Saxon counties and by European and global organizations like the OECD and the World Bank" (1513).

The proper role of the public sector, like that of citizens themselves, has therefore become the focus of the NPM reforms taking place in the United States and throughout the West; unfortunately, as will be shown below, it would seem that the same processes that are fueling globalization are increasingly creating obstacles for democracy and active citizenship participation in the traditional sense and these issues are discussed further below.

Structural Changes under NPM Making Democratic Politics more Difficult for the General Populace.

According to Roberts (2000), the last several years have witnessed the governments of many advanced democracies dramatically reorganizing their public sectors in an effort to manage the problems of growing taxpayer burnout, indebtedness, and increasing citizen dissatisfaction with the diminishing quality of public services; however, these restructuring initiatives were not taken in isolation: "They were accompanied by the rapid development of an international reform community that knit together professionals and academics in many different nations and permitted the rapid diffusion of ideas about reform strategies" (308). In their essay, Exploring and Explaining Contracting Out: Patterns among the American States," Brudney, Fernandez, Ryu and Wright (2005) report that the most current NPM-based reform initiative in public management in the United States and abroad has been to introduce a wide range of managerial practices and techniques that were previously unknown to the public sector. "Many of these managerial practices and techniques," they add, "including extensive outsourcing but also total quality management, performance management, and customer satisfaction surveys, were borrowed from the private sector" (Brudney et al. 393). In fact, the NPM movement itself has transcended these private sector management initiatives and now involves a worldwide reexamination and restructuring of governance in response to changing demographics, technologies, global competition, and customers' expectations (Maor 5).

By all accounts complex problems such as these require complex solutions, but the structural changes taking place as a result of these and other NPM reforms have caused what has been referred to as "institutional sclerosis" because of unexpected adverse impact of many of these NPM initiatives. For example, in their essay, "How Does Public Management Affect Government Performance?," Forbes and Lynn (2005) report that, "The logic of governance framework has the power to enhance our understanding of why a policy's implementation may look quite different from reformers' intentions; for example, why New Public Management reforms intended to promote greater efficiency might have failed to do so, as in the case of health, education, and housing reforms made in the United Kingdom in recent decades" (559). Indeed, the reference to "institutional sclerosis" concerns the fact that virtually every conceivable interest in contemporary society is protected by a variety of laws that provide for extensive advising, participation and appeal procedures, a process that further exacerbates the inability of public administrators to remain responsive to their constituents (Klijn & Koppenjan 241). These authors emphasize that, "This results, among other things, in the Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome, where parties block the creation of arrangements of collective interest (such as the location decision concerning an industrial site, a road, an asylum centre, etc.) based on their own private interests" (Klijn & Koppenjan 241).

According to King and her associates, current public participation processes have four major components as follows:

The issue or situation;

The administrative structures, systems, and processes within which participation takes place;

The administrators; and,

The citizens (318).

This arrangement means that those with the most at stake - the citizens themselves - are placed the farthest from the issue under consideration with layers of bureaucrats standing between them and an active voice in the governing process. The impetus on streamlining and cost-savings by transforming the public sector has therefore been more advantageous for public administrators than it has for the citizens they are supposed to serve. In this regard, King et al. point out that, "Participation efforts are currently framed such that these components are arrayed around the issue. The citizen is placed at the greatest distance from the issue, the administrative structures and processes are the closest, and the administrator is the agent between the structures and citizens" (318).

This formidable bulwark of layer upon layer of unresponsive and increasingly ineffective bureaucracy is likely sufficient to dissuade all but the most ardent reform-minded citizen from seeking redress or offering alternatives to their public officials - all to the detriment of the democratic process. In this regard, King and her colleagues report that, "In the context of conventional participation, the administrator controls the ability of the citizen to influence the situation or the process. The administrative structures and processes are the politically and socially constructed frameworks within which the administrator must operate" (318). These frameworks provide public administrators with the restricted authority to develop alternative solutions, but only after the issue has been defined. As a result, administrators do not possess any true power to redefine the issue or to change administrative processes that would allow for greater citizen involvement (King et al. 318).

Furthermore, when public administrators assume an advisory or expert consultation role, then, the process is further constrained because of the power structures involved. In this regard, King and her colleagues note that, "Participation within this context is structured to maintain the centrality of the administrator while publicly presenting the administrator as representative, consultative, or participatory. The citizen becomes the 'client' of the professional administrator, ill-equipped to question the professional's authority and technical knowledge" (318). This structural change in the traditional role of public administrators has only added yet another bureaucratic layer between the individual and the public sector in a process that further isolates citizens from the public sector while insulating administrators from true accountability for their actions. "In this falsely dualistic relationship," King et al. add, "the administrator is separated from the demands, needs, and values of the people whom he or she is presumed to be serving (King et al. 318). Furthermore, this trend towards marketization wherein the citizen is transformed into a consumer of government products and services rather than an active participant in the political community has been on the increase in recent years.

Indeed, the last 25 years have witnessed a growth in industrialized economies and increasing efforts to restructure and reform the large public sectors that were characteristic of the old Soviet bloc countries and to a lesser extent the "welfarist" social democratic regimes such as in the European Union where NPM reforms have been increasingly popular, but have been met with mixed results (Ferlie & Steane 1459). For example, the transition to democracy in Greece and Spain resulted in changes in personnel in the senior bureaucracy as well as efforts to restructure the bureaucratic system with limited effectiveness; likewise, in Italy, a well-entrenched bureaucracy has managed to resist any attempts to reform it to transform it an effective tool for developing and delivering the policies of a modern welfare state (Page & Wright 266). According to these authors, "In Sweden perhaps the most important change has been towards a guiding role over agencies. In Britain the changes have been the most marked, incorporating a New Public Management approach and involving a greater sensitivity to politics analogous to that noted in Germany. In other countries changes in the bureaucracy have been less marked" (Page & Wright 266).

Generally speaking, then, the New Public Management reforms that have been introduced in recent years have sought a different model for public agencies in response to a changing political climate, and a number of traditional service deliveries in Europe, North America and Australasia have been reassessed and reorganized as a result; these changes have been most evident in:

Contracting-out, as a variant of the purchaser-provider type of relationship in which government retains the responsibility for ensuring a service is provided but does not itself deliver that service.

A greater concern for client-centered quality in service provision, assisted by the use of benchmarks and quality standards derived from the private sector or other governments.

Wide-spread financial reforms, heavily output and performance orientated, culminating in the adoption of accrual accounting procedures whereby more relevant financial data for planning and management purposes is used for assessing performance.

Reforms to inter-governmental policy development and coordination, and a focus on regulatory compliance for organizations that contract with government to provide a service with tax-payer funds, as well as selling services for a fee (Ferlie & Steane 1460).

As a result, the trend of New Public Management reforms has fundamentally affected the traditional role of professionals in public organizations at home and abroad in some unexpected ways (Sehested 1513). For instance, during the period when the European welfare states initiatively developed, public sector professionals became fully integrated in the large bureaucratic public organizations and professionalism became a priority as a governing principle; however, this author emphasizes that the New Public Management trend undermines professionalism as a governing principle and introduces managerialism as an alternative governing principle (Sehested 1513).

According to Klijn and Koppenjan (2004), "The aim of most of the New Public Management reforms was to transform governments into leaner but more effective steering organizations. Governments should be steering, i.e. setting goals and trying to achieve them, instead of rowing, i.e. doing all of the service provisions themselves" (103). This type of entrepreneurial government provides for clear specifications of both the desired products or services and the outputs that have to be achieved in relation to these services; however, it also implies a distinct separation of responsibilities between decision making and delivery, and between the political actors and providers involved (Klijn & Koppenjan 103). In this regard, Pierce (2005) reports that the typical NPR reforms seek to promote such entrepreneurial governments by focusing on eliminating red tape in order to be more responsive to citizens as customers by achieving results; other factors include public choice, increased government efficiency, and the notion that the way to achieve better governance is through increased productivity as defined in economic terms (Pierce 24). Critics of NPM reforms, though, maintain that these initiatives are not conducive to creating governments that are more transparent, representative, and open to public participation (Pierce 24).

According to Barzelay (2001), there are enough differences within the Western models of NPM to make across-the-board generalizations about what impact they are having problematic: "Differences in governmental systems are pronounced," he advises, "even within the so-called Anglo-American context (as between the Westminster-type parliamentary and the U.S. separation-of-powers systems)" (170). Although the specific public service sector in different countries is unique to their setting, all countries that have introduced NPM reforms have done so in response to current political challenges (Ferlie & McLaughlin 165). According to Ferlie and McLaughlin (2002), "The objectives that were pursued with the reforms varied significantly throughout European local governments. Sometimes NPM was introduced to save money, sometimes to fight the loss of legitimacy of public administration and on other occasions to deal with dissatisfaction of their public managers and politicians or the opacity of the bureaucracy" (165). There are some commonalities involved in the various reforms engendered by the NPM movement identified by these authors, and these are described in Table 1 below.

Table 1.

Generic Element Categories of NPM.