Public Administration and Quality of Life: Literature Review

Introduction

The problem of interest to this study concerns the relative effectiveness of public administration's activities dedicated to the evaluation of life quality and standards. This chapter provides a review of the relevant literature on current public administration research, focusing on governance's role in evaluating and enhancing societal wellbeing globally. For this purpose, the chapter assesses recurring themes, limitations, influential works, and implications for future studies in this field. A summary of the findings is presented in the chapter conclusion.

Common Themes, Assumptions, and Approaches

Identifying the common themes, assumptions, and approaches used in public administration — and evaluating their effectiveness in assessing and improving citizen quality of life and standards — is critically important for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, the process provides accountability concerning how well governance bodies are meeting public needs, which enhances transparency of performance on wellbeing metrics. In addition, comparative analysis of successful and unsuccessful administrative approaches allows policymakers to identify hard-learned best practices that can be scaled while reforming or discontinuing ineffective policies. The review of the relevant literature revealed a number of common themes, assumptions, and approaches that have garnered mixed results, which are discussed below.

Resilient, citizen-centric governance emerged from the reviewed literature as a shared thematic priority across multiple sources. Citizen-centric governance refers to public administration that prioritizes meeting the needs and preferences of citizens through co-creation and user-driven policy and services (Hanbal et al., 2023). For instance, Ansell et al. (2021) highlight robust strategies such as modularization that enabled targeted COVID-19 pandemic-era responses. In many cases, these types of initiatives involve innovative e-governance models that encourage citizens to participate more actively in local decision-making processes (Lo et al., 2022).

Instead of a model of government that acts on passive citizens, citizen-centric governance places a high priority on collaborative engagement, participatory processes, and individualization. In this regard, Singh et al. (2022) report that "a citizen-centric approach mainly concerns the needs of the citizens or develops products and services with the orientation of benefits to the citizens. Additionally, citizen centricity is all about creating value for citizens" (p. 540). By adopting informed and timely citizen-centric governance, policymakers can create a democratic system that not only addresses citizens' needs but also empowers them as active contributors to the decision-making process, fostering a sense of ownership and accountability within society in mutually beneficial ways. According to Ju et al. (2019), "citizen participation in e-governance is, essentially, a social exchange between individuals and their government through which the citizen creates public value as well as acquires private value" (p. 37).

Some of the core principles of citizen-centric governance include transparency, accountability, accessibility, human-focused design, and prompt responsiveness. Potential approaches include participatory budgeting and crowdsourcing citizen feedback and insights (Lazaroiu, 2017). The overarching aim of citizen-centric governance is responsiveness to citizens' values and priorities across the entire policy cycle. A growing body of research confirms that well-implemented citizen-centric governance can enhance satisfaction, trust, and collective problem-solving processes (Lazaroiu, 2017).

Similarly, Frijters et al. (2020) trace the historical foundations of wellbeing economics, providing policymakers with preliminary models like the UK's What Works Centre for Wellbeing to emphasize happiness in governance. Although proponents differ in their precise views, they generally share the notion that the overarching goal of wellbeing economies and public policy should be maximizing human wellbeing and happiness rather than solely focusing on economic growth. In this regard, Henscher (2023) reports that "the wellbeing economy draws heavily upon a range of heterodox schools of economic thought; these schools differ in many respects, but all share the central common insight that the economy is best conceived as a social provisioning system for humanity's needs" (p. 1). In this context, wellbeing comprises multiple dimensions including physical health, mental health, social connectedness, purpose, and financial security, among others (Henscher, 2023).

Digital innovation is also a recurrent theme in the relevant literature, with Helander et al. (2020) using activity theory to examine collaborative e-government services and Bullock (2019) assessing artificial intelligence's transformative potential. Likewise, Lo et al. (2022) cite e-governance technologies as a means of enhancing government operations and services involving citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders. As technology rapidly advances, there is a growing assumption among public sector policymakers that establishing e-governance models has become absolutely essential for streamlining processes, integrating multi-actor governance, and adopting a digital-by-default approach aimed at efficiency, reduced bureaucracy, improved capabilities, and increased trust among stakeholders (Lo et al., 2022). There is likewise a prominent — and, in many cases, unjustified — assumption among scholars and policymakers that if sufficient resources are allocated to these initiatives, achieving optimal outcomes is possible and perhaps even inevitable.

It is important to note that virtually all of the sources reviewed emphasized that significant challenges remain in fully implementing distributed data-sharing solutions at all levels of government (Valenzuela-Fernández et al., 2023). In this context, e-governance can be regarded as encompassing the full range of changes in politics and public services brought about by innovations in digital technologies and online platforms. This evolution highlights the interaction between e-governance — as the digitally enabled collaboration among government, citizens, and stakeholders — and e-government, or the provision of digitized public services (Umbach & Tkalec, 2022). Implementing and evaluating e-governance reveals challenges and pitfalls across different policy domains and geographic regions. The research to date indicates that the factors influencing e-governance success are highly context-specific, including policy area, institutional climate, and administrative customs. Consequently, comprehensively evaluating e-governance remains especially challenging; assessment tends to be limited to analyzing particular tools, projects, and initiatives as operational examples (Umbach & Tkalec, 2022).

Finally, the increasingly influential impacts of trends such as populism and technology are also common themes identified in the reviewed literature (Wanvik & Haarstad, 2021). Although these trends have implications for virtually all types and levels of government operations, they are especially salient for environmental initiatives where citizens are becoming increasingly involved and vocal in their protests against what they regard as harmful public and private sector policies. For instance, according to Wanvik and Haarstad (2021), "in local and urban politics, many populist movements have manifested as opposition to road tolls and congestion charging, car-free zones, fuel subsidy removal, and so on" (p. 2096). It is reasonable to expect that these trends will continue to gather momentum as the grim realities of climate change displace tens of millions of people around the world in the foreseeable future.

Despite the efforts by researchers and policymakers to forge improved approaches to service delivery, much work remains to be done. The various approaches reflected in the existing body of knowledge concerning public administration effectiveness are all characterized by some significant common weaknesses and limitations, which are discussed below.

Common Weaknesses and Limitations

The research focused on analyzing the effectiveness of public administration in evaluating life quality and standards is characterized by a number of common weaknesses and limitations. One key issue to emerge from the literature review is that the contextual specificity of cases frequently limits broader generalization of findings, even in the most robust studies. For instance, Kokhanovskaya et al. (2019) focus narrowly on evaluating Russia's challenges and solutions, while Ramírez de la Cruz et al. (2020) analyze Latin American pandemic responses over a comparatively short period. In response to this limitation, both qualitative and quantitative comparative approaches could strengthen insights and provide unique perspectives from stakeholders (Rodríguez et al., 2023).

In addition, short-term perspectives are prevalent in the reviewed literature, as Lapuente and Van de Walle (2020) note in their study on New Public Management reforms. Longitudinal assessments tracking policies across extended timeframes are lacking but could reveal reforms' lasting impacts (Lapuente & Van de Walle, 2020). Even among the rare instances where longitudinal assessments have been conducted, these studies have likewise suffered from contextual specificity that limits the generalizability of their findings (Furuholt & Sæbø, 2018).

Influential Sources: The World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report, which has helped anchor happiness as a policy goal, appears highly influential given its recurrence across works such as Aknin and Whillans (2021). Behavioral Insights Team publications also seem impactful, driving the rise of behavioral public policy. Since its launch in 2012, the World Happiness Report — published annually by the Gallup Poll — has garnered significant global attention for its potential to guide policymakers in assessing and selecting policies. The report identifies six key variables that account for differences in happiness across countries: GDP per capita, social support systems, life expectancy, freedom of choice, corruption levels, and generosity (Aknin & Whillans, 2021).

By tracking happiness in relation to these factors annually across diverse nations, the World Happiness Report aims to provide valuable data-driven insights about the impacts of various societal conditions on wellbeing. Policymakers can leverage these findings to evaluate which policy approaches are associated with higher happiness and life satisfaction. In summary, the World Happiness Report constitutes an influential global study that may inform public sector policy decisions by correlating happiness levels with multiple national-level variables (Ulkhaq, 2020).

While happiness is a highly subjective, purely human construct, enhancing the happiness levels of the body politic is clearly an important outcome for governments at all levels (De Paola & Pirttilä-Backman, 2023). It is therefore little wonder that so much attention has been paid to the World Happiness Report in recent years by public sector policymakers and academics alike. This report serves as a report card of sorts concerning how well governments are fulfilling their fundamental responsibilities to their citizenry. Since its original publication in 2012, the report has presented happiness data as core indicators of quality of life worldwide. The report ranks countries by self-reported life satisfaction and positive affect scores, affirming happiness as a crucial societal metric of particular interest to public sector policymakers (Fereidouni et al., 2013).

The report analyzes factors linked to higher collective happiness, including GDP, social support systems, life expectancy, generosity levels, and freedom of choice. This supports the case that monitoring subjective wellbeing offers vital insights for crafting policies focused on human fulfillment. By highlighting happiness together with corresponding economic data, the World Happiness Report provides a timely and valuable indication of the growing prioritization of wellbeing metrics in governance. In this regard, Helliwell et al. (2023) emphasize that "the natural way to measure a nation's happiness is to ask a nationally representative sample of people how satisfied they are with their lives these days" (p. 4).

Happiness is highly subjective, and the adage that money cannot buy it may be true. Nevertheless, impoverished nations in Africa and affluent nations in Western Europe consistently rank at opposite ends of the World Happiness Report, suggesting that the fulfillment of basic Maslovian needs is absolutely essential before humans can realize happiness at any meaningful level. Parents with starving children are little interested in the fine arts or entertainment; people suffering from debilitating diseases are hard-pressed to be happy, and the difference that financial resources can make in securing adequate, high-quality health care is inestimable. As the editors of the World Happiness Report point out, "a population will only experience high levels of overall life satisfaction if its people are also pro-social, healthy, and prosperous. In other words, its people must have high levels of what Aristotle called 'eudaimonia.' So at the level of society, life satisfaction and eudaimonia go hand-in-hand" (Helliwell et al., 2023, p. 4).

Moreover, the report's annual measurement of national happiness and its models correlating life satisfaction with key variables have inspired widespread adoption of similar wellbeing indices. The report's significance lies in substantiating happiness data as essential for informing people-centered policy and assessing genuine human progress. The report's findings have spurred the implementation of similar wellbeing indices in other contexts, thereby reinforcing the notion that happiness is a crucial metric for guiding governance and fulfilling citizens' fundamental needs.