In Defense of Politics in Public Administration: A Value Pluralist Perspective (Public Admin: Criticism and Creativity)

136 Pages·2010·0.43 MB·English

by  Michael W. Spicer

In Defense of Politics
in Public Administration
Public Administration: Criticism & Creativity
Series Editor
Camilla Stivers
Editorial Advisory Board
Thomas J. Catlaw
Terry L. Cooper
David J. Farmer
Martha Feldman
Cynthia J. McSwain
David H. Rosenbloom
Peregrine Schwartz-Shea
Michael W. Spicer
Orion F. White, Jr.
In Defense of Politics
in Public Administration
A Value Pluralist Perspective
Michael W. Spicer
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Tuscaloosa
Copyright © 2010
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Typeface: Garamond
∞
The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spicer, Michael W.
In defense of politics in public administration : a value pluralist perspective /
Michael W. Spicer.
p. cm. — (Public administration : criticism and creativity)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8173-1685-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Public administration.
2. Pluralism. 3. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title.
JF1351.S584 2010
351.01—dc22
2009026106
To my mother, Annie Doreen Tavernor

Contents
Preface ix
1. Introduction: Anti-Politics in Public Administration 1
2. Value Pluralism and Moral Experience 18
3. Politics, Conciliation, and Value Pluralism 37
4. Politics and the Limitations of a Science of Governance 53
5. A Pluralist Approach to Public Administration: Adversary Argument,
Constitutionalism, and Administrative Discretion 70
6. Conclusion: Practical Moral Reasoning in Public Administration 91
References 107
Index 117

Preface
This book seeks to provide a defense for the practice of politics in public ad-
ministration. Notwithstanding the sometimes shabby reputation of politics, not
just among citizens but also among many academics, I argue here that politics is
crucial to protecting the array of confl icting values or conceptions of the good
that constitute our moral experience as human beings, both in our private lives
and in the conduct of government and public administration. Politics does this,
albeit in an imperfect fashion, because it encourages political leaders and public
administrators to respond to the confl icting views of different groups of citizens
in our society, because it allows some measure of personal freedom to us as we
go about making our own choices among confl icting values, and also because it
helps to maintain some sort of a peace among us as we make these choices. I have
come to believe that defending politics is especially important nowadays because
of a renewed enthusiasm among so many in our fi eld for a more scientifi c ap-
proach to the study of governance and public administration—a n approach, in
my view, that is problematic because it downplays the confl ict and uncertainty
that are characteristic of the deeply political way in which we have come to gov-
ern ourselves. Therefore, what I also seek to offer here is an alternative approach
to governance and public administration, an approach that properly recognizes
that governance is inherently political in that it is concerned with the peaceful
resolution of confl ict among competing ends or conceptions of the good, an
approach that also recognizes that, because governance is political, public ad-
ministrators will often be faced with making choices among such ends without
recourse to any sort of scientifi c algorithm and that they have a moral responsi-
bility for these choices.