Free «Public Administration» Essay

Public administration is the controlling and management of public property, assets, and people in particular to their assorted regional and geographical niche. During the past centuries, public administration was determined by political affiliations. However, in the 21^st century, the former 19^th and 20^th century bureaucratic and policing theories of administration have been replaced by the concepts that accept socio-political and economic empowerment of the people rather than authorizing the administrative units to serve the central governments. The origin of public administration is founded in ancient monarchies and groups of people who came together to govern themselves by setting up a central power of authority as opposed to the view of a sovereign man.

Administrative discretion is a method of governing people by using discretional decisions and plans to the known public interest. Usually, a discretionary action taken by the government is considered informal and thus unfit in terms of safeguarding the inherent needs of the public. Abuse of administrative discretion is usually caused by the administrator’s freedom to select any choice of action without considering the reasonable judgment. Administrative discretion consists of agencies especially interest groups that make primary decisions about the duty of the government. Policymakers in the 20^th and 21^st centuries consider the views of the public more important than the aspirations of the congress and the representatives and therefore seem to control the process of policymaking. Therefore, agencies take over the work of policy making as the legislative bodies but the legislative deal with making of laws while the agencies handle policies in relation to the established laws. Government is charged with policy making, but modern governments provide a framework that allows the socio-economic goals to be defined by the agencies that understand public needs best. Administrative discretion is based on the aggregate values as decided by popular population. Therefore, the government as the legislative body refrains from making an individual resolution and consults with the agencies in order to customize a societal goal oriented on policy decisions. Therefore, the main actors in this form of administration are the agencies concerned with public interest and the expertise which define achievable parameters for the government to deliver. Congress must delegate policy making to the agencies, which tailor policies today unlike before when the Congress defined policies. Furthermore, during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the American presidency controlled policy making exercise. Today, the Congress assigns policy making and decision making to agencies that must seek for public will and reduce the differences between the public and the government. Therefore, administrative discretion creates a formal alliance between the legislative organs of the government, which create legislations that determine agencies, interest groups, and expertise work together under one authority to outline public opinionated policy plans. The future of administrative discretion is promising as governments employ agencies comprising of public interest groups, expertise and legislative policy makers as key players in defining socio-economic development. Government is more likely to hire services of administrative discretion since the agencies can easily absorb any public blame for failure of programs or cover for any public outrage caused by poorly planned policies unlike before when the government bore all the blame for poor policy implementation.

Social Equity

Equity is a process of revitalizing public spirit by offering them a neutral expertise to implement desired policies without political bias in order to distribute resources equitably. Aristotle asserted that the public administrators cannot make autonomous policy decision without consulting through a social equitable process which allows respect for similar rights and duties associated with political, economic and social participation of all people. People with equal position in the society easily relate through dialogue to define the ways of taking appropriate public decision in a neutral manner. The modern concept of social equity has charged from rights and freedoms to more economic and political empowerment of a group of people to bargain for representation of their issues. The agenda of social equity today is to increase public participation in policy making so that the process of public administration could be defined from a citizen-participating perspective. Social equity intends to connect the past disproportional distributions of wealth through the use of an informed public policy unlike before when government defined the policy making process without citizens’ participation.

Public Administration

Public administration has moved from the traditional view in which the economic efficiency and effectiveness as well as the responsiveness of legislatives and elected representatives determined policy making process to the modern holistic approach which incorporates citizens. Citizens’ participation in public administration is a contemporary measure taken to increase responsiveness and effectiveness of policies designed to distribute public service. The intention today is to create a proactive organized administration that can handle both legislative and public opinion in their commitment to deliver results with approved managerial ethics and values. Therefore, the contemporary public administration is bent to increase democratic administration by introducing the citizen participation program into former government work to suggest and oversee the ways the policies are implemented. Political processes affect the citizens’ level of trust for their government in delivering fair administration.

The history of public administration aims at a servant-leadership management style that is still present in a form of bureaucratic processes that protect only the leaders at the expense of fairness, equity, and effectiveness of administration. Unlike the past administration, which neglected the value of the servant, modern administration is geared towards including all citizens in order to deal with equality, equity, and fair distribution of resources, responsibilities, and duties. However, public administration is still likely to change from the present economics of cutback management and privatization that allows third-party governing agencies to be included in the administrative unit in which the representatives work hand in hand with the citizens.

The constitution defines what kind of public administration is practiced per state, country, and region. The U.S. Constitution advocates for democratic principles that assert for citizen inclusion when discussing socio-economic framework. Therefore, the past political movements were aimed at separating politics and private administration from public administration. That led to the development of the scientific management theory as proposed by Fredrick Taylor and Louis Brandeis in which the means of improving productivity were sought to prevent the increase in prices of products and services so that the economy could improve if prices were stabilized over a long period of time.