ABSTRACT The political fictions used in political discourse, during the English Civil War period, remain relevant to contemporary public policy and administration. Mainstream public administration discourse has too often employed the fiction of a singular and unbounded popular sovereignty that emerged during this period, leaving public administration ill‐equipped to deal with the authoritarian impulses of contemporary populist governments. What is needed in public administration discourse, in dealing with these authoritarian impulses, is not an ethic of administrative neutrality, such as has traditionally dominated much of our field, but an ethic of constitutionalism that draws on the fiction of the individual that was also articulated during the English Civil War period by the English Levellers and subsequently by the founders of the American Constitution.
As the digital footprint of public service expands, the need for accessible materials for individuals with disabilities grows. Public servants must consider accessibility in the creation of all materials, from websites to PDFs to audio and visual media. However, research around accessible material creation in public service has been limited. This study uses data from a 2024 survey of MPA alumni from five universities to identify their familiarity with accessible material creation, including their awareness of their own organization's policies, processes, and training. The findings reveal that respondent awareness of their own organization's practices was correlated with higher familiarity in generating accessible materials. However, many respondents did not know about their organization's practices, identifying the need for increased dialogue about this essential element of social equity and inclusion. As such, suggestions for organizations to improve their practices around accessible material creation along with ideas for continued research are shared.
After decades of expansion, liberal democracy is threatened by autocratic populists. These actors exploit widening gaps between leaders and citizens, as well as growing political polarization in the population, to consolidate executive power by undermining courts, sidelining elected assemblies, discrediting public administrators, and intimidating both opposition and the press. This alarming predicament begs the question of what enterprising role public administrators can play in curbing the rise of autocratic populism by reconnecting elected politicians with diverse and polarized population groups while fostering alignment among them. To this end, public administrators are conceptualized as bridgebuilders promoting interactive political leadership along the vertical axis of the political system; as mediators fostering agreement, accommodation, or compromise between polarized groups along the horizontal axis; and as institutional architects linking representative democracy and collaborative governance arenas. This expanded role of public administrators as democratic guardians and protagonists raises important questions regarding its legitimacy.
Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) directly affect citizens, making them central to public service delivery. Service success therefore hinges on public sector organizations' ability to recruit competent SLBs. We argue that citizens' perspectives should inform SLB recruitment, especially for contact-intensive, relational frontline roles. Yet public administration research has not integrated citizens' perspectives into SLB recruitment, despite a broader shift toward a service-user orientation. We test whether job advertisements co-designed with citizens increase job seekers' application likelihood. Using a mixed-method design, including a preregistered experiment, we find that co-designed job advertisements (a) identify SLB competencies often overlooked in conventional recruitment (Study 1), (b) increase application likelihood regardless of applicants' awareness of citizen involvement (Study 2A), and (c) attract candidates whose values align with service-user-oriented organizations by improving person-job fit (Study 2B). We advance public sector recruitment and SLB research by introducing co-design as an innovative and effective approach to service-user-oriented SLB recruitment.
Participatory and collaborative governance (P&CG) is widely celebrated as an institutional vehicle for democratizing public decision-making by inviting affected stakeholders into inclusive and deliberative policy processes. This essay argues that underlying appeals to democratic legitimacy in P&CG are tacit commitments to specific (and often ideologically bounded) conceptions of justice. Democracy, far from being normatively univocal, encompasses competing justice principles that yield divergent and sometimes incompatible design imperatives. In response, this essay calls for a shift from vague democratic invocations to a more precise theorization of justice as the operative normative currency in P&CG. To this end, the essay outlines an analytical framework that maps three core dimensions of governance design (input, process, and output) onto corresponding domains of justice: representational, procedural, and distributive. Systematically unpacking the plural and conflicting ethical principles within each domain shows how different principles of justice produce distinct governance dilemmas and trade-offs.
