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Public Administration and the Law in Democratic Contexts

Thu, September 5, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Pennsylvania Convention Center (PCC), 204B

Session Submission Type: Featured Paper Panel: 30-minute Paper Presentations

Session Description

The papers on this panel explore the integration of democratic principles into public administration and governance. Each study, while distinct in its focus and methodology, contributes to a theme of central theme of how democratic values are embedded, perceived, and operationalized in various facets of public life.

Papers:

The Democratic Character of Public Encounters: Theory and Evidence from the UK and Italy - Anthony Bertelli & Silvia Cannas

We present a novel approach for examining the democratic content of public encounters, or direct focused interactions between unelected public and private agents. While public encounters have inspired robust literatures, we contend that existing work has not congealed around questions of democracy. First, we build an analytic framework that relates the experience of public encounter to the belief systems of the individuals it involves. Second, building on recent normative arguments about democratically responsible public administration we show how certain public encounters have important democratic content and the potential to reshape the belief systems of those involved. Third, to provide an initial test of these normative expectations in two ways. A pair of survey experiments examine how knowledge and explanations of administrative procedures influence respondents' perceptions of the importance of normative principles and perceptions of responsible action in general population samples from the UK and Italy. Adapting a recent methodological innovation in the political knowledge literature, a mixed methods study explores if and to what extent exposure to democracy-preserving encounters influences respondents' understandings of the administrative process and its underlying normative principles in a general population sample from the UK.


Public Administration, Democracy and Individual Belief Systems: Evidence from the UK and Italy - Anthony Bertelli, Silvia Cannas & Marika Csapo

Understanding what conditions are conducive to promoting democratic values on a broad social scale is normatively important so long as the quality of democratic institutions rests on a coherent set of socially-reinforced norms. How do individuals’ understanding of governing institutions influence their valuations of principles of “good” public administration (i.e., impartiality, accountability, transparency, integrity, efficiency and legality)? Are these principles integrated into a coherent belief system? Does a college education increase the centrality of these principles in a political belief system? We examine these questions using original survey data from Italy and the UK that employs novel questions about administrative principles while leveraging well-established items of identifying political and moral beliefs. To evaluate whether political and institutional knowledge may be a mechanism through which education may influence belief system structure, we build a metric of “institutional understanding” modeled on the open-ended question approach of Kraft (2023). To examine the structure of belief systems, we use a network analysis approach that has become common for studying the centrality of specific values within broader belief systems.


Multilayer Networks of Normative Principles in Statutory Law - Anthony Bertelli, Silvia Cannas, Marika Csapo & Zsuzsanna Magyar

The legal basis of public administration provides it with fundamental normative principles that guide its practice. These principles, such as impartiality or transparency, are the primary formal way of connecting the normative values of a state to the practice of its public administration. How do administrative principles shape the legal structure of public administration? We develop a novel method for quantitatively measuring the importance of principles such as impartiality or transparency to national laws. We apply this method to the full corpus of Italian law, more than 73,000 laws adopted under the present constitution since 1948. We begin with qualitative methods that identify definitions and articulations of principles in statutes. We then use these references (and citations to them) to construct networks for each principle. Like a social network, statutes are written by politicians for public administrators and lawyers, and have reasons to emphasize (or de-emphasize) connections between principles and other statutes. We argue that more connected laws become institutionalized and are harder to change. We analyze these network dynamics through information about the types and topics of laws and the political context in which they are created, such as the electoral and party systems, government ideology, and the identity and characteristics of signing ministers. Our claim is that normative principles in statutory law constitute a dynamic scale-free multi-level network in which the networks of individual principles are interconnected. We estimate the probabilities of tie formation with ERGM models to understand under how political context influences the networks of principles.

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