Key Aspects of Modern Public Administration: Q&A
Public Management Questionnaire
1. What Does a Third-Generation Model Imply?
It involves taking into account several considerations that have become necessary over time. The design based on the characteristics of Weber’s bureaucratic model, as well as the attitude and competence of public officials, has also been changing.
2. How Does One Get onto the Public Agenda?
Starting from the fact that unmet public demand was gradually replaced by the idea of the public agenda.
3. How Should the Public Agenda Be Viewed?
The public agenda should not be seen as a unilateral decision but as a result of openness to social priorities. In other words, public resources must address real public problems, each of which must be supported by detailed indicators on how to raise and address them through public policy.
4. How Should Social Priorities Be Resolved?
The solution to public problems lay in establishing bodies and governmental agencies that were, in turn, the continent of stable bureaucracies. The new approach proposes that each problem be defined as a course of action in which even those who can contribute something to the desirable results can and should participate.
5. How Should Public Policy Be Understood?
As courses of action oriented towards results, public policy requires a greater orientation towards managerial skills than rigid roles in constructing verifiable and open procedures that can and should be subject to public evaluation.
6. How Should the Procedure Be Evaluated?
The quality standards pursued by this new approach, however, represent a commitment to accountability. While retaining the transparent use of resources, it adds organizational outcomes along a process that seeks explicit results.
7. What Is Covered with the Systematization of Administrative Processes?
The use of new information technologies and the internal consistency of the processes involved. The ethics of officials are still a subject of surveillance, monitoring, and control to move to the personal commitment of staff.
8. What Is Covered with Greater Transparency and Wider Participation as Possible from Society?
The administration remains a black box, aspiring to become a glass case whose proceedings are public and whose results are measured in terms of fulfilling their explicit commitments.
9. In the New Public Administration, Is the Private Sector Calling on Public Services?
Since there is not enough public service, the private sector asks for and demands the quality and efficiency of service.
10. What Is the Professionalization of Public Employees?
Special training involves administrative functions and management that will have to develop the service and attention to the public.
11. What Is the Role of Decentralization in New Public Administration?
With the establishment of administrative units that have a certain level of autonomy in their functioning and internal organization, and which are then evaluated according to the results. Decentralization has produced some new centers of political decision and the emergence of administrative levels with specific skills and the capacity to administer and manage resources.
12. What Impact Would a Decrease in Regulations Have?
Giving greater decision-making power to each administrative unit, depending on the peculiar and specific problems of their allocation, to increase efficiency and problem-solving ability under the circumstances in which they arise.
13. What Is Meant by the Implementation of an Accountability System?
This entails the establishment of new relationships and communication.
14. What Is the Difference Between an Administration of an Expansive Welfare State and a Balanced Government?
The administration is presented as safeguarding the public interest and private interest as a defender of the citizens, which is leading to a rethink on the use of human and financial resources, which are limited, while demand is increasing benefits and in a growing process. This requires the establishment of sound policies, citizen submissions, and flexible administrative structures to enhance responsiveness to demands and social demands.
15. What Is Required of Sound Management?
An approach to society and social partners, which impacts positively on the levels of competitiveness of public organizations.
20. What Is the Theory of the Agency?
Agency theory is a contract between an individual (principal) who hires another (agent), delegating to him the execution of a task. To this situation must be added the possibility that the agent has information or asymmetric preferential to prevent exhaustive control over him by the principal.
21. What Is the Citizens-Managers-Political Relationship Chain?
This delegation of responsibility occurs successively in all the territorial areas of administration, such as the state, regional, local, etc. The election of representatives and the delegation of management of subordinates is common to them all. To make a more specific analysis, we proceeded to examine each of the links independently.
22. How Are Citizens-Political Relationships Given?
Citizens elect political representatives in accordance with the objectives set in an electoral program, whose full implementation is at the mercy of the existence of organized groups with interests in power, obtaining a parliamentary minority, or the utility function of the ruling party in its entirety, or each member individually politician. This stems from an agency relationship, where people bring their coercively capital, and politicians make decisions that may not generate a profit for collective citizenship.
23. How Is the Political-Managers Relationship Given?
The political role is responsible for designing programs or policies, setting targets to achieve, with a hand-gun of managers of activities that enable their achievement. Given this division of functions, the principal-agent relationship makes perfect sense because they are numerous factors that could cause deviations from the guidelines managers marked by politicians. It is latent in the budget literature that the utility function of managers is defined by the need to increase power through his departure in budgets by the number of hierarchical levels under its control, the possible improvement of working relationships, or their relationship to the political scene. Putting their utility function to policy objectives, based on the lack of thorough checks, is mission possible. The union of these two levels complicates the agency relationship, as there are multiple agents in relation to citizen-administration, with different utility functions each one, which can cause serious distortions in the principles that should guide the administration in its action. You can also speak of a third link in the chain, those goods or services where there is also a separation between their supply and production, following the decision to buy instead of making.
24. What Are the Pillars of the New Public Management?
- Public Choice: Introduction of the private sector in public production. Introduction of competition mechanisms.
- Transaction Costs: Organizational restructuring in relation to the optimal cost function.
- Neo-Taylorism: Cutting red tape and rules of action. Simplification of the hierarchical structure. Improvement of motivation mechanisms, control systems associated with the implantation of control tools associated with the exercise of responsibilities. Implementation of processes of accountability.
- Agency Theory: Implementation of control tools associated with the exercise of responsibilities. Implementation of processes of accountability.
25. How Are Reforms of the Organizational Structure and What Types Occur?
The amendments and modifications that lump together from the organizational point of view can come provided by the permanent or temporary disappearance of the public in the production of goods or services, by their coexistence with the private sector, or simply for a change in the distribution of roles and power in the public domain.
3.1.1. Pure Reductions in Size
Actions include privatization and indirect management of services. Under these figures, the public sector gave the management of goods and services on a permanent basis in the case of privatization or temporarily in indirect management.
3.1.2. Hybrid or Intermediate Size Reductions
Within this section, we reflect actions in which there is no direct transfer of public functions to the private sector, but both sectors compete or cooperate in providing the same service. The activation process of external competition is intended that the production be public or private depending on the relevance to the needs and demands of users (citizens or other public bodies). The potential loss of control of production for the private sector will lead to a rivalry between the two sectors at a lower cost.
3.1.3. Changes in Organizational Design
In these public policy areas where the government is faced with the impossibility of introducing real market mechanisms, it has had to promote their establishment on new avenues of internal competition or consider the need to stimulate the responsibility of managers and productivity of workers through decentralization of functions, or simplification of the hierarchical structure. Procedures do not imply a loss of power by the administration.
26. Within the Normative and Cultural Rationalization, How Is the Development of Personnel Policies Given?
It proposes to launch a new human resources management of a more decentralized nature, something that would prevent a retreat from the problems on the responsibility centers that prevent the production of appropriate responses. Within the processes taking place in this area include: i) reductions in templates, ii) lifelong learning and dynamic iii) the participation of workers; iv) the introduction and development of reward systems and motivation v) implementation of evaluation systems that could achieve the level of performance of public sector workers, for linking with motivational strategies.
27. In the Same Vein, How Is the Introduction of Private Techniques Given?
Initially, it started with management by objectives, but today the direction is selected as a strategic technology to fully meet those needs. This new system of management requires the development of the strategy or strategic plan, which reflects the mission or purpose of the particular organization in the overall goals or objectives over a long period required for their achievement, and the timing to achieve them, and annual planning and programming, or operational plan, with a strong link to the budgeting process, which specifies the main priorities in the short term manager whose responsibility is public.
28. How Did the Transparency of the Administration Come About?
Berman summarizes the views of citizens from the government on three negative factors: they feel misunderstood or ignored, consider that the government did not use their power to further them, and found public policy and ineffective services. To avoid these situations, he suggests three strategies: first, would explain that aims government do to serve the general interests, the second strategy would aim to incorporate citizens and public input in the decision process, and finally the need for the public sector to defend its reputation, showing the efficiency reached in the process.