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What are the big questions which should concern practitioners and students of public administration? Behn recently offered three big questions of public management, involving micromanagement, motivation, and measurement. Kirlin argues that the big questions of public administration in a democracy are different from those of public management and develops four criteria by which to judge big questions. Seven big questions of public administration in a democracy are offered, concerning: tools of collective action supporting a democratic polity; appropriate roles of nongovernmental collective action; tradeoffs between designs based on function versus geography; national versus local political arenas; when decisions are isolated from politics; balance among neutral competence, representativeness, and leadership; and societal learning.
Behn's (1995) recent delineation of the "big questions of public management" makes an important and compelling argument that any field of inquiry should focus on major questions and should be driven by those questions, not diverted to more tractable questions nor limited by methodological orthodoxy. This is a strong critique of much of the contemporary public administration and public management literature, both in terms of the questions addressed and efforts to establish an orthodoxy of methods somehow judged to be most appropriate. Behn is careful to limit his suggestions to public management and to invite others to offer alternative definitions of big questions.
In this article, I respond to this invitation, arguing that the big questions of public administration in a democracy are quite different from the big questions of public management, a position also recently suggested by Newland (1994). To begin, I identify Behn's big questions, give an initial preview of the critique more fully developed later, and offer a listing of the seven big questions of public administration in a democracy.
Big Questions
Behn's three big questions for public management (1995; 315) are:
1. Micromanagement: How can public managers break the micromanagement cycle-an excess of procedural rules, which prevents public agencies from producing results, which leads to more procedural rules, which leads to ...?
2. Motivation: How can public managers motivate people (public employees as well as those outside the formal authority of government) to work energetically and intelligently toward achieving public purposes?
3. Measurement: How can public managers measure the achievements of their agencies in ways that help to...