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One of the few issues on which public management scholars agree in theory is the centrality of the democratic ethos. Public policy has recently paid attention to more democratic forms of policy making (e.g., participatory policy analysis), and public administration has periodically studied and advocated increased citizen participation in the processes of government. But the field of public management scholarship has yet to make a similar commitment to the democratic ethos, despite some contemporary practices (flattened hierarchies, self-managing teams) that represent democratization in public organizations. This essay reviews reasons why public management should be more democratic, some ways in which it is not, and proposes some ways in which the focus of scholarship and practice should be directed.
There are few issues on which American public management scholars can agree. Almost every topic or big question (Behn, 1995)-from the wisdom of strategic management to implementation theory, with an infinite number of controversies in between-is illuminated by many, often conflicting points of view. In the midst of this maelstrom of disagreement, however, lies one stable point, the fundamental ideological bedrock of the American public sector: the democratic ethos. Although observers might legitimately argue over exactly what democracy means in philosophical (e.g., Satori, 1987) as well as operational (Morone, 1990) terms, most will agree that it denotes the involvement of citizens in their government. Direct or representative, strong or weak, involved or detached: Whatever adjective one chooses, each still indicates a level of citizen participation.
In this essay, our starting point is the premise that democracy means that every citizen has a ticket of admission to any of the arenas where public decisions are made. Not every citizen has equal influence-not only money but expertise, access to communication media, and many other factors are critical-but everyone has the right to enter into public discourse. In general, too, we premise that democratic processes work better when they are more direct, because indirect expressions of a citizen's preferences are likely to distort them.
A mushrooming body of literature on American politics suggests that concerns about the failure of our democracy abound; it portrays a sharpening alienation between voters and their polities. For example, E. J. Dionne wrote Why Americans Hate Politics (1991); Michael Sandel (1996) examined Democracy's Discontent,...