Public Affairs and Democratic Ideals

Curtis Ventriss

Description

We live in an era where many citizens feel increasingly uncertain about their futures, having to deal with stagnant wages, globalization, and wealth and income inequality, while, at the same time, policymakers appear unable or unwilling to reach any viable policy consensus on a wide range of major issues. Public Affairs and Democratic Ideals addresses these vexing conditions and the challenge they pose for public management and administration. Curtis Ventriss argues for reordering intellectual and policy priorities with a focus on publicness and the role of critical democratic thought in public affairs. Too often, the assumptions that underlie the prevailing theory and practice of addressing major political and economic problems remain unquestioned, with economic and political conflicts displaced into issues of administration and leadership. Ventriss calls for a reinvigorated notion of publicness based, in part, on a public social science, civic experimentation, and policies designed and tailored to the unique needs of various publics. As a way to move forward, this book offers ideas for redefining professionalism, promoting civic initiatives, and rethinking professional education for public service.
Foreword

1. Introduction

Section 1: The Importance of Publicness and Critical Democratic Thought

2. Conditioning Factors: Neo‑Managerialism and the Modern State

3. A Conceptual Foundation: Reinvigorated Publicness

4. A Substantive Approach: Critical Democratic Thought

5. Rationality, the Public Sphere, and the State

Section 2: Contemporary Challenges

6. The Enduring Implications of the Economic Crisis of 2008

7. Public Affairs in an Epoch of Space: Challenges to the Public Sphere

8. A Critical Analysis of the Role of Citizen Involvement in Public Affairs: A Reexamination

9. Conclusion: Reflections of a Sympathetic Critic

Notes
References
Index

Sujets

• National
• Central
• Public administration

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438481265
• Langue: English

Extrait

Public Affairs and Democratic Ideals
Public Affairs and Democratic Ideals
Critical Perspectives in an Era of Political and Economic Uncertainty
CURTIS VENTRISS
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2021 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Ventriss, Curtis, author.
Title: Public affairs and democratic ideals : critical perspectives in an era of political and economic uncertainty / Curtis Ventriss.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020024649 | ISBN 9781438481258 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438481265 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Public administration—Evaluation. | Public administration—Moral and ethical aspects. | Public administration—Citizen participation. | Government accountability. | Democracy.
Classification: LCC JF1351 .V46 2021 | DDC 352.7/48—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024649
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to Lisa Ventriss and Alex Ventriss
… Where trust in society and its institutions is battered, and where interests fail to gain the recognition they feel entitled to, there is an explosive mixture ready to be set off. Individuals cannot stand too much uncertainty in their lives, and the direct measures of uncertainty are the rapid and fluctuating loss in value of money people use for exchange (the aggravating discrepancies between income and what one has to buy, the erosion of wealth one has painfully accumulated) and fluctuating unemployment. It is these circumstances that the traditional institutions and democratic procedures of a society crack, and the irrational, emotional angers and desire for a political savior come to flood tide …
—Daniel Bell
And so the question becomes whether the ideals [of democracy] themselves must be given up or drastically revised, or whether there are ways of rearticulating them that retain their moral force.
—C. Wright Mills
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.
—Thomas Pynchon
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1 Introduction
S ECTION 1 T HE I MPORTANCE OF P UBLICNESS AND C RITICAL D EMOCRATIC T HOUGHT
Chapter 2 Conditioning Factors: Neo-Managerialism and the Modern State
Chapter 3 A Conceptual Foundation: Reinvigorated Publicness
Chapter 4 A Substantive Approach: Critical Democratic Thought
Chapter 5 Rationality, the Public Sphere, and the State
S ECTION 2 C ONTEMPORARY C HALLENGES
Chapter 6 The Enduring Implications of the Economic Crisis of 2008
Chapter 7 Public Affairs in an Epoch of Space: Challenges to the Public Sphere
Chapter 8 A Critical Analysis of the Role of Citizen Involvement in Public Affairs: A Reexamination
Chapter 9 Conclusion: Reflections of a Sympathetic Critic
Notes
References
Index
Foreword
For me, this book has had a long history. Some of the issues I have examined in this book, in fact, go back to my undergraduate days. Other issues raised mirror the era in which I grew up, as I explain in more detail in chapter 9 . But it was my two mentors in graduate school, more than anything else, who had the greatest impact on my thinking, particularly in exploring, as Theodor Adorno (1967, p. 10) so candidly put it, “the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.” These two mentors respectively were John Dyckman (1922–1987) and Alberto Guerreiro Ramos (1915–1982). John Dyckman, an economist, was one of the leading scholars in planning and international development who served for many years as the chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He later became the first James Irvine Chair of Planning at the University of Southern California. His last appointment was as a professor of geography, Johns Hopkins University. By contrast, Guerreiro Ramos was a prominent sociologist and administrative theorist who wrote seminal works in Brazil before coming to the United States. After being forced to leave Brazil after the military coup in the 1960s, he resided briefly at Yale University, but spent the rest of his career at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his book, The New Science of Organizations: A Reconceptualization of the Wealth of Nations .
With that said, this book is in response to many of the questions they posed to me when I studied with them. They believed it was crucial to ask “foundational questions” that explore the underlying assumptions of economic, political, social, and cultural norms of the modern polity, especially as it related to both public administration/management and public policy. Moreover, they both strongly encouraged me to examine issues that went beyond a procedural/managerial perspective—as valuable as this approach may be in addressing some important societal issues. That is, they encouraged me to not just limit my inquiry of public affairs to strategies of collaborative policy networks, participative deliberation, economic efficiency in service delivery, professionalism, and the like (as important as they are to the study and practice of public affairs), but to undertake a substantive exploration of those political and economic presuppositions that have shaped civic and political life.
Needless to say, I am not claiming in this book to be exhaustive or contending that my analysis is in anyway definitive concerning the challenges that we face in both fields. Rather, I argue here that the issues I have raised—and their respective theoretical and practical nuances—are largely neglected in the mainstream literature of public administration/management and public policy. To cite only one brief example, there has been little, if any, discussion of how the modern state might confine what constitutes, or should constitute, legitimate questions and policy approaches in addressing major social issues of the day. In short, I hope this book ignites an ongoing debate about certain fundamental issues, assumptions, and approaches that are often taken as a historical given, or that are regarded as so obvious and self-evident that they are seldom scrutinized for their validity and continued relevance. In this regard, I have raised concerns about the role and purpose of civic participation, the economic crisis of 2008 and its impact on governance, the role of the state, the fixation on procedural and utilitarian rationality to public affairs, and the important centrality of publicness.
I argue that these issues are especially important in this era of political and economic uncertainty. 1 For example, this uncertainty is partially reflected in the views of many citizens who are frustrated by what they perceive as an increasingly dysfunctional governing system unable to respond to major societal problems, an acerbic political discourse that has contributed to a troubling political polarization and tribalism, and a lack of any serious collaboration among key policy actors in finding meaningful political consensus on an array of policy issues. For example, in the United States, this political unease is presently juxtaposed with a heightened sense of economic uncertainty of increasing income and wealthy inequality, stagnant wages for middle-income families since the 1970s, the impact of globalization on local and regional communities, uneven economic growth between urban and rural areas, and limited social mobility. This political and economic uncertainty has contributed, to some degree, to a distrust of public institutions by many Americans and in other countries (Mounk, 2018). What is key here is the following: as the political environment has become more and more consumed by a growing uncertainty of whether we can effectively resolve these daunting challenges, it has taken its toll on the body politic both in the United States and elsewhere. Among other things, it has—at least to some extent—contributed to the emergence of a pseudo-democratic populism that channels such economic and political uncertainty into fears, anxieties, and a numbing cynicism among certain segments of the citizenry in the United States (and in other countries). Coupled with voters who feel neglected by political and economic elites, these citizens will likely become a permanent and disruptive political fixture on the landscape (Eatwell Goodwin, 2018). Given these stark realities, I think that for those in public management/administration and public policy the time has come to directly confront the validity of certain basic assumptions and to start asking different kinds of questions—questions that could in both fields make many rather uncomfortable and, I suspect, at times defensive.
As I write this, some of the more deleterious implications of widespread political and economic uncertainty have been vividly displayed during the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequential societal and economic distress that has instilled fear, frustration, and anxiety among the general public. This widespread uncertainty is especially acute in a time of economic and political discord—a situation, as previously noted, that can metastasize into an atti