New Public Management Reforms and the Democratic Deficit

Introduction

Among the many issues arising from the prominence of New Public Management (NPM) reforms over the past decades is the question of democracy. The changing nature of public administration under managerialism is said to be altering the concept of governance and affecting democratic politics. According to Lane (2000), "NPM as managerialism focusing upon contract making and enforcement seems to take government once and for all out of the Weberian framework of bureaucracy" (6). Although NPM enthusiasts continue to praise their efforts to move the ordinary citizen closer to the public administration machine — and thus provide greater choice and input in the delivery of public services — a closer investigation into the reform structure indicates something very different.

The decentralization of public administration, one of the core elements of NPM reforms, seems to be disconnecting civil society further from the decision-making apparatus of government and reducing the accountability of elected officials. New Public Management's idea of empowerment appears more focused on empowering the "consumer" in making purchases with their dollar than on empowering the "citizen" to make political choices that directly affect the quality of their lives.

The purpose of this study is to further explore the idea of the democratic deficit under NPM reforms and to elaborate the discourse on this subject. An analysis of the process by which managerialism is hollowing out democracy is conducted on two fronts: (a) the fundamental change of societal values that NPM is seeking to institutionalize, and (b) the structural changes under NPM which have made democratic politics more difficult for the general populace. This analysis is followed by a discussion of current and future trends in NPM and a summary of the research and salient findings in the conclusion.

Background and Overview

According to King, Feltey, and Susel (1998), there has been an increasing amount of attention given to the appropriate role of the public component of public administration in recent years, but the issue about the role of citizens in a democratic republic is as old as the debates that characterized the Constitutional Convention in 1787. In this regard, Black's Law Dictionary (1990) defines the important role of "citizen" as: "One who, under the Constitution and laws of the United States, is a member of the political community, owing allegiance and being entitled to the enjoyment of full civil rights" (244). The Founding Fathers carefully considered the proper role of the average citizen in the new democratic experiment, with many Convention delegates suggesting that the masses could not be entrusted with the heavy responsibilities that went hand-in-hand with citizenship in a democratic republic (Hall 366).

These are not new issues, but the impact of globalization and the changing nature of threats to the United States and its allies have forced public administrators to make difficult choices in recent years. Shifts in the social contract at home and abroad, combined with powerful market forces, have also compelled public administrators in the West to reexamine their traditional approaches. King and her colleagues note that "the contemporary movement to examine the role of the public in the process of administrative decision making has come about in response to problems in the latter half of this century and as a result of concern on the part of citizens, administrators, and politicians over citizen discouragement and apathy" (317).

Some observers suggest that active citizen participation in the democratic process has been dampened by the lack of responsiveness on the part of the public sector, but the historic trends that have fueled the drive for NPM reforms appear inexorable. According to Ferlie and Steane (2002), "Global developments have meant that nations increasingly compete on a variety of levels. The basis of competition between nations is not only in terms of market share, but also in the scale, shape and role of their public sectors and the regulatory regimes that are emerging within them" (1459). These processes accelerated during the 1990s when a number of Western governments — Japan is frequently cited as the sole exception — sought various types of public sector reform.

According to Lane (2000), the concept of public sector reform is too broad to encompass all the various initiatives witnessed in recent years: "Some countries have tried one or two of these kinds of reforms whereas other countries have embraced all of them: decentralisation, privatisation, incorporation, deregulation and reregulation, the introduction of executive agencies, internal markets or the use of the purchaser-provider split, as well as tendering/bidding schemes" (Lane 6). Consequently, such public reform initiatives have come to be referred to as New Public Management, with some common reform goals included in the concept. These include (a) the attempt to employ new governance mechanisms in the public sector that go beyond traditional institutions such as the bureau and the public enterprise, and (b) those that employ or imitate market institutions of governance (Lane 6).

On their face, many of the goals of NPM reforms appear at least benign and potentially valuable insofar as they serve to improve citizen participation in the democratic process and enhance the responsiveness of the public sector to citizens' needs, values, and wants. However, some critics maintain that these reforms can go too far when they seek to institutionalize selected social values that may not serve the best interests of the citizenry.

Fundamental Change of Societal Values Under NPM

As members of a nation's political community, citizens have both rights and responsibilities, but their ability to secure the benefits of either has been diminished in recent years by virtue of some New Public Management reforms. In her essay "How New Public Management Reforms Challenge the Roles of Professionals," Sehested (2002) reports that most Western European countries have been involved in NPM reforms over the past two decades with the goal of changing the functioning and culture of the public sector. This process has been described by Pierre (1995) as "a managerial revolution" in public bureaucracies (8). According to Sehested, "During the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of New Public Management became the dominating discourse concerning the 'proper' development of public administration, sustained by enthusiastic governments in the U.S.A. and in the Anglo-Saxon countries and by European and global organizations like the OECD and the World Bank" (1513).

The proper role of the public sector, like that of citizens themselves, has therefore become the focus of NPM reforms taking place in the United States and throughout the West. Unfortunately, as will be shown below, the same processes fueling globalization are increasingly creating obstacles for democracy and active citizen participation in the traditional sense.

Conclusion

The review of the literature showed that although change is inevitable, many of the reforms introduced by New Public Management initiatives have not had the intended outcomes, while others have accomplished what the policymakers wanted by insulating them from their constituency and affording them with more authority to talk about societal problems but little power to resolve them. The research showed that even though the proponents of New Public Management profess that governments are more accountable and transparent because of public administration's restructuring under NPM ideas, participation under this model of governance does not encompass real and genuine public involvement and decision-making. Thus, many of the reforms introduced by the New Public Management initiative do not genuinely strengthen democracy. The research also showed how the marketization of the state and public administration is transforming citizens into consumers, and the potentially adverse implications this trend has on democracy.