Democratic accountability standards and the education of public administrators: A call to action
Is it time to reaffirm democratic accountability standards in the education of public administrators through our accreditation processes?
While this is a question that likely resonates with public administration academics and practitioners living within democratic systems around the world, it is being explicitly posed to those operating within the context of teaching, conducting research, and engaging in outreach and service within the university and college programs, departments, and policy schools of the Network of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA), a United States-based international association and network. As a network of institutions, NASPAA serves as an accreditor. NASPAA is also a network of educators, researchers, and administrators responsible for conveying knowledge, skills, and values to current and future generations of public administrators serving within democratic political systems. This question is also addressed to them.
A profession and democracy in crisis
This editorial is being written during a time when established and nascent democracies around the world, including the United States, are experiencing a period of “democratic backsliding” (Bauer & Becker, Citation2020). And while experiences of democratic backsliding have long been experienced in many parts of the world, including Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and South-Southeast Asia (Kaltwasser et al., Citation2017; Sajó et al., Citation2021), the depth and breadth of democratic backsliding resulting from and though the rise of authoritarian-leaning populist movements has led to the erosion of democratic norms and standards in long-established democracies.
The evidence of democratic backsliding is mounting. Efforts to advance illiberal reforms by democratically elected authoritarian leaders, backed by populist movements (Taub, Citation2024), are leading to the erosion of trust and confidence in public bureaucracies in democracies worldwide. In the worst cases, career civil servants are stripped of authority to compose and enforce rules and regulations, and/or attempts are undertaken to capture public bureaucracies through the (re)institution of politically charged spoils systems.
While long-established political norms relating to the expansion and protection of individual rights, practices of tolerance and forbearance toward people expressing differences in values, policy positions, and identities are threatened by a steady barrage of norm-transgressing events that could increasingly become accepted as the “new normal.” Moreover, the pursuit of reason, the use of evidence, and the establishment of knowledge and truth claims through science are being eroded by a consistent conflation of truths with opinions, the perpetuation of organized lying, and pedaling in conspiracies that had, hitherto, been widely rejected by the political and administrative establishments of long-standing democracies.
While these trends are global in reach and likely have implications for the teaching and practices of public administration worldwide, this editorial focuses explicitly on the context of the institutions and individuals of NASPAA, particularly those NASPAA constituencies from the United States. To these constituencies, the following assertions are offered up:
The persistence of democratic backsliding in the United States and other long-established democracies calls for the deeper examination and promotion of explicitly defined and rigorously assessed democratic standards and, even more specifically, the assessed learning outcomes of accredited public administration, management, and policy programs.
These times also call on educators and researchers to revisit how and where democratic standards are implicated in their public service courses, the theories they advance, and the empirical research they undertake. (Koliba, Citation2024)
The democratic obligations of public administrators have long been considered by public administration scholars and practitioners over the generations (see Bertelli & Lynn, Citation2006 for an extensive review), leading some, such as Dahl, to assert that public administrators serve as one of the “guardians” of democracy (Dahl, Citation2000). Increasingly, public administrators’ abilities to fulfill these obligations are being challenged as they are placed in positions to broker the space between opinion and evidenced-based truth claims, upsetting the balance between neutral competence and political actions. The imperative to engage in authentic participation with citizens is taxed by increasingly polarized and politicized public discourses in person and online. At stake lies the ability of public administrators to practice and defend democratic standards by bringing a measure of “democratic anchorage” to the networks of public, private, and nonprofit sector actors increasingly being called on to deliver public goods and services (Koliba et al., Citation2018). These present-day challenges also call for public administration educators to revisit the relationship between public administration’s purposes, as expressed through learning competencies, and liberal democratic accountability standards.
An accredited profession with vague ties to democracy
Public administration is a profession, and one that is served by networks of associations, educators, researchers, and knowledge brokers – in very much the same vein as medical doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, engineers, and blue-collar professions like firefighting, law enforcement, and the trades (Kruyen & Sowa, Citation2023). Accreditation of educational standards is one of the structural characteristics of a profession, along with the advancement of codes of conduct, the actions of professional associations, the evolution of academic disciplines, and educational credentialing by post-secondary educational institutions (Abbott, Citation1988, p. 5).
We argue here that since the early inception of standards to guide master of public administration (MPA) programs in 1974 in the United States (Ingraham & Zuck, Citation1996), the treatment of democratic standards vis a vis purely administrative and managerial objectives has been muddled. This lack of clarity was first pointed out vigorously by both Dimock and Waldo (Bertelli & Lynn, Citation2006) and only deepened during the advancement of new public management, with its focus on efficiency, privatization, and contracting out. With these long-standing vagaries, it is not surprising that the relationship between democracy and accreditation standards has remained ambiguous.
The National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) was launched in 1974. The first “Guidelines and Standards for Professional Masters Degree Programs in Public Affairs/Public Administration” coincided with the official birth of the association (Ingraham & Zuck, Citation1996, pp. 167). NASPAA entered into a relationship with the Council on Postsecondary Accreditation (COPA) in 1986 and developed the Commission on Peer Review and Accreditation (COPRA).
NASPAA accreditation through COPRA followed the trends toward mission-based and learning competency-based accreditation that became common among professional accrediting bodies during the early 2000s. This resulted in a new set of standards, including five “universally required competencies” (URC) situated under Standard Five. Comparing studies of early adoption of learning outcome standards by MPA programs from 1976 to 2006, Holzer and Lin (Citation2007) found a greater focus on “government institutions” in 1976 (using Herring’s, Citation1976 study) and substantially greater emphasis on quantitative methods, procedural analysis, legal processes, communications, and policy process and program evaluation in 2006. This trend presaged the New Public Management era’s focus on efficiency and performance evaluation. In relation to democratic standards, no subcategories listed by Holzer and Lin (Citation2007) explicitly mention the terms “democracy” or “democratic” in them during either time period.
In the late 2000s, NASPAA undertook a systemic review of the entire accreditation system. It codified a mission-driven focus that provided accredited MPA programs with large areas of discretion to define their mission and justify a curriculum tied to that mission. NASPAA-accredited programs needed to clearly link to “public service perspectives” in their mission, although what these values and perspectives are is left up to their discretion. Five core universally required competencies (URC) were defined (see Table 1), with accredited programs needing to demonstrate how each URC is manifested and evaluated within the curriculum. Some programs have taken these five learning competencies and delivered a set of sub-learning outcomes to further define and distinguish learning outcomes (Kapucu & Koliba, Citation2017).
Also, during this time (2008–2010), NASPAA undertook a concerted push toward globalization. International attendees to NASPAA conferences in the United States have been common for many decades, and their engagement has deeply enriched the profession and the network. NASPAA began to make a concerted attempt to expand the NASPAA network to include programs from outside the United States with the goal of offering the opportunity to pursue accreditation at this time. To coincide with this move toward globalization, the first word in NAPSAA’s name was changed from “National” to Network” in 2013. NASPAA officially became a network of schools and programs of public affairs and administration. Anticipating the occasion, Raffel acknowledged that “[NAPSAA] standards serve as a model throughout the world … ” (Raffel, Citation2010, p. 6).
The move to globalize the accreditation of MPA programs stimulated debate across the network. A robust conversation regarding how and to what extent democratic standards were to be explicit within the standards was undertaken. And with it, a brief debate about the properties of public administration as a universal profession applicable to any political system of governance or a specific profession anchored in liberal democracies ensued. A compromise was sought and found in the elevation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in some of the materials associated with the pitch for international accreditation. This was also when the specter of democratic backsliding in the United States and other Western liberal democracies was nary a thought. A sense of the apparent strength of liberal democracies, the tip of the hat to the SDGs, and the ongoing promotion of “public services values” should suffice, prevailed. The compromise of the time settled on the current standards and learning outcomes NASPAA now uses to accredit MPA programs.
Present-day accredited NASPAA MPA programs are expected to “define the boundaries of the public service values it emphasizes, be they procedural or substantive, as the basis for distinguishing itself from other professional degree programs” (as quoted in Svara & Baizhanov, Citation2019, p. 4). Public service values are often espoused as an individuated sense of public value and worth – largely understood in terms of administrators’ motivations and discretion. Those who do the credentialing, training, and education of present and future public administrators are requested to define public service values in relation to their program’s mission. The field has encouraged a “public” centered value pluralism to persist (Ventriss, Citation2021) that is divorced from specific principles and standards of democratic institutions. Could the resulting flexibility and inherent ambiguity relative to public service values in relation to liberal democracies pose a problem and inadvertently permit democratic backsliding?
A more recent study of the learning competencies and mission statements of accredited MPA programs undertaken in 2019 by Svara and Baizhanov concluded, “Many self-studies … seem intent on attempting to demonstrate how they are unique and different from public affairs programs at other universities. Some mission statements present scattershot coverage of values that surely leave out other values that are integral” (Svara & Baizhanov, Citation2019, p. 17). And, while there were some mentions of democracy and adherence to the rule of law in some of the learning competencies and mission statements they studied, the scattershot nature of the concepts persisted.
The ability of individual MPA programs to define a mission that suits their context, resources, regional needs, and global ambitions has pushed the leaders of NASPAA’s MPA programs, their faculty, and advisory boards to consider questions of mission and learning competencies. To be clear, the efficacy of devolving such considerations has great value. However, this devolution does open the door to discretion and, by implication, the potential for politicizing the mission and learning competencies of MPA programs.
There is emerging evidence to suggest that this is already happening.
Accreditation and accreditors have been placed in the crosshairs of illiberal reformers. Such considerations are currently being felt in those US states that have passed bans on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in public universities. Already, MPA programs in Florida and Texas are facing political pressures to drastically alter their diversity plans (personal communication, 2024). While the wider and longer-term implications for NASPAA accreditation remain to be seen, the requirement that accredited MPA programs possess a robust diversity plan is likely to be threatened, which could conceivably lead to even more extensive politicization of an MPA curriculum.
A call for deeper integration of democracy and public administration
The current accreditation system largely leaves the following question unanswered: What is the relationship between public service values and democratic standards? While there are plenty of references in classical public administration scholarship to democracy (Bertelli & Lynn, Citation2006), including Follett, Addams, Appleby, Dimock, Waldo, Dahl, and the classic Finer-Friedrich debates relating the politics-administration dichotomy in the 1940s (Stewart, Citation1985), these references have largely been diluted and distributed across a series of sub-fields pertaining to constitutional obligation, social equity, and ongoing emphasis on “publicness.”
An area of contemporary public administration literature that explicitly references democracy and public service values is the “constitutional school” based on the works of Rohr, Rosenbloom, Terry, and others (Newbold, Citation2011, p. 466). Bertelli’s most recent efforts to examine how public administration has “the authority to shape democracy” offer important guidance in this space (Bertelli, Citation2021).
Democracy is also inferred in the field’s emphasis on social equity, which was first advanced by Frederickson and the New Public Administration movement in response to the turbulence of the 1960s (Frederickson, Citation2005). It was later developed in relation to cultural competency, the advancement of inclusion in participation, and the disaggregation of performance data when assessing the efficacy of policy prescriptions (Gooden & Portillo, Citation2011).
Arguably, the long-standing consideration of public value, interest, ethics, and accountability has assumed classical liberal democratic values without explicitly aligning with them. These links between constitutional competencies and democratic standards have largely been considered by NAPSAA-accredited programs in the context of US policy and law. Social equity, diversity and inclusion have been promoted via allusions to “public” values and interests and not explicitly tied to questions of citizen authority, individual rights, promotion of tolerance, or appeals to reason and truth claims that are characteristics of liberal democracies. The extensive body of literature focusing on such concepts of public value, public interest, public service values, and public accountability has largely been rendered with relatively vague allusions to democratic ideals. While elements of democratic standards can certainly be found in learning competencies focusing on citizen participation, administrative burden, ethics, and, to a lesser degree, in relation to the advancement of performance management systems and public accountability, the explicit links between these concepts and the obligations of public administrators to liberal democratic standards have remained nebulous.
The five universal learning competencies (URCs) of NASPAA accreditation standards are provided in Table 1. When reviewing the use of terms found in these URCs, we find two explicit references to “publicness”- found in URC1’s promotion of “public governance” and URC4’s allusions to “public service perspectives.” While no URC explicitly requires focus on constitutional obligations. References to social equity may be drawn from URC5, with its focus on a diverse workforce and citizenry. NASPAA also requires accredited programs to submit diversity plans. This long-standing practice has recently come under political attack in the “anti-woke” agendas against DEI initiatives in the United States.
How might new URCs be constructed that are more explicit about democratic standards?
Table 2 draws on a recent application of classical and contemporary political philosophy and liberal constitutionalism to consider seven democratic standards that can be applied to public administrator obligations (Koliba, Citation2024). These standards also include recognition of the underlying integrity of democratic institutions and the professional discretion of public administrators. They are offered here to provide some definitional context for the legal, political, and professional dimensions of liberal democratic systems. They are, by no means, presented as novel or “new” insights into democratic theory but rather as a set of long-standing, albeit contested and evolving set of practices, institutional rules, and professional norms. Nor are they framed explicitly as learning outcomes for MPA graduates.
Space precludes an extensive crosswalk of the existing NAPSAA URCs and the democratic standards offered in Table 2. Suffice it to say that the advancement of URCs that are more deeply and intentionally integrated into democratic accountability will need more explicit references to matters of public administration and constitutional and administrative law. There would also likely need to be a more explicit focus on exposing students to the compelling questions of ethics, morals, and political norms of working within, managing, and leading democratic institutions – think here in terms of “democratic” service values that focus attention on the promotion, protection, and extension of individual rights, and the promotion of tolerance and inclusion in public forums and citizen engagement. While the existing focus is on performance management and measurement, research methods and evidence-based decision-making need to be grounded in democracy’s long-standing appeals to reason, logic, and science.
In practice, public administrators in liberal democracies are being threatened and forced to articulate and defend democratic standards in nonpartisan, constitutionally grounded ways without necessarily being well-equipped to do so. We must revisit the long-standing debate around globalization and standards and seriously consider whether and how we need to more explicitly anchor the public administration field and profession in the types of democratic accountability standards outlined above. Failing to do so opens the door for the politicization of program mission and learning competencies by partisan and decidedly illiberal forces.
A pathway forward lies in mounting a deliberate and concerted discussion among NASPAA members regarding the place and purpose of democratic standards in accredited programs. We argue for the NASPAA brand to be firmly rooted in democratic traditions. NASPAA should be one of the key spaces where democratic standards for the field of public administration are defended, applied, investigated, and evolved. Nothing less leaves the door open for illiberal reformers to erode the professional integrity of our craft.