Article

Teaching Public Administration

2015, Vol. 33(3) 292–312
How public is public ª The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0144739415573268
A constitutional tpa.sagepub.com

approach of publicness
Arthur Ringeling (emeritus)
Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Abstract
Both in Public Administration and in practice, there is a loss of the concept of public.
A view became dominant in which markets were superior to governments and public to
private. Not only did the esteem of the public sphere diminish, but also its significance in
our reasoning and teaching. It became less clear what the public sphere stood for. In this
contribution, renewed attention for the concept and for related concepts like public
interest and public values is asked for. Attention for these concepts should stimulate
the reflection of our students on the relevance of the publicness of public administration,
the relevance of the public sphere, the discussions about these subjects and of the study
they follow. We should do so because this theme is crucial for our discipline and what it
can deliver in education.

Keywords
public administration, public and private, public interest, public sphere, public values,
publicness

Introduction
According to Frederickson (1997: 4) there is a gradual loss of the importance of the
concept of public in our discipline. Sennett (1977), for instance, states that ‘‘ . . . no
recognizable public realm remains’’. Kaufman (1985) describes a cyclical movement
between private interests on one hand and public action on the other. Concerns for
efficiency, economy and good management are alternated with concerns for respon-
siveness and democratic government. Hirschman (1982) refers to shifting

Corresponding author:
Arthur Ringeling, Erasmus University, Postbox 1738, Rotterdam, 3000 DR, The Netherlands.
Email: ringeling@fsw.eur.nl
Ringeling 293

involvements between private interests and public actions. Public, in his view, includes
public action, action in the public interest, and striving for public happiness.
But these remarks can be considered almost marginal when we look which
developments have taken place in many Western countries. What was later on called
the Reform movement brought us a perspective in which the public sector was only
relevant when markets failed (see Wolf, 1988), bureaucracy was used in its non-
Weberian sense, and public organizations could improve performance by using
market-related means of governing. Public is often defined by what it is not, in
this case not private (see Pesch, 2005). The dominant view was that markets are
superior to governments and, in line with this, private organizations superior to
public ones. Some are inclined to reduce public efforts to private well-being, private
interests. Goods and services have to be delivered to individuals; individuals have to
be better off. Those seem to be advantages not on the public, but on the private side.
Is there still something to share in the public domain? All this refers to actions in
the political realm, to involvement of the citizens in civic and community affairs.
The public sphere has the traits of an endangered species. The bitter irony of the last
years is that it was government that had to save market parties and stabilize markets
as a whole.
Public Administration underwent effects of this dominant view of public and
private. Administration became management, and management was strongly influ-
enced by an economic approach. Performance was a central object for study, costs
more than benefits became a crucial concept, and efficiency the dominant value.
This was not exclusively an American or Anglo-Saxon affair. Europe followed this
perspective to a large extent, but in a more balanced way (Pollitt and Bouckaert,
2011). In the governance approach, the distinction between what was public and
what was private even seemed to disappear. More and more it became unclear why
we called it Public Administration. Perhaps this era asks for reconsideration of what
public is.
These insights can amaze us, because the distinction between public and private is an
invention of great importance in political history. No longer were countries the private
property of the prince, the king or the emperor. No longer citizens did have to obey and
serve the ruler without having any rights. No longer was a regime able to interfere
unlimited in the private sphere of its inhabitants. This was not a development that came
overnight. It was the product of a long historical struggle that in parts of the world still has
not come to an end.
There is a second reason why we should be amazed, because how are we able to talk
about Public Administration when the public character of what we study becomes more
and more obscured. So, by addressing the concept of public we are confronted with a
variety of issues. Where is the idea of a public sphere, what is still publicness in a
privatized world, is the public domain substituted by the private, the citizen by the
consumer and what is the content of the concept of public interest in these circum-
stances? The developments in Public Administration make the question important
whether the concept public has not to be more central in what we research and write.
There is reason to ask: how public is Public Administration?
294 Teaching Public Administration 33(3)

The concepts ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘publicness’’

The term ‘‘public’’ (Gripsrud et al., 2010), carries at least four different meanings:

1. We refer to physical places, like squares and parks, as public when they are open
to all individuals. Some authors also use the term ‘‘the commons’’ (see Ostrom,
1990). The same is true for information that is accessible to everyone.
2. The term public is used as a social category with variations on the boundaries of a
specific public: all those active in a social construction or a specific public, public
events, a collectivity of citizens.
3. We distinguish between public and private concerns. Here public means that
something is the common interest to all those in a polity, while private lacks this
quality.
4. The term ‘‘public’’ is also used as an indication of the aggregation of individual
views, as in public opinion, and public discourses.

So, there is something as a public domain, a public realm, a public sphere, a public
sector, and a public interest. These terms all indicate that there is a separate domain
in society with distinguishable characteristics we call public. The term public used as
in public administration is connected to specific interests, to what people in a polity have
in common and the way these interests are articulated.
But, as Pesch (2005) makes clear, public is an ambiguous concept. The use of it has
never been consistent. There are different philosophical approaches to the term with
different insights and consequences. One of these approaches is the liberal concept of
publicness, which already has two different meanings. The first, and most dominant, is
an individualistic one, and the other an organic one. The first one presumes the onto-
logical precedence of the private sphere over the public one.
The public sphere is an artificial construct. This is contrary to the classic insight that
the Greeks had, in which it was the other way around: the private sphere was that which
was, by necessity, not public (Arendt, 1958). In the individualistic conception, the public
sphere is derived from the aggregation of private spheres. That is not the case in the
organic conception. Here, the public sphere is more than the aggregation of private
spheres. It transfers a shared identity to the private spheres by organizing and integrating
them.
In public administration, the organic conception has been and still is important. It
relates public activities to the values and principles that constitute the shared identity of a
community (Pesch, 2005: 183). These values and principles offer public organizations
and public officials a normative basis for their efforts. There exists a normative rela-
tionship between public administration and the community it governs and serves. This,
however, is not a relationship of total congruency, of sheer harmony. Perhaps the best
proof of the existence of this relationship are the continuous tensions between govern-
ment and the governed.
All these different meanings are present in the term ‘‘public sphere’’, or what is called
in German, ‘‘O¨ffentlichkeit’’.
Ringeling 295

By ‘‘the public sphere’’ we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something
approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of
the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals
assemble to form a public body. (Habermas, 1964/2010: 114)

The author refers to ‘‘O¨ffentlichkeit’’ as a sphere of open spaces and communication,

where a public discourse on matters of common concern can take place and lead to the
formation of an opinion by a public of citizens, which in turn may influence political
decision-making. In his view, it is not an description of a network of institutions. Public
arguing is central to democratic politics. Elster (1986/2010: 153) states: ‘‘The public
sphere must be seen as a forum, a public and open activity in which citizenship can
be realized through participation in collective deliberation’’.
That is quite a different story than the mere aggregation of individual preferences.
Arguing, and deliberation, are part of the public sphere.
Öffentlichkeit is not only a descriptive concept, it also has, in Habermas’ view, a
normative content, advancing a principle of democratic legitimacy: the exercise of state
power should be ‘‘public’’ in contrast to secret. It also should reflect the power of a
deliberating public of free and equal citizens. In the good Kantian tradition, the concept
unites insights on political legitimacy with individual maturity and autonomy (Haber-
mas, 1962: xv; Frederickson, 1997 comes to the same insight). Behind it is the liberal
ideal of a reasoning public and not the actual public spheres in welfare state democracies.
There the public dialogue is replaced by public relations work, by politicians explaining
to a public again and again, and without a public that is included in the public discussion.
This view can be related to three other insights. First to Dewey’s (1954) broad
conception of democracy, which is not only a decision making mechanism, but also a
distinctive form of society and a way of life (Gripsrud et al., 2010: xviii). The second
reference is to Rawls’ concept of public reason: a concept that belongs to the conception
of a well-ordered constitutional democratic society (Rawls, 1997/2010). And third,
McCollough (1991) coins the concept of public as a realm, a space in which free and
equal citizens hold each other accountable for what they know and value, for their
insights as well as their acts. Officials are held accountable for responding to human
needs. The public realm requires a citizenry that can reason together. With Habermas, all
these authors connect the public sphere with democratic values and ways in which public
deliberation should be shaped.
Two misunderstandings, however, have to be taken away. The first is, as Freder-
ickson (1997) correctly remarks, the public sphere is not the same as the state. In most
of its activities, it is a dominant actor in that sphere. But the concept contains the
possibility that more actors are active in that sphere: citizens, foundations, and
sometimes companies.
Characteristic for all these institutional arrangements, to be called public, is that they
produce something with public value:
By reducing the term public to mean government, we limit the capacity of people to be pub-
lic. As an idea, the public means all people coming together for public purposes rather than
for personal or family reasons. The public as capacity implies an informed active ability to
296 Teaching Public Administration 33(3)

work together for the general good. [ . . . ] public accountability and responsibility lies in
enabling citizens to set agreed-upon community standards and goals and working in the
public’s behalf to achieve these goals. [ . . . ] One cannot hide behind labels of ‘‘private’’ and
‘‘public’’ to escape responsibility to the public. (Frederickson, 1997: 52)

The second misunderstanding is that the concept of public is unusable because it is

ambiguous and refers to many different phenomena. Box (2009) argues that publicness
is not just important, but that it is crucial, in particular under circumstances of unclear
boundaries of public, quango’s, non-profit, NGOs, private or whatever the configura-
tions were called. Jørgensen (1999) refers to these institutional arrangements as ‘‘in-
betweenness’’, a diffuse sector with ‘‘role indeterminateness’’. Because the interesting
question regarding all those in-between constructions is: which normative schemes are
applied formally and in practice? We can’t do both when dealing with the distinction
between public and private, as well state that the private sector is superior to the public
as claim that the distinction does not mean much and is unclear. Let’s elaborate these
positions somewhat.

Public and private

Often the distinction between the public and the private sphere is used, as if it is a clear
one. But the distinction between public and private is not a naturally given phenomenon
(cf. Pesch, 2005: 182). Public and private are constructions, made during a long history.
The meaning of this construction changed during time as well as from place to place.
Moreover, reality is somewhat more complicated than we would like it to be. Even when
the concept would be stable theoretically, it does not offer any guarantee for the sig-
nificance of the terms in practice. Because, what exactly is distinguished and compared?
There must be no misunderstanding: private is a fuzzy term too. On one hand, it may
refer to the private sphere as a personal domain (i.e., privacy). On the other hand, it may
refer to the private sphere as an economic domain (the private sector, i.e., business or
markets). This in itself caused a hopeless confusion between individual activities and
what economic organizations do and the potential tensions between individuals and
business organizations.
As will be shown in the next sections, there are two different discussions. The first is
the normative, ideological if preferred, discussion about what the state and what the
market should do. The second is the empirical discussion whether private organizations
perform better than public ones.

What the state should do

The private sector, meaning the economic or market sector, is confronted with the public
sector or the state (see Pesch, 2005). Public Choice and Governance theories have sti-
mulated the fuzziness of public and private. The public choice theory had two points of
departure: an individualistic one and an economic rationalistic one. Self-interested
rational individuals, aimed at maximizing satisfaction of preferences, based on an
weighing of utility. Individuals, whether citizens, politicians or public officials, want to
Ringeling 297

be better off. They are self-interested rational individuals, aiming at maximizing the
satisfaction of their preferences, based on a weighting of utility of their alternatives.
They try to maximize their income, their power or their budget. The public, in this view,
is the aggregation of the efforts individuals make. Neo-liberalistic thought made clear
what was preferable: the market, government being the problem given its inefficient
production of goods and services (see Schultz, 2010).
Compared to private organizations, The President’s Private Sector Survey of Cost
Control in the Federal Government (Grace Commission, 1984) stated:

. . . government has no such incentive to survive, let alone succeed, nor any such test to
meet. The Government, unlike private sector enterprise, is not normally managed as if it
were subject to the consequences of prolonged managerial inefficiency or persistent failure
to control costs.

Its advice, ‘‘Run government as a business’’ was an echo of Wilson’s insight, a century
earlier. The message was that public affairs would be better cared for and results would
improve if the public sector would adopt more business-like methods and if more gov-
ernmental tasks would be implemented by private organizations. With this advice, it
reinforced the endeavours for privatization of governmental tasks that had gotten a new
stimulus at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s.
The Grace commission, was an extreme defender of this point of view, fitting in a
North-American line of thought. But the view expressed by the Commission can be
heard more often and is connected to popular beliefs despite the balanced research that
Rainey and collaborators did (Rainey, 2003; see also Bozeman, 2007). Behind that
advice lies the old idea about the inferior performance of government organizations
compared to private organizations. Most observers have little doubt about the superiority
of the latter. The reasons are often repeated. Government organizations lack the chal-
lenges of the market. They are budget organizations, and so more directed to input than
to output. These organizations are little client- and performance-directed. Consequently,
they perform poorly. They work inefficiently and distribute their goods and services
unevenly. Hear, hear, Mrs Thatcher would react. Some economists would add that public
sector involvement results in loss in social efficiency (Buchanan, 1985). When these
statements are correct, at least the differences between both kinds of organizations must
be clear.
Sayre (1958) long ago formulated the famous aphorism that public and private
organizations are alike in all unimportant respects. Allison picked up the statement and
tried to prove the extent to which it was justified. His conclusion was: ‘‘ . . . that public
and private management are at least as different as they are similar, and that the dif-
ferences are more important than the similarities’’ (Allison, 1979: 37).
We note that this view, how important it may be, concentrates on differences in
management of organizations in both sectors. So the question how to guide or steer
public and private organizations is at stake. This is an important question. Without any
doubt there is a strong connection to structural and functional characteristics of these
organizations and the way public and private organizations have to be managed. But it is
298 Teaching Public Administration 33(3)

another question than the question to what degree these types of organizations differ in
performance.
The discussion concerning the differences between public and private organizations
was continued by Bozeman. He reverses Sayre’s statement by advancing that private and
public organizations only differ in the unimportant things. Whether these organizations
have a public status or not is not very important. In his view, all organizations are public.
Public in his terms means: ‘‘ . . . the degree to which an organization is affected by
political authority’’ (Bozeman, 1987: xi).
Organizations are not alike in their publicness. Like the equality of Orwell’s animals,
the degree to which public organizations are public is not the same. It is too easy to state
that, based on their behaviour, public organizations are more public than private. On the
contrary, some private organizations are more public than public organizations. This
especially holds for types of semi-public organizations. So, in this way the distinction is
hardly sharp.
However, Bozeman conflates two different concepts of public: being affected by
political authority on the one side, and fulfilling public functions on the other. Public
tasks are not realized by public organizations only. Governments’ tasks are not only
performed by governmental organizations. Also quasi-governmental and private orga-
nizations contribute to the realization of public goals, and variations among public
organizations are as frequent as their similarities. But the rule structures of configura-
tions, in government as well as outside government, differ. So, the differences imply
more than gradual ones. To illustrate this, the New Public Management movement
traded the role of citizens as voters for citizens as consumers. Intellectually, there is some
affinity with the Public Choice theory. Economic rationality stands central. Maximizing
may have been replaced by optimizing, but its adherents are still concerned with
obtaining more benefits than costs. The role of citizens is modest. They are the passive
receivers of public goods and services, often metaphorically referred to as clients. But
clients without possibilities to choose between different suppliers or a role in the
decision-making on what is delivered.
Moe (1987: 454), correctly, returns to Sayre’s original point of view, stressing the
importance of public law for the conduct of public organizations. It is more than the
interference by political authority, it is more than the legal status, and more than
the kind of tasks that are served that constitutes the difference between public and
private. It is the role-structure that brings these differences together. Is the perfor-
mance also a crucial point?

Comparing public and private organizations

Comparisons between public and private organizations were made in different ways.
First, the Grace Commission compares government with private sector enterprise. One
can ask whether that comparison is justified. Can government be compared to a business
firm? What kind of conception of government is used in that case? Methodologically, it
has to be called a fallacy of the wrong level because government as a whole is compared
with a market party, not with the market as such.
Ringeling 299

Second, there are analyses on what we would call system level. Some authors take a
higher level of abstraction and compare the public sector with the private sector. Both
sectors in this approach have specific traits. The state is compared to the business world,
hierarchies with markets. However, this comparison brings with it a number of problems.
Often, there is a serious omission. This approach overlooks all those organizations
performing governmental tasks, while having a private status. The status according to the
law is, we saw before, not the only important indicator. So, in the comparison of the
public and the private sector, the first has to be expended from government to the public
sector, and include quasi-public organizations. However, the variety of structures and
operations is so large that there is hardly a basis for comparisons that makes sense.
The third comparison is that between the performances of public and private orga-
nizations. Private organizations are presumed to work much more effective and efficient
than public organizations. So, a number of authors directed themselves towards the
consequences of the potential differences in performance of public and private organi-
zations. Especially economists had a very morose view on the effectiveness and the
efficiency of public organizations. But again, whether this view is correct can be dis-
puted. Savas (1982: 111), more or less the champion of privatization, concludes:

No universal or generalizable conclusions can be drawn, [ . . . though . . . ] it is safe to say,

at least, that public provision of services is not superior to private provision, while those
who believe on a priori grounds that private services are best, can find considerable support
for their position.

Sometimes beliefs and strong convictions seem to be valued higher than empirical evi-
dence. Donahue (1989) compares a number of studies and concludes that for specific
tasks, private enterprises are more efficient. But a lot of factors, the kind of tasks, the
number of suppliers and buyers, diminish their advantages in practice. The advantages
of private above public organizations differ from task to task and over time. Downs and
Larkey (1986: 16) put forward: ‘‘ . . . it is very difficult to know just how efficient any
particular government agency or business firm is and virtually impossible to fairly com-
pare the relative efficiency of these two types of organizations’’.
Their study shows that in many circumstances the efficiency of private enterprises can
hardly serve as an example for public organizations. Goodsell (1983) correctly indicated
that for a number of governmental tasks there hardly exists a private alternative. And so
the comparison in performance only can be a partial one.
To that must be added that decision making of quangos is mostly not based on explicit
measurable criteria because of the broad purposes these organizations usually have. This
means that it is difficult to find adequate evaluation standards for these organizations.
Mostly, these standards are more concerned with processes in the organization than with
its products. This must make us very careful in judging the performance of these
organizations (Wolf, 1988: 90). These considerations lent support to Waldo (1980: 20)
who states: ‘‘I believe the idea that the ‘private sector’ is generally more effective and
efficient than the ‘public sector’ is untrue. Or more precise, I believe that a gross
comparison is not so much untrue as unrealistic, meaningless’’.
300 Teaching Public Administration 33(3)

The discussion about the results of public and private organizations leads to less clear
results than the claim of the superiority of private organizations tries to make us belief.
We may conclude that also on the level of discrete organizations the distinction between
public and private is not as sharp as would be necessary to ascertain clear differences in
orientation or results.

A non-satisfactory discussion
Governmental organizations experience difficulties in implementing public decisions.
This is not much different with private actors. It results from the fact that more people
with different and conflicting interests participate in the implementation of govern-
mental tasks and that authority is more dispersed than in a private firm. It is also the
consequence of the fact that public organizations have to perform unique tasks and to
attend goals that are hardly attainable. Public intentions often lack clearness and pre-
cision. These characteristics influence the implementation of these tasks and the eva-
luation of the performance of the implementing organizations. The problems are
twofold. The many different pay offs lead to vague, misleading, multiple and conflicting
goals as well as to diverging evaluation standards.
Nevertheless, the last decades has shown enormous changes in the relationships
between public and private. Neo-liberalism was highly influential in what governments
were doing and not doing, in what they did themselves, and what was delegated, out-
sourced, and privatized. Privatized here also had that double meaning as we saw before,
brought to individual citizens as well as to business or in between organizations.
Discussions like these are for Pesch (2005) reasons to distinguish a third concept of
publicness, what he calls the economic variant of liberalism. In this view, the private
sphere becomes the domain of the market, where the public sphere is the domain of the
state. By doing so, the ambiguity of the concept of the private sphere increases tre-
mendously. The concept private refers both to the significance of what belongs to indi-
viduals as to market parties. With it comes the secret presumption that there is no conflict
between the two, that individuals cannot become the victim of companies vice versa.
Arendt (1958), however, strongly argues that market reasoning is private, and should
have no place in the public sphere, because there is a fundamental conflict of interests
between market rationality and public rationality. Elster (1986/2010: 153) joins that
position by stating that the market-driven view of democratic politics is hopeless
inadequate in addressing the allocation and redistribution of collective resources and
ensuring just outcomes that strike a balance between individual interests and the com-
mon good. And Bozeman (2007: 177) concludes:
. . . that the idea of market failure, property rights, and principal-agent theory, three of the
strongest arguments for the inherent superiority of market approaches, are all based on
assumptions that, remarkably, have rarely been submitted to strong empirical test and, when
they have, yielded ambiguous results.

The discussion about the public-private comparison turns out not to be a very fruitful
one. Not only are different discussions and different comparisons at stake, they also
Ringeling 301

do not lead to clear answers to the question what distinguishes the public from the private
sector. Neither juridical status, orientation, nor performance create clear divisions
between public and private organizations. That accountabilities differ seriously between
public and private organizations is left out of sight. That political accountability is a spe-
cial category that have to be studied in order to understand relationships in the public
sector is lost in the discussion. Is it possible, one can ask, to do better and to develop
a more promising approach?
Perhaps another approach to the theme of private and public organizations, based on
the theory of rules guided behaviour, may help to improve our understanding of the
distinction in practice. The foundations of this approach are laid by Kiser and Ostrom
(1982). By rules in this context are meant the prescriptions commonly known and used
by a set of participants to order repetitive interdependent relationships. Normative points
of view are to some extent replaced by observations about how rules work in practice. If
government is not an actor like other actors in a policy network, it has to show from the
rules that are used in the functioning of the institutional arrangements in that sector. I will
use the central element of this view, reasoning in terms of rules in action, in my approach
of the public sphere. I call it a constitutional approach.
A constitutional approach can challenges a number of presuppositions that were used
in the economic approach of governmental affairs. Mainly, the models used in that
approach refer to, in the Weberian term, ideal types. But the types do not fit very well to
practice. They are so sketchy that differences in public systems seem to have no con-
sequences for the games being played and for their results. Institutional theory can offer
useful support in reorganizing our thinking on the public private distinction. It offers a
framework for a more organized distinction between public and private institutions. We
have to study the rules used in practice in organizations with a public character.

A constitutional approach
The insight of Frederickson (1997: 44) is that there have to be four requisites for a
general view of the public in public administration. First, as we saw before, there have
to be constitutional foundations, related to the principles of popular sovereignty,
representative government, the rights of citizens, procedural due process, and the
balance of power. I have earlier used the German term (democratic) Rechtsstaat for it
(Ringeling, 2014).
The second requisite must be an enhanced notion of citizenship, what he calls ‘‘the
virtuous citizen’’. The term is derived from Hart (1984) who connected four aspects to
the concept. First, the citizens should have a civic life of which the making of moral
judgments is a significant part. Second, the citizen must believe in the values of the
regime. Third, the citizen should take individual moral responsibility. And fourth, he
should show forbearance and tolerance. One would possibly consider this requisite as too
idealistic. But it is significant because it highlights the intense relationship between the
concepts public and citizens. Perhaps the ideal picture can be substituted by the vision of
what is called ‘‘neo-republican citizenship’’. Van Gunsteren (1998) develops that con-
cept as a result of a critical analysis of liberal-individualistic, communitarian and
302 Teaching Public Administration 33(3)

republican theories of citizenship. Characteristic for his specification of citizenship is the

awareness amongst citizens of their shared destiny and their active role in the polity.
The third requisite is the development and maintenance of systems and procedures for
hearing and responding to the interests of the collective as a whole of organized interests,
but also to the inchoate public. Frederickson (1997) offers two different perspectives, a
legislative and a pluralist perspective. The public in the legislative perspective refers to
the population of a political community: a state, a region or a municipality. It is rep-
resented by political parties and politicians in parliaments and councils. These repre-
sentational bodies decide on the rules, not only of the game, but also of the policies that
governments have to execute. Individual citizens have one task: to choose their repre-
sentatives. Then the problem is still which insights are represented: all, a number of
ideas, or the will of the majority?
The pluralist version of the public is the product of a political science approach. It is
based on the idea that politics is grounded on diversity of insights. These different
insights are organized in interest groups that struggle for power, and deal and wheel. The
public is represented by these groups in multiple ways. The public interest is the result of
this representation. This implies that we leave the old pluralism behind us as the
exclusive solution for the aggregation of preferences and open new ways of participation
and deliberation among citizens. Consumer satisfaction and grievance procedures are
necessary ways of information. But we still have to search for new ways in making
public decisions.
The fourth requisite for a general theory of public has to do with the relationships
between citizens. The neo-republican citizen is not only governed, but is also governing
him- or herself. From this, it follows that representative government is only a partial
answer to the role of citizens. They also have to take individual responsibility for what
happens in a political community. This presupposes a sphere of tolerance with respect for
the insights of others. Benevolence is the key of the interaction between one citizen and
another. Because we have to cope with diversity in society. That is the difference with
Rousseau’s idea of the ‘‘volonté generale’’. He presupposed unanimity and overlooked
the problem of different opinions and minorities. Well, we all are different; we think
differently, we have different insights and convictions about what is and what should be
in society. The central question is how we can live with one another, without having
fights all over. Given a democratic regime, the attempt is to reconcile the differences of
opinions in one way or another. Gawthrop (1984) describes the public both as an idea and
as a capacity. The idea refers to an ethic of civility in which we function under the rule of
law, based on written codes and standards, rather than under the rule of people. The
capacity here is the structured pattern of interactions between public administrators,
interest groups, elected officials, and citizens in order to find the evolving and changing
public will.
At the same time, Frederickson (1997: 49) brings forward that political communities
form a republic of strangers, individuals that have only limited elements in common:

Public life can be the encounter of strangers occupying the same territory, impressed with
need to acknowledge the fact and the impulse to get along . . . A healthy public life involves
Ringeling 303

continual interaction with other individuals moving in and out of one another’s lives in an
endless panorama of meeting, interacting, leaving, and meeting again. This public life is as
authentic and valid a form of human experience and is as able to authenticate common and
shared beliefs as are other more intimate forms of human interaction. It is the public as both
an idea and a capacity . . .

The political community is not governed with and for friends or relatives, but by people
with a shared destiny and with shared as well as different values.
With the constitutional approach we are back to fundamental insights on the modern
state. The democratic Rechtsstaat is founded on the sovereignty of the people. Citizenship
is a public function, next to other public functions like representative, minister or
administrator. As a consequence, citizens have rights and obligations. And it is a crucial
function, which cannot be substituted by representatives or interest groups. In this per-
spective, the public is the living state, government as well as society. Amidst the varieties
of interests, public and private, there are also forms of solidarity between citizens. There
are shared fate and common future. For this constitutional approach two concepts have to
be explored further: public interest and public values (cf. Bozeman, 2007).

Public interest
The concept of public interest is applauded as well as belittled. Some references to how
the concept went up and down in Public Administration makes that clear. Compared to
business organizations, government organizations can, according to Appleby (1953: 61),
be distinguished by the breadth of scope, impact and consideration of their activities.
Public administration is said to serve the public interest. Public organizations must
operate, or appear to operate in the public interest. Appleby (1953: 62) can again be
mentioned as an example here. His position is that: no organization works more strongly
in the public interest. The interesting insight this remark offers is that the public sector is
not the same as the public interest. There can be a discrepancy between what public
organizations do and the public interest.
The emphasis put on serving the public interest fulfils several functions. It is a means
to distinguish between the activities of organizations in the public and private sector. The
latter are directed to the production of private gains, where the public organizations has
to serve the community as a whole. Within the public sector it is also used as a criterion
to distinguish between what political organizations and public organizations are aiming
at. Politicians are presumed to seek the party interest and public officials try to serve the
public as a whole. The argument is stronger in those countries where parties play a
prominent role in public affairs. It means an effort to keep alive the distinction between
‘‘politics’’ and ‘‘administration’’. But it also expresses how superior the work of public
officials is, compared to that of entrepreneurs and politicians. The crucial task of public
officials is to make the public interest a concrete standard for the way they do their work.
So contrary to what the Public Choice theory says, Frederickson (1991: 415) maintains:
‘‘The pursuit of self-interest through government, while commonplace, must be resisted
when either citizen or public servant self-interest erodes the general interest’’.
304 Teaching Public Administration 33(3)

In the 1990s, the concept of public interest received renewed attention. As well in the
Blacksburg manifesto (see Wamsley et al., 1990) as in the study of Reich and his col-
leagues (Reich, 1988), the concept plays a central role. Goodsell (1990) attends to the
significance of the concept of public interest and the role public administration plays in
the different stages of the policy process to give it an explicit form. The distance between
administrative and political actors has been diminished. Both segments of the political
system are presumed to contribute to the realization of the public interest.
However, there are serious problems in the conceptualization of the concept of public
interest. Policy decisions could have various contents and the public interest could hardly
be used as a decision criterion. Besides, public organizations are disputing with each
other about what the ‘‘common cause’’ is. As a result, Stillmann (1985) wrote:

The Public Interest became the public interest: i.e. clouded, more fragmented, less easy to
know or act upon and, hence, it became a subject few administrative theorists addressed or
even tried to assert as an important or worthy guide for administrators action.

Empirical evidence about the distinct patterns of behaviour of officials and politicians or
between private and public organizations was even harder to get. Some authors pointed
to the political character of the activities of public organizations, a quality that private
organizations lack: ‘‘Government is different because it is politics’’, was Appleby’s con-
clusion (1945: 63). At the moment he made that statement, it was daring. It signifies the
denial of the politics administration distinction that was held for so long. But it does not
take us much further. Because the next question is, what is politics? And consequently
the question rises whether that phenomenon is absent in private organizations.
In their vision of what is called the New Public Service, Janet and Robert Denhardt
(2003) state that public administrators must contribute to building a collective, shared
notion of the public interest. And they add: ‘‘The goal is not to find quick solutions
driven by individual choices. Rather, it is the creation of shared interests and shared
responsibilities’’ (Denhardt and Denhardt, 2003: 65).
Their vision on the way shared values are defined is very much that of the
deliberating idea of democracy. They are the product of a public dialogue. Then what
is ‘‘the public interest’’ in this reasoning? Shared interests and shared responsibilities?
Shared by whom and to which extent? Pesch (2005: 182) puts forward that the values
conveyed by the public interest can be reformulated in individualistic terms. Indivi-
dualistic values like efficiency and economy are in the public interest. That may be
right, but it does not complete the concept of public interest. The distinction between
public interest and self-interest is taken for granted by all authors mentioned. Still the
question remains what is that general interest that is different from self-interest? Is
there something like a public interest? Or if so, isn’t it plural? What we can do is
make a distinction between the same interests, common interests and public interest.
People can share a particular interest, they can have all the same particular interests,
which we will call a common interest.
Much of the discussion on the concept of public interest was about the question
whether public interest contained more than the aggregation of individual interests (see
Ringeling 305

Leys, 1952). Is even a majority of citizens enough to define the public interest? If there is
a public interest, can it conflict with the interests people share?
Box (2009: 6–7) distinguishes between two types of public interests: aggregative and
substantive. The first consists of the sum of individual preferences, the pooled wishes of
everyone who expresses a preference. Voting and surveys are ways to find the aggre-
gative public interest. In Denhardt and Denhardt’s treatment of the concept of public
interest, the aggregative elements are strong (Denhardt and Denhardt, 2003). Still the
public is considered as the aggregation of individuals. Both follow an individual
approach to the public sphere. This discussion on the concept of public interest was
caused by the pluralistic conception of the political process. Shortly formulated: from the
clash of group interests the public interest would result. A lot of empirical research has
slaughtered that insight (recently Stiglitz, 2011). It presumed that interests were repre-
sented on an even basis, that no representing organizations had control over more power
than others and that every interest was of the same weight as the others. These three
presumptions have been proved to be wrong.
It was part of the discussion whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Sure
it is. A beautiful building is more than a heap of stones. An ugly building is too. In the
political realm, it is difficult to aggregate individual interests, because in most cases they
differ. Politics is meant for dealing with different values and, as a consequence, with
different interests. Preferences are difficult to aggregate. As an alternative, the public
interest would be what is in the interest of a majority. The simple rebuttal to this con-
viction is: what do we do with the minority (see Scharpf, 1970)? The more difficult
rebuttal is: are there specific elements we have to add when a collectivity is more than
the individuals added up? But also this reasoning runs awry, because a stable minority
can become a threat for a society as a whole.
The substantive public interest is a more elusive concept, consisting of whatever
would be in the best interest of the public over a longer time span. But how do we
determine this? A possibility is to think about what the majority of people would have
chosen if they had full information on an issue, the opportunity to interact with others
whose interests may be different, and time to consider the long-term effects of each
potential policy alternative. Box adds that achieving this level of sophistication in
determining the public interest is complicated, perhaps a reason to refrain it. Never-
theless, it is a level of sophistication we need for a constitutional approach to public
interest. Even then, the argumentation used refers to the public interest. Even self-
interested actors have to justify their proposals with reference to the public interest, in
whichever way defined (Gripsrud et al., 2010: xix).

Public values
There had been major efforts in the history of thinking about the public domain to
reintroduce the problem which values are central in the public sector. Vincent Ostrom
made clear that the concentration on the bureaucracy side of public administration made
the discipline blindfolded for the democratic aspect of it (Ostrom, 1973). That means that
Public Administration should involve more than making the public bureaucracy work
306 Teaching Public Administration 33(3)

better. The subject of Public Administration is not only management of public organi-
zations. It is not only an organizational theory for the public sector. It is about how the
democratic Rechtsstaat works and should work. It is about organizing democratic
decision-making and the rule of law. Ostrom’s insights meant a redefinition of the
domain of Public Administration.
For a long time neo-positive thinking dominated the social sciences. Values could
hardly be given the place they deserved, in particular in the public sector. ‘‘Scientific
Value Relativism’’ was more or less the maximum one could get. Instrumentalism
implied that design of public policy could be done on the basis of given goals, and the
goals were given by politicians. So, instrumental thinking fitted perfectly in the dis-
tinction between politics and administration. Alternatively, it should be better for-
mulated the other way around: the distinction between politics and administration was
the product of instrumental pragmatism. Public policy design concerned the optimizing
of given goals. Where politicians got those goals from, remained out of sight. Whether
they were good or bad, favourable or abject, and for whom also. That seemed to be a
minor handicap in a world of values, to phrase it somewhat ironically.
The pragmatist claim, however, did not succeed. It was impossible to keep values out
of the practice of public administration. And it was impossible to keep it out of the
discipline. So I argue, in order to rediscover the place and role of public administration
again, we have to scrutinize the values in which public administration is embedded, to
analyse the values of the doctrines that are applied in the public sector and to reflect
about new relationships between politics and administration, normatively as well as in
practice.
When we do so, it turns out that next to developments and values that we can see
globally we discover ideas that have everything to do with the political-administrative
system that we study. What we discover are universal values as well as regional or
national ones. We discover global trends on one side, and diversity on the other. And the
development is not one in which globalization is the only development that counts. We
have to take the diversity of Public Administration into account, not as a temporary
phenomenon, but as something that follows from the values we stand for, locally,
regionally, nationally and internationally.
With the concept of normativity, Lasswell (1971) refers to the value-laden character
of public policy. This has consequences for the student of the policy sciences: he is not
able to study his object without interacting in one way or the other with its normative
content. Values, or more specific public values, play an important role.
The position of Lasswell contradicted a lot of work that was published in political
science. Most of these, and often that was their great significance, were empirical in
character. In Public Administration, the distinction between politics and administration
had effect. Politics was a synonym for values, administration for facts (see Waldo, 1948).
A double reduction of a complex reality was the result of the interpretation of politics as
politicians, or better: institutionalized politics. And the aims of politicians were centered
around obtaining and preserving power. Values became a phenomenon out of sight, both
in political science and Public Administration, and political philosophy followed. Hardly
any attention was given to the value-laden character of the public sphere.
Ringeling 307

The ‘‘rebirth’’ of political philosophy made the question ‘‘Where do goals come from
and what is their relationship with other political goals’’, important. Goals were no
longer a-moral nor justifying themselves, like efficiency. Political philosophy experi-
enced something like a revival. Both Moore (1995) and Frederickson (1997) searched for
other values than efficiency alone (like I did in Ringeling, 2004). Frederickson adds
social equity next to effectiveness and legitimacy in his attempt to formulate a New
Public Administration. A firm discussion was the result.
In the 1980s and 1990s, there was an ‘‘argumentative turn’’ in the policy sciences.
Fischer and Forester (1987) asked for analyses of the normative aspects of public policy.
The idea was to bring values back in. However important this idea was, it remained
limited to the field of public policy. And even within that field, there was only limited
adherence. Most studies were concentrating on given goals, goals given by the
responsible politicians. Evaluation studies became an industry, evaluating what was
accomplished of these given goals. Too seldom researchers asked themselves the
question where the goals came from and whether the results of a policy had anything to
do with these goals and with the circumstances the policy was implemented.
From the idea that there is a variety of values, we also can understand why thinking in
terms of optimizing and the best solution is obsolete. We differ on what the best solution
is, have different ideas about it. The reason is that our values differ. Not always, not with
every decision that has to be taken, but often enough to realize the diversity that is
characteristic for our societies. And that it is worthwhile to study the normative side of
the public sector intensively. We must distinguish between two different discussions.
One is the discussion on values. The other is a discussion about solutions, given a shared
framework of values. The second presupposes the first, but at the same time it is the
raison d’être of the first, because policies and institutions are expressions of solidified
values in which citizens can recognize the common or shared values.
Values are central to what governments do. It was not only David Easton (1954) who
made that clear. His famous expression is that the function of the state is to allocate
values in a society authoritatively. It is also central in the line of thought of the demo-
cratic Rechtsstaat. The state is about values, public values to be more precise. Moore
(1995) emphasizes the role of public managers in promoting public values for the public.
It is more than an empirical observation. In his view, it is their task to do so. Values are
not in a normative sense the exclusive domain of politicians and politics. About the
question which values have to be promoted, this author is less explicit. And he stays
silent about the ways conflicting values have to be handled and by whom. There are still
important areas to discover.
We conclude that those in power are not free to do what they want or what they think
is desirable. Moreover, a lot of alternatives for handling and governing are not allowed.
The reason is not only because the law forbids them to do so. Or that they don’t have
rules at their disposal that allow them to do so. But because it conflicts with more
fundamental ideas about law, about legality, and about the way the state is organized and
the fundamental principles on which the organization rests. The concept of the public
sphere brings with it normative insights about government and administration. Public
values limit as well as offer opportunities for public activities.
308 Teaching Public Administration 33(3)

Consequences for what we teach

The practice of the last decades has been that we were confronted with the absence of the
concept of public and a number of other concepts referring to the public sphere. The
fuzziness can’t be a reason to refrain from dealing of these concepts. On the contrary, it is
the reason we have to pay attention to it. Because in the study of Public Administration, it
is a necessary concept in order to understand its subject. We have to regain ideas about
the public sphere in Public Administration, because public life is more than a business of
production and consumption.
Neglect of the concept of public implies the loss of a historical heritage of Europe and
the United States and with it insights on the foundations of the modern state. The Reform
movement of the last decades seems to have washed away this kind of crucial insights,
replacing it with a business-like managerial approach, where ‘‘costs’’ was the central
concept and efficiency the dominant value. Public Administration programs that are the
consequences of this kind of reasoning are handicapped programs, because they miss
what is characteristic for the public sphere. They take public activities for a business.
A necessary insight is also that the concept of public is not identical to the state or
government. There are many organizations fulfilling public functions, apart or at a
distance from the state. They are active in what is called the public sphere, the public
realm, the public domain and the public sector. State as well as society fulfil public
functions. In the normative sense, the state is not there only when the market fails. The
economic concept of publicness fails in itself. The public sphere is not the arena for
individual consumers looking for their biggest benefits. Governance is more than deli-
verance of goods and services to clients. Systematically the dominant approach under-
estimates the public character of the state and society.
Also, there is not one specific rule structure for public organizations. Some govern-
mental organizations have a rule structure that looks very much like those of private
enterprises. Others have more traits that make them look like the caricatures that Public
Choice and New Public Management adherents draw of the public sector. Diversity is a
characteristic of organizations formally belonging to that sector. It is in particular dif-
ficult to make sharp distinctions between public and private configurations on a network
level, because also within network organizations, tasks, structure and functioning differ.
We can only speak of public–private collaboration if there is some degree of clarity what
the terms public and private refer to in terms of tasks, functions and responsibilities.
Publicness is the common denominator for what entities active in the public sphere
do. This kind of basic insight hardly seems to have any consequences for what we teach.
At best, we organize an ethics course (see Ringeling, 2013). The problem area we
explored is a much-encompassing one, referring to the fundamentals of our discipline.
Public interest can be considered as a normative standard for the public sector. But we
should not confuse normative and empirical reasoning. In practice, a lot of effort is made
to give private interests a public character. Even then the argumentation that is used to
realize these private interests refers to the public interest that could be served.
Public organizations pay attention to particular public values. Not only in the way that
they operate, but also because they committed to certain goals that are the expression of
Ringeling 309

these public values. The values public institutions embody or promote can be con-
sidered as a link between public values and social ethics. There is a role for all the
people active in the public sphere to deal with public values, citizens, politicians as
well as administrators. We should begin with our students for two reasons. First, to
make them alert to the phenomenon of the value-embeddedness of much of the dis-
cussion and action in the public sphere. And second, in order to stimulate the devel-
opment of their own normative ideas.
The concepts we paid attention to in this contribution are all crucial concepts for
Public Administration. The concepts are not unproblematic nor undisputed. That is the
reason why we should pay attention to them in our curricula. Public Administration
programs can’t do without reflection on what is public. Defining it is insufficient,
because these concepts of public and public sphere are complex. Nowadays and in
history there are many different ideas and insights on the democratic Rechtsstaat and the
public values connected with it. We have an obligation to stimulate the reflection of our
students on the public character of Public Administration. So, first of all this essay asks
attention for a theme that in my view has been neglected in recent times. Students of
Public Administration should be sensitive for this subject, because they must have an
idea where the state is for.
That leads to the next question: in which ways should this be done? Public Admin-
istration programs run the risk of becoming instrumental in themselves by giving much
attention on management techniques, but little on political philosophy. Changes in the
curriculum in order to stress the uniqueness of the public sector would be welcome. But
there are also educational means that could be applied. Policies and decisions could be
analysed on the values that they contain and where these values are derived off. Case-
studies, and studies of the practice of government could stimulate more attention for
the normative side in our programs of what public organizations do. Discussing con-
trasting cases about public and non-public decision making may help, but also the study
of the evaluation reports of organizations like for instance the General Accounting
Offices or government committees are useful to explore a spectrum of values, public as
well as private, their similarities and their differences.

Acknowledgement
This contribution would not be as it is now if Loek van Rooij would not have criticized it
and had made suggestions on how to improve it. All flaws, however, are mine.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.
310 Teaching Public Administration 33(3)

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