The New Public Administration: The Public as Citizen
The contemporary revival of interest in the public as citizen dates
to the passage in the mid-1960s of President Lyndon B.Johnson’s
Great Society legislation with its showpiece War on Poverty,
a battery of programs designed to combat poverty in low-income,
disproportionately African American communities.
Concerned not to repeat the errors of earlier urban renewal programs, legislators
required that the programs be developed and administered with
the “maximum feasible participation” of residents of the target
areas, a mandate that launched a new era of “citizen participation” (Moynihan 1969).