The Public's Three Primary Roles
Controversy persists among public administration scholars and practitioners, especially in the United States, over how to view the public's role in public management, with the principal disagreement focusing on whether to view the public as customers (e.g., Osborne and Gaebler1993) or as citizens (e.g., Schachter 1997). But the citizen versus customer debate oversimplifies by ignoring other roles that the public plays relative to public management. Frederickson (1991, 396) suggested five roles, and Roberts more recently listed seven “models of administration and the roles that citizens and administrators are expected to play in each of them,” with a caution that those are only “some of the better known models” (2004, 327–28).
Amid this array of options, this article focuses on three roles that the public plays relative to public management: as citizen, customer, and partner. The logic for this choice is straightforward: First, as documented later, each of those roles encompasses a substantial proportion of the public's interactions with public management, and the several roles together cover most of those interactions. Second, the three roles can subsume some other roles, including those of regulatee, beneficiary, and client (e.g., Alford 2009, 34–35; Frederickson 1991, 404–5), thereby encompassing even more of the public's interactions with public management. Third, parsimony matters. Limiting discussion to three roles can simplify discussion, yet not at substantial cost if the three encompass most interactions.
This article focuses on three roles that the public plays relative to public management: as citizen, customer, and partner.
The three roles reflect central ideas from successive waves of rethinking public management and public administration over the past half century. Beginning in the 1960s and extending to the present, each wave for a time dominated the discourse of public administration and management.
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).
This citizen participation, which matured into contemporary “public involvement,” differed in two crucial respects from traditional citizen involvement with government. First, whereas the proper role of the public traditionally had been viewed as confined to policy making by elected bodies, citizen participation focused squarely on policy implementation and administration, on involving the public in deciding how policies, once adopted, would be put into operation. Second, in contrast to the elite bias of earlier citizen involvement, as with urban renewal's “blue ribbon” advisory committees (e.g., Dahl 1961, 124), the new citizen participation broadened the definition of relevant citizens to include those of low income, such as “residents of the areas and members of the groups served” by the War on Poverty.
Around the same time, the public administration community became troubled by allegations of bias and injustice. Public administrators were sometimes characterized as the enemy of the disadvantaged, servants of the elite rather than of the public, bureaucrats who might pursue whatever strategy necessary to rebuff the demands of the disadvantaged (see Kirlin 1973; Lipsky 1968).
Stung by these criticisms, public administration began a period of soul searching, leading eventually to the development of a new perspective, which became known as the New Public Administration (e.g., Frederickson 1971; Marini 1971). Consistent with the War on Poverty's goals, this perspective included a case for more citizen participation in public administration as a means to address biases in administrative decision making. Bringing previously neglected constituencies into agency deliberations might lead to their interests being better reflected in agency decisions.
Although early citizen participation experiments often disappointed, requirements for involving the public and actual involvement in administrative decision making have grown substantially since the 1960s. In the United States, citizen participation requirements had been attached to more than 150 federal programs by the end of the 1970s (Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations 1979). “By the mid-1980s,” according to Frederickson, “citizen participation had modified the usual methods of making decisions in a host of policy areas and had taken its place as a major feature of democratic administration” (1991, 406). Other democracies—from Brazil to Mexico to the Netherlands—experienced similar trends (see Ackerman 2004; Fung and Wright 2001).
The public probably plays its most important role in public management when it joins with managers in this kind of deliberation about the nature of public programs. Members of the public then take the citizen role, sharing responsibility for the core democratic function of determining the course of government. In a recent example from the Netherlands, leaders in the city of Enschede involved residents intensively in planning the future of a neighborhood devastated by an explosion that had killed 22 people. Officials developed an elaborate “process architecture,” including “multiple participatory arenas,” and involved a representative public in formulating and ultimately approving a comprehensive plan for the area (Denters and Klok 2010, 587).
On these occasions, public managers invite citizens to contribute their ideas and share decision-making authority. At its most extensive, this involvement engages citizens in formulating plans and proposals from the outset of an issue arising, as in the Dutch case, in which city officials brought residents on board before developing any plans for the devastated area. In other cases, public involvement finds managers consulting with the public, seeking ideas, but reserving the prerogative to decide.