The public administration is supposed to have a good relationship between the administrators and the public. The citizens should be involved in the decision-making as co-producers of the policies and the government. However, the public should be involved in the administration of policies since they are the ones who know what is best for them. From the article, the public service should be provided in normative arrangements since it can be involved in forming laws to be followed. This normative decision can also lead to the formation of legal decisions.
Public administration is not functioning as seen in the article how it is supposed to be working. The administrators tend to put their interests ahead of the citizen’s welfare. The public not being involved maximally in the making of the policies has made the public administration not work effectively. The public administration has individuals who are engaged in seeking public service in excess (Yuan, 2019). By doing so, they tend to benefit excessively more than the public itself. This kind of individual makes it hard for the public administration to fail regarding the provision of services.
The public administration is being hindered from achieving its goals by many things. Firstly, minority interests tend to benefit more at the expense of the public’s interest. Secondly, the idea of the involvement of the public in decision-making raises an ethical dilemma for the administrators. This is because they have to choose between satisfying their own needs and satisfying the needs of the public. Moreover, the relationship between the bureaucrats and the elected authority plays a role in public administration (Yuan, 2019). This relationship has brought a massive gap in the conceptualization of ethics, and from the article, it is seen that service ethics must be in place to fill the gap.
The classical theory of administration has a relationship with the bureaucratic approach since it allows them to be engaged in policy-making. The theory is based on the division of work, authority, control, and the making of policies. The theory is mainly based on the division of labor in the administration of policies. It focuses on the fact that the public has different ideas. Therefore, only an organization can make decisions that can bring the public together. From the classical theory, it is seen that the organization has to have a functional structure to implement the policies.
On the other hand, the new public service focuses on the public in every aspect and involves the democratic approach. These aspects include public service and not attempting to control them. It also focuses on the public interest and valuing of people. It puts away individuals who might want to take advantage of the public by seeking the benefits of having the services provided in a way that will benefit them more than the public. The new public service is also based on the ethic of care, whereby the management and the public correlate in policy making (Yuan, 2019). These two theories have distinctive differences when it comes to public policies.
In the United States, public administration is based on a classical approach, especially the bureaucrat theory in policies. This is because the theory describes how the public administration rarely considers the public interests. They are concerned with the division of labor and the chain of command structure. There exist bureaucrats that make choices on how to satisfy public needs, but the choices made may benefit some individuals more than others.
Reference
Yuan, Q. (2019). Co-production of public service and information technology: A literature review. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (pp. 123–132).