B. Guy Peters

University of Pittsburgh | Pitt

Administrative law is a not a frequent subject of research in public administration, but it can reveal a great deal about the functioning of the public sector and governance in general. The nature of administrative law is, we argue, closely linked with administrative traditions, and therefore administrative law is an especially apt focus for compar...

Even in the face of great uncertainties, limited knowledge, imperfect data, and flawed processes of decision making, there is reason to be optimistic that democratic governments can make good decisions and achieve good outcomes for their citizens. Knowing fully what public value is, and how and when it is created and realized, before taking action...

This chapter starts discussing some challenges in the use of the concept of public value as well as the importance of context for its conception and application, to then discuss the ways Moore’s ideas were considered in the works of some Latin American authors, divided in three general topics: public management; public policy, citizen participation...

Liberal democracy has become vulnerable to illiberal political movements and the gradual erosion of democratic institutions. To safeguard liberal democracy, we propose the concept of the Guardian State, which embraces liberal principles while acting as a defensive barrier against illiberal tendencies. We need strong administrative institutions that...

This article addresses the vulnerability of liberal democracy to illiberal political movements and the gradual erosion of democratic institutions. While free and fair elections are central to democracy, backsliding politicians can exploit them to legitimate their undemocratic actions. To safeguard liberal democracy, we propose the concept of the Gu...

Richard Rose’s Politics in England was not just a textbook. Its origins mark it out from the range of other texts that students of British politics could look to in the mid-1960s, most of which adopted a legal and/or historical approach to the study of British politics. Politics in England was part of a series of books—the ‘Little, Brown’ series—th...

Governing is not an easy task. Every day, governments, along with their allies in the private sector, face challenges when attempting to make good policy and to put those good policies into effect within the society. Even when they are capable of making very good policy choices, governments need to marshal the resources to pay for them. And they mu...

Political patronage is defined as political actors appointing individuals at their discretion to key positions in the public sector. The book examines this practice in the bureaucracies of 11 Asian countries through the use of a typological framework of patronage types. The framework is based on two key criteria: basis of trust and the major role o...

Introduction Policy-making is in essence a matter of design. It is essentially about creating or constructing a means (for example, a plan, set of rules, instruments, interventions) for a certain end (to manage or to solve a societal problem). However, as this volume shows, we can witness an interesting shift in the logic or kind of design that is...

Introduction Governments see themselves as increasingly confronted with complex or wicked problems (such as climate change and migration). Characteristic for such issues is that many different stakeholders are involved, with different ambitions, interests and perceptions. A solution for one actor may imply an increase in problems for others (Head,...

Approaches to design in public policy and service delivery have turned a corner. Many governments are experimenting with applying all kinds of design methods or design thinking to their primary processes of policy-making, service delivery and decision-making. This new use of ‘design’ is characterised by a process of reframing the problem, mobilisin...

In recent years, design approaches to policy-making have gained popularity among policy-makers. However, a critical reflection on their added value and on how contemporary ‘design-thinking’ approaches relates to the classical idea of public administration as a design science is still lacking. This introductory chapter reflects upon the use of desig...

In this final chapter we reflect upon the application of more designerly, and thus creative or playful, ways of making policy, the ‘second face of public sector design’ (Clarke and Craft, 2018), how they relate to the more traditional forms of design, and what their pitfalls and promises are. Moreover, we reflect upon the consequences of this trans...

Patronage appointments in government are a continuing issue in many administrative systems. Especially for countries in Latin America and Africa patronage is considered a major impediment to developing more effective administrative systems. A great deal has been written describing patronage and discussing the causes for patronage, but much less res...

The paper critically reviews the consequences of a bifurcation of Political Science and Public Administration. This divorce of two closely related academic fields has removed political explanations to key developments in the public service from Public Administration research and thus it tends to provide a partial view of the reality that it seeks t...

This visionary Research Handbook presents the state of the art in research on policy design. By conceiving policy design both as a theoretical and a methodological framework, it provides scholars and practitioners with guidance on understanding policy problems and devising accurate solutions. Chapters discuss the major approaches to policy design a...

The rhetoric of populism stresses benefiting “the people” who have been ignored by a corrupt elite, whether that elite is political or economic. If the reality is to match the rhetoric, then populist governments should provide social and economic benefits for the public, including healthcare, education, and income redistribution. This paper examine...

Governance scholarship is particularly positioned to propose reforms in public administration to improve the work of governments. The papers in this mini-symposium focus on governance reforms in Latin America, presenting results related to the processes of institutional change that shaped public administration. Governance reforms in Latin America h...

In this chapter we operationalize the Policy Design Framework through a four-fold model of causation, evaluation, instrumentation and intervention. We delve into the theories of policy design around three common threads: the politics of policy design, policy instrumentation and social constructivism. Then we deal with the main problems of causation...

Policy design will be complex, uncertain and legitimate or it will not be successful. It will be complex because policy problems are increasingly intertwined, multi-leveled or nested, hence requiring a comprehensive rather than a compartmentalized approach. It will be uncertain because of the persistent bounded rationality hindering our knowledge a...

Politicization has different consequences for public administration and public services in different countries. This study seeks to identify the consequences of politicization in the Iranian public service. After reviewing the theoretical foundations of politicization, the authors reflect on different researchers’ and political experts’ views about...

In this programmatic essay, we argue that public governance scholarship would benefit from developing a self-conscious and cohesive strand of “positive” scholarship, akin to social science subfields like positive psychology, positive organizational studies, and positive evaluation. We call for a program of research devoted to uncovering the factors...

Liberal democracy is at risk. Its hallmark institutions – political pluralism, separation of powers, and rule of law—are coming under pressure, as authoritarian sentiment is growing around the globe. While liberal-democratic backsliding features prominently in social science scholarship, especially the branches concerned with political parties and...

Liberal democracy is at risk. Its hallmark institutions – political pluralism, separation of powers, and rule of law—are coming under pressure, as authoritarian sentiment is growing around the globe. While liberal-democratic backsliding features prominently in social science scholarship, especially the branches concerned with political parties and...

Liberal democracy is at risk. Its hallmark institutions – political pluralism, separation of powers, and rule of law—are coming under pressure, as authoritarian sentiment is growing around the globe. While liberal-democratic backsliding features prominently in social science scholarship, especially the branches concerned with political parties and...

If legislatures are to be effective rulemaking organisations, they require information and advice, usually provided by legislative staff. The levels of staffing varies markedly across countries, although most legislatures in European democracies have relatively small staffs. This article discusses the importance of different forms of staffing for a...

Liberal democracy is at risk. Its hallmark institutions-political pluralism, separation of powers, and rule of law-are coming under pressure, as authoritarian sentiment is growing around the globe. While liberal-democratic backsliding features prominently in social science scholarship, especially the branches concerned with political parties and po...

As a group of fifteen scholars from different sub-fields, countries, and generations, we argue that public administration would benefit from launching a self-conscious and cohesive strand of ‘positive’ scholarship, akin to social science subfields like positive psychology, positive organisational studies, and positive evaluation. We call for a prog...

Liberal democracy is at risk. Its hallmark institutions – political pluralism, separation of powers, and rule of law—are coming under pressure, as authoritarian sentiment is growing around the globe. While liberal-democratic backsliding features prominently in social science scholarship, especially the branches concerned with political parties and...

Governments and societies in 2020 and 2021 have been facing three interconnected crises—COVID-19 and the health crisis, an economic crisis resulting from the health crisis, and a social crisis around inclusion and equity. The magnitude of these crises, and their nature, vary across countries, but no country has been left untouched. The governance r...

The concept of governance has come to be used more commonly in the discussion of public administration, but the meaning of the term is not always clear. There is a growing body of Euro-pean literature that can be characterized as "governance without government," stressing as it does the importance of networks, partnerships, and markets (especially...

Contemporary public administration reflects its historical roots as well as contemporary ideas about how the public bureaucracy should be organized and function. This book argues that there are administrative traditions that have their roots centuries ago but continue to influence administrative behavior. Further, within Western Europe, North Ameri...

The contributions to this special issue examine the politics of domestic and international climate policy, concentrating on the role of institutions, interests, ideas, and networks. The outcomes of the policymaking processes are assessed with regard to their proportionality, that is, the balance between the benefits and costs of a policy. The contr...

The demonstration of causal relationships among variables has been central to the social sciences for their entire existence, but there has been an upsurge of concern about causal inference over at least the past decade This increased interest in causation has coincided with the increased use of experimental methods, in all the social sciences, and...

Patronage is one of the enduring issues in public administration. Although the virtues of merit-based recruitment and retention in the public service are extolled widely, patronage of some form persists in many, if not most, countries. By using system dynamics modeling applied to performance governance, this chapter provides an analysis of both the...

Populism has become one of the most commonly used concepts in contemporary political science, albeit one which is often contested. Most of the discussion of populism, however, has focused on elections and political party systems. We argue that populist politics can be seen in a number of other dimensions of governance. We develop a typology of popu...

In the wake of the “audit revolution” during the 1980s and 1990s, administrative systems across the western world have tended to gradually downplay evaluation as a component of the policy process. At the same time, auditing has dramatically increased in scope and depth, and has also, to some extent, come to fill the role in policymaking previously...

Public policy research has become increasingly comparative over the past several decades, but the methodological issues involved in this research have not been discussed adequately. This Handbook provides a discussion of the fundamental methodological issues in comparative policy research, as well as descriptions and analyses of major techniques us...

The methods discussed in its 22 chapters, including this introductory study, consider not only the nature of public policies but also how to deal with the complexities of policy across political systems and across policy domains and across time. These methods are also of interest for practitioners, who face many policy problems of international dim...

Much of the existing scholarly literature on political economy of resources confuses various definitions of institutions (e.g., formal and informal), institutions with the environment, and rational perspectives on institutions with social perspectives. In order to take a different path from that of reductionist explanations, this chapter will addre...

Dossier “El Diseño de Políticas Públicas para el Desarrollo”

Populism has been perhaps the most popular explanation for the difficulties that have been besetting contemporary governments. But despite the intense interest in populism as a political phenomenon, very little has been written assessing the implications for governance and even less on the implications for public administration. Focusing on the Uni...

The concept of wicked problems has become widely used in policy analysis. The popularity of the concept has led to its overuse, and has produced significant conceptual stretching. This paper investigates the extent to which this stretching has led to the application of the concept to issues which are not ‘wicked’ in any meaningful sense. Based on a...

The problem‐solving capacity and problem‐generating potential of multilevel systems entail the need for the delegation of authority. When the problem concerned is about how to put an abstract policy concept into a practicable policy tool, the choice of the respective delegation trajectory depends on the policy models or the policy‐relevant knowledg...

The lack of effective vertical policy coordination between the policy makers at the “top” and the implementers at the “bottom” is an important source of deficits in both policy design and policy implementation. Yet while the link between policy production and implementation seems vital to explain and prevent policy failure, so far the conceptual to...

Governance theory has been focused on the contrast between governance through the State and governance through alternative mechanisms such as networks. This paper focuses on four alternative sources of governance and the potential positive and negative contributions to each. It also addresses the logic of movement among different forms of governanc...

Public administration-as a field of both academic study and professional practice-would benefit greatly from a more systematic and cohesive strand of research that is explicitly geared towards systematically studying the successes and positive contributions of government. At present, the citizenry at large is ill-informed about what government does...

First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this updated volume explores the intersections between governance and media in western democracies, which have undergone profound recent changes. Many governmental powers have been shifted toward a host of network parties such as NGOs, state enterprises, international organizations, autonomou...

In recent years, design approaches to policymaking have gained popularity among policymakers. However, a critical reflection on their added value and on how contemporary ‘design-thinking’ approaches relates to the classical idea of public administration as a design science, is still lacking. This introductory paper reflects upon the use of design a...

Despite recognizing the importance of public bureaucracies in governing climate change, our knowledge of how their behavioral and structural characteristics influence climate change adaptation policy is limited. This article provides an introduction to a collection of studies that seeks to explore the link between climate change adaptation and publ...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the changing relationship between auditing and evaluation. Over the past several years, supreme auditing institutions (SAIs) in a number of advanced democracies have evolved from conventional auditing institutions to becoming increasingly concerned with assisting policy change and administrative reform...

Introduction to JCPA Special Issue on policy change in Latin America. Full version available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/wyXCZ5jVhK8e9XKA6mYu/full

The study of comparative politics and the comparative study of public policy have developed independently of one another, and there has not been adequate interaction of the fields. This is true despite some notable exceptions that have attempted to bridge the apparent gap. A number of theoretical approaches to political science could have great rel...

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) influence policymaking in states by devising and promoting policy ideas. In this study, we examine to what extent a set of IGOs make normative commitments to integrate environmental concerns as well as to contrast this commitment to environmental policy integration (EPI) with climate policy integration (CPI) a...

This article describes data for 78 intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) working on topics related to energy governance, environmental protection, and the economy. The number of IGOs covered also includes organizations active in other sectors. The point of departure for data construction was the Correlates of War dataset, from which we selected th...

Policy coordination is one of the oldest challenges for governments, but has become even more important as the problems confronting governments change, and the ideas of “New Public Management” are diffused. This paper examines the causes for coordination problems and the mechanisms that may be available for improving coordination. It concludes by d...

The majority of the policy work of government is done through the organizations that constitute the public bureaucracy. Even when administrative organizations act as agents for political leaders, rather than making policy on their own, they play a number of important roles in making policy and in making policies perform as intended by the actors wh...

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis is a classic work of the Public Policy discipline. Wildavsky's emphasis on the values involved in public policies, as well as the need to build political understandings about the nature of policy, are as important for 21st century policymaking as they were in 1979. B. Guy Peters' critical introduction provides t...

Comparing local politicians’ and bureaucrats’ assessments of democratic participation: the cases of Norway and Sweden Given the increasing emphasis on delivery and output as a source of legitimacy for local government, how do politicians and civil servants perceive conventional, input-based channels for citizens’ influence on government in relation...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relationships between governance and a variety of approaches to public administration, especially New Public Management. Design/methodology/approach The study provides a conceptual review of the various approaches to public management and governance. Findings Many approaches to public administra...

In what circumstances do organizations react to changes in their operating environment by adopting proportionate policy responses? And drawing on institutional theory, what expectations can we formulate in relation to the proportionality of policy responses to climate change? These two research questions frame this article, which seeks to make new...

The concept of wicked problems has become a fad in contemporary policy analysis, with any number of problems being labeled as “wicked”. However, if many of these problems are analyzed using a strict definition of the concept they do not meet the criteria. Building on this analysis, I have developed a research program to investigate the extent to wh...

To better connect the concept of policy problems to policy solutions, this article builds on Guy Peters’ framework for identifying and applying ‘attributes’ of policy problems. It does so by applying the seven attributes of policy problems identified in Peters’ past work to a range of policy problems in the United States. The problems investigated...

The previous studies about Chinese policy process give predominant focus in the agenda setting or proposing policy issue stage. There is limited record and analysis on the policymaking process. Once agenda is set, it is government’s responsibility to formulate practical and applicable policy terms. Therefore, a close examination of how local govern...

The article addresses the issue of public sector work motivation, particular the notion of bureaucratic 'shirking'. Although a popular theoretical model among public choice scholars of public administration, the 'shirking' argument has not been empirically supported. The article compares two organisational models of ensuring public servants' compli...

The concept of governance is used frequently and in a variety of different ways. This article discusses Mark Bevir’s use of an interpretative approach to governance and its implications for understanding better how we govern. This approach has particular relevance to democratic forms of governance, and to the use of deliberative and direct forms of...

Decision-making is at the heart of governing and governance, and is a more challenging task compared to just a few decades ago as a result of increasing social complexity and globalization. In this book, B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre propose a new framework for the comparative analysis of governance, arguing that government remains a central actor i...

Institutions shape public policy, and in turn public policies shape institutions. This chapter discusses the role that institutions, viewed from a number of theoretical perspectives, play in shaping policies. Institutions can structure the flow of information and ideas from the environment and also have their own perspectives on what constitutes go...

To understand contemporary governance one needs to be cognisant of the manner in which media, and perhaps more generally, information, is used as a component of the process. The fundamental contention of the mediatisation literature is that institutions and organisations adapt to the pervasive role of the media, and this paper argues that the same...

Given the increasing emphasis on delivery and output as a source of legitimacy for local government, how do politicians and civil servants perceive conventional, input-based channels for citizens’ influence on government in relationship to performance and output-oriented opportunities to influence public service? This article compares the attitudes...