ABSTRACT

The establishment of the Constitutional School of U.S. Public Administration is one of the most enduring efforts to shape the priorities and responsibilities of running the Constitution in the 21st century. The selections in this book demonstrate empirically how public administration scholars can ground their multi-faceted research in democratic-constitutionalism and the rule of law, both of which advance American constitutional tradition. When Public Administration Review published Stephanie Newbold’s 2010 article on the Constitutional School, the editors classified it as a “big idea” in public administration theory. The purpose of this edited volume is to make the Constitutional School’s presence within the field’s literature even more prominent, vibrant, and useful to scholars and practitioners alike. With this objective in mind, there is a need to be bold. We have discussed

in previous work our growing concerns over the direction the field of U.S. public administration has taken, intellectually and pedagogically (Newbold, 2011, 2014; Newbold & Rosenbloom, 2014). Ever since Herbert Simon published Administrative Behavior in 1946, the public administration community has been on a quest to make its research and knowledge base more scientific. That effort has led to an overwhelming emphasis on the application of statistical models and quantitative techniques to answer some of the most central questions affecting public administrative management. Without question quantitative and qualitative methodologies play important roles in public administration scholarship and pedagogy. Equally unquestionably if a comprehensive science of public administration develops, future scholars and practitioners will look back on contemporary research as but a stepperhaps only a very preliminary one-in its evolution. In the spirit of incorporating scientific methods into the field, we have inadvertently undermined the importance of more traditional epistemological and methodological approaches to answering and addressing major issues affecting the administrative state. In Simon’s (1991) autobiography even he observed that the pendulum had swung too far in favor of using scientific approaches and quantitative techniques to solve political problems (pp. 56, 285). In contributing to the further development and advancement of the Constitutional School, we seek to provide greater intellectual balance in the field’s

space organization, design, and behavior of polities have a place to call home and where normative questions concerning law, constitutional thought, ethics, and democratic-constitutionalism are supported and encouraged. Reflecting on the great intellectual history of U.S. public administration is

both rewarding and disheartening. It is rewarding because it allows for serious, thoughtful reflection into some of the most engaging ideas of the modern era. These include questions about the purpose of government (Appleby, 1945; Brownlow, Gulick & Merriam, 1937; Gaus, 1950; Gulick & Urwick, 1937; Mosher, 1968; Pfiffner & Presthus, 1935; Waldo, 1948; Wilson, 1908); the importance of politics to administration (Gaus, 1950; Goodnow, 1900; Kaufman, 1969; Storing, 1962; Waldo, 1948); the value public institutions bring to the citizens they serve (Selznick, 1957; Waldo, 1948); the contemporary relevance of political and administrative history to democratic governance and public management (Mosher, 1976; Storing 1970, 1981a, 1981b; White, 1948, 1951, 1954, 1958); democracy (Appleby, 1945; Mosher, 1968; Strauss & Cropsey, 1963; Waldo, 1948); law and the federal courts (Hart & Witte, 1937; Pfiffner & Presthus, 1935; Schaeffer, 1953; Willoughby, 1929; Wilson, 1908); the political, governing, and managerial responsibilities required by public administrative institutions (Brownlow, 1937; Gulick & Urwick 1937; Pfiffner & Presthus, 1935; Polenberg, 1966; White, 1926; Wilson, 1887); and bureaucracy (Downs, 1966; Kaufman, 1977; Merton, 1957; Weber, 1922). It is disheartening, because we recognize that the work produced by

highly influential thinkers and intellectual contributors to the history of American public administration including but not limited to Paul Appleby, Louis Brownlow, John Gaus, Frank Goodnow, Luther Gulick, Herbert Kaufman, Charles Merriam, Frederick Mosher, Herbert Storing, Dwight Waldo, Leonard White, and W.F. Willoughby would likely find their work desk rejected by some of our field’s leading academic journals if they were writing today. These scholars all focused on big ideas; ideas that provided extraordinary insight into the affairs of governance. They were not dependent upon big data to create a big idea. They delineated the core concerns and big questions that define public administration and public management and created the theories and theoretical frameworks that continue to guide research and practice even as the contemporary focus on quantitative analysis and the use of big data progresses. Without their ideas the fields of public administration and public management would not have developed as they did; without intellectual space for the introduction and discussion of new ideas of their magnitude, these fields will stagnate. Indeed, it is not unfair to say that today these fields are embraced by narrowness of depth and thinness of breadth that fills journal pages but leaves very little room for big theoretical ideas to take center stage. As Larry Terry often observed, the only numbers you find in Simon’s Administrative Behavior are for

Constitutions matter. We cannot begin to understand U.S. public admin-

istration without first developing a foundation for how natural law and common law underpin the Constitution and the rule of law that govern the American state and its administrative institutions. Although Leonard White (1926) first argued that the study of public administration should begin with a management orientation rather than a legal foundation, after working in the F.D. Roosevelt administration he recognized how unrealistic that recommendation was to both the study and practice of public administrative management. This transformation provides one of the most valuable examples for how practice can inform theory, and exemplifies a very big idea regarding the power to reframe our disciplinary perspectives. U.S. public administration is oftentimes thought of as operating on a

continuum where Dwight Waldo and Herbert Simon anchor each end. Over the past forty years, the field has moved substantially towards Simon’s orientation. An important goal of the Constitutional School is to shift the discourse in the direction of Waldo and the intellectual traditions he fully established and brought to the forefront of public administrative theory and research. Waldo emphasizes the need for more focus on what types of norms, values, and behaviors contribute to how the three branches of government shape the modern American administrative state and the processes of democratic governance it engages. As Gary Wamsley (1990) observed more than two decades ago, public administrators make the most influential decisions when they acquire as much information as possible. The same holds true for the intellectual development of our field. The fundamental reason that democratic-constitutionalism and the rule of law form the foundational bedrock of public administration is precisely because over time constitutional principles and values become institutionalized in our everyday lives as citizens. This institutionalization is publicly reflected through shared norms, expectations, and values that define rights, create public and private space, and establish multiple forms of mutual accountability (Newbold, 2014). As such, it is not just court cases and laws that we must examine and understand, but it is the institutionalization of broad constitutional tradition that requires us to incorporate and rely on sociology, the arts and humanities, and the natural sciences to help explain how these values reflect and change the public meaning of citizenship, roles, and expectations, all of which govern the relationship between leaders and followers, government and citizens, public agencies and the individuals they serve (Newbold, 2014, p. 17). The Constitutional School of U.S. Public Administration works to create

the space needed for scholars and practitioners to come together and analyze, debate, refute, and create common understandings that are focused on a variety of topics relating to democratic-constitutional traditions. It also helps us to explain how and why our values and preferences for governance might be changing. Not everyone has to agree with the perspectives of

this school of thought regarding which democratic norms and values should inform practice and how. The field does, however, have to take the Constitutional School seriously. It deserves to be engaged substantively and intellectually. For as James Madison noted more than 200 years ago in Federalist 51: “The interest of the man must be connected to the constitutional rights of the place” (Cooke, 1961, p. 349). The Constitutional School anchors public administration precisely where the American framers wanted it to reside-within the rule and philosophy of law.