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Public Administrators and and Citizens: What Should the Relationship Be?

Download Public Administrators and Citizens

Public Administrators and Citizens is a working draft Kettering report that focused on those in the public administration field who want to connect with citizens. U.S. citizens remain alienated from the country’s electoral system and distrustful of major institutions, especially those of government. Some professionals have doubts about whether the public has anything to contribute to their programs and agencies beyond providing endorsements and tax revenue.

Sensing this, people have become cynical about the efforts professionals make to engage them; citizens feel manipulated. This cycle of mutual distrust dominates the political environment in which public administrators work.

Public Administrators and Citizens: What Should the Relationship Be? suggests other ways of thinking about public administration that have implications for engaging citizens and are about engaging the public. The major finding is that people have to engage one another before administrators can engage them as a public. This kind of engagement seems critical to breaking the cycle of mutual distrust.

This report is about how otherwise unengaged individuals become members of a public that can take on the responsibilities implied in self-government. People become citizens by doing the work of citizens, which is work done by not just for people. Public work is the necessary complement to government-sponsored public works, which is work done for people but not by them. Administrators have self-interest in both kinds of work.

If everything depends on what citizens do with citizens, what are administrators supposed to do in the meanwhile? Kettering makes no pretense of being an authority on public administration. But the ideas about the public in this report may give professionals some new ideas about how they can do their jobs differently—without taking on more work.

What should be done to alter existing work routines, however, will depend on the creative imagination of inventive administrators.

Other Reports in this Series


Engaging Citizens: Meeting the Challenges of Community Life

We Have to Choose: Democracy and Deliberative Politics

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