The Irony of NPM

Abstract

Government delivery mechanisms and services are increasingly being shifted to the private sector where executive values of efficiency and effectiveness reign supreme whereas legislative and judicial institutional values are confined to traditional government agencies. New Public Management (NPM) has ironically initiated a process of diffusing legislative and judicial institutional values into the contract state through reactive legislative enactments and judicial opinions that attempt to reinforce the constitutional character of public action. An integration of NPM and legislative and judicial constitutional values is sought to reach a balancing point in the American state. Last, prescriptions are provided for Congress, the judiciary, and public administrators to reach a balancing point that will ensure the protection of constitutional values while valuing effectiveness and efficiency. Thus, NPM may create a potential paradox—rather than the state becoming minimalist in nature, NPM will increase the influence of the state through the diffusion of constitutional values.

New Forms of Administrative Law in the Age of Third‐party Government

“…Rosenbloom and Piotrowski (2005a, 2005b) develop a similar framework while adding significant empirical examples. And recently, Bumgarner and Newswander (2009) have further demonstrated that ironically NPM leads to the expansion of public service norms to private actors.…”

“…In their eminent research they created a theoretical and empirical framework for the exploration of the prospects for outsourcing constitutional and administrative law norms to private third‐party contractors. Recently there has been a growing scholarly interest in the underlying values of third‐party government (e.g., Bumgarner and Newswander 2009; Dubnick and Frederickson 2009; Heinrich et al 2010; Rosenbloom and Hahm 2010), and it is clearly one of the most intriguing questions in the current study of public administration.…”

Moral Leadership and Administrative Statesmanship: Safeguards of Democracy in a Constitutional Republic

“…One angle, based on Storing's vision, is to adopt the “skills and temperament of a judge rather than those of a policy wonk or technical analyst” (Morgan et al , 626). The reliance on using judicial decision‐making techniques has become embedded within the field of administration (Bumgarner and Newswander ; Cooper ; Morgan et al ; Rohr ; Rosenbloom, O'Leary, and Chanin ; Spicer and Terry ). Judicial decision making provides an “appropriate path for transcending common sense” by considering both ends and means (Morgan et al , 628).…”

El Nuevo Servicio Público (NSP), un paradigma para la construcción de nuevos modelos metodológicos para el análisis de la administración pública

“…La mayoría de los cuestionamientos que se han puesto encima de la mesa por diferentes académicos tienen que ver, fundamentalmente, con el excesivo peso del enfoque intraorganizativo y de orientación al mercado y al sector empresarial privado en la implementación de políticas y servicios públicos. En esta línea se encuadran los reproches que algunos autores realizan en relación al desmesurado énfasis que esta corriente otorga a la descentralización que promueve el modelo de mercado, lo cual entra en clara tensión con la necesidad de coordinación que requiere el sector público (Peters y Savoie, 1996;Dent, Chandler, y Barry, 2004;Bumgarner y Newswander, 2009;Meier, y O`Toole, 2009;Levy, 2010) o incluso genera la defensa de intereses particulares muy alejados de los principios que deben guiar la prestación de servicios públicos (Prats i Catalá, 2005). No menos importantes, son los trabajos que han puesto en entredicho las relaciones implícitas entre las ramas del poder, ejecutiva y legislativa, que establece y defiende este paradigma (Carroll y Lynn, 1996;Lynn, 1996), propugnando un menor intervencionismo y una reducción notable, por tanto, del tamaño del sector público.…”