“The Public Interest” in Administrative Decision-Making: Theorem, Theosophy, or Theory?

Abstract

Textbooks in public administration customarily conclude with a section on administrative responsibility. The charitable inference is that this location betokens the saving of the best till last, rather than the appendage of an afterthought. Herbert Kaufman might explain it as the preoccupation of the past generation of political scientists with the legitimation of the efficient exercise of administrative power to subserve the goals of the social state, with a consequent sublimation of the emerging problem of the control of large, professionalized bureaucracies. However that may be, it does seem clear that, with the exception of administrative decisions which adversely affect “civil liberties,” most political scientists have been content to let lawyers and defenders of the free enterprise system worry about the restraint of administrative action.

Accountability and the Public Interest in the Nonprofit Sector: A Conceptual Framework

“…The concept of public interest has attracted much attention from scholars of public administration and public policy (e.g., Schubert, 1957; Flathman, 1966; and Goodsell, 1990). The public interest debate has been primarily focused on determining whether ‘the public interest is simply a colloquial, subjective, commendatory term used freely by individuals to promote a program or policy or whether the concept carries a more specific, objective meaning that can be examined with some degree of intellectual rigor’ (Barth, 1992, p. 290).…”

The Influence of Legislative Oversight on Discretionary Authority

“…The phrase public interest should set off warning flags in the minds of public administration theorists. Political science has given the concept of public interest short shrift since the onset of the behavioral revolution, largely because the discipline has not been able to define public interest in operational terms (see especially Schubert, 1957). The problem, according to Goodsell (1990), has been that political science has tried to comprehend public interest only with substantive applications, and a diverse, decentralized, even pluralistic, political system such as ours cannot find consensus on any substantive conceptions of public interest.…”

Supply management in American public administration: Towards an academic discipline?

“…Despite Herring's call, however, the public interest as a guiding precept for American PA has remained problematic due to its ambiguous meaning, as noted above. In an influential critique, Schubert (1957) concluded that ''the public interest notion is close to useless in the development [of PA as] a true social science'' (Goodsell, 1990, p. 98). Through the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, the public interest as a central theme became ''more clouded, more fragmented, less easy to know and act upon and, hence, it became a subject few public administration theorists addressed'' (Stillman, 1985, p. 114).…”