Responding to the populist attack on public administration

Abstract

The current wave of populism, either from the left or the right, has a particularly strong and negative view of public administration, both seen as body of knowledge and as a governmental apparatus. In short, populist defend that public administration has become actually a defendant of the elites, a technocracy serving elitist interests. Public administration uses its technocratic jargon to hide from its only and simple responsibility: to resolve the people’s problems, which is assumed to be homogenous and different from the “elites”. The populist solution for an effective government of forcing a general agreement under the idea of homogenous “people’s needs” is not only misleading but also dangerous. Dangerous because accepting the importance of plurality has shown to be critical for protecting the always weak institutional framework that guards the liberty and rights of persons in any society.

Keywords:

• public administration
• populism
• elites
• democracy
• technocracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.