Democracy and the teaching of public administration

KEYWORDS:

• Democracy
• public administration
• teaching

There is a specter haunting the world—the specter of authoritarianism and of a retreat from democracy. Across the world, be it in the established democratic regions of Western Europe and North America, or in the emerging or transitional places such as South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia, democratic values and governance seem sieged and in retreat. In the face of what seems to be an unprecedented attack on democracy, Teaching Public Administration and the Journal of Public Affairs Education decided to collaborate in jointly publishing a symposium on “Democracy and the Teaching of Public Administration.”

The editors of Teaching Public Administration and the Journal of Public Affairs Education initially prepared this editorial as news of the 2017 Manchester, England terrorist bombing was emerging. Since the events of 9/11, it was yet another example of how terrorists sought to undermine democracy and freedoms by instilling fear and carnage. But were such senseless violence were the sum of the attack on the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Spain, Germany, or a host of other countries, that would not be as dangerous as a far more insidious threat hidden within these attacks and other ostensibly nonviolent acts across the world which are undermining democracy.

Historian R. R. Palmer (2014) once wrote in his The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 that the American and French Revolutions ushered in the modern era of democracy. Combine it with the British Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 and what we see in them are the foundations of a two hundred plus period of liberal democracy sweeping the globe. Alexis DeTocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1988) makes a similar argument, asserting that the French Revolution’s promise of “Liberté égalité fraternité” ushered in an era of democracy that seemed inevitable at the time and until the present. While the story of the mid-twentieth century and Cold War was one of fascism, Nazism, and authoritarian communism, the results of World War II, the end of African colonialism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the breakup of the Soviet Union seemed to single what Francis Fukuyama (1992) declared in his The End of History and the Last Man that the West had won and that democratic values had emerged. The struggle over grand-narratives—capitalism versus communism—had ended, with the United States and western liberal democratic values that included democracy (representative government, free press, and an active and pluralist civil society) emergent as victorious.

And history and hope seemed to bear this out. African independence saw the shedding of colonial empires and the establishment of democratic structures. Eastern European states rushed to create market democracies, and the Russian Federation in the 1990s witnessed the birth of an independent civil society and what appeared to be a free press and competitive elections. South Korea transitioned from an authoritarian to stable democracy, and the military coups that characterized Central and South America collapsed into democratic regimes. The Arab Spring represented another statement of the possibility of change to a more democratic form of politics and governance. By the turn of the 21st century, and perhaps even through its first decade, the Spirit of the French Revolution appeared firmly footed. Yet somewhere along the way something went wrong.

Across the world, democracy is under assault and in retreat. Freedom House’s most recent report (2017a) notes that a “total of 67 countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties in 2016, compared with 36 that registered gains. This marked the 11th consecutive year in which declines outnumbered improvements.” The place where the biggest declines in democracy occurred were in the established democracies. Freedom House in its Freedom of the Press 2017 report (2017b) declared the freedom of the press had declined to its lowest point in 13 years, and there is a steady stream of reporters being jailed or murdered by critics and opposition governments.

More than a half-century after independence, democracy still seems less than firmly rooted across Africa. In its 1973 report, Freedom House (2015) ranked only two states—Gambia and Mauritius—as free, in the 2015 report 10 states—Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Mauritius, Namibia, Sao Tome & Principe, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia—are classified as free. Overall, in 1973, 32 states are listed as unfree, in 2016 the number was 22. Democracy has generally improved compared to 1973, but certainly one cannot say that democracy is sweeping the continent. Additionally, comparing 1973 to 2016 misses something crucial—progress made and then regression. As Freedom House points out, democratic gains were made across much of Africa in the 1970s and into the 1980s, only to see overall and specific countries eventually regress or retreat from democracy (Freedom House, 2010).

The Russian Federation which in the 1990s and early 2000s, even under Putin, looked like it was adopting democratic values and practices, but it has since changed profoundly with crackdowns on the press and dissent frequent. Eastern Europe demonstrates a mixed bag of democracy, with the former Baltic states doing well, but countries such as Hungary and Poland—once viewed as rising democratic stars, regressing. Orban in Hungary praises “illiberal democracy” and seeks to shut down (as we write) the free Central European University. Even before the attempted coup, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was consolidating power and persecuting journalists, but since the coup and as a result of 2017 constitutional changes, the state of democratic Turkey is in doubt. And in Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro has defied popular elections and continued a war against liberal democracy that Hugo Chavez began several years ago. What was once a stable democracy seems less so. The story is similar in Brazil and Argentina, where political corruption threatens democracy.

But it is not just in the what used to be called the second or third worlds where democracy is fragile. France narrowly escaped electing the far right candidate Marianne LePen, and the same could be said in the Netherlands where voters managed to turn back another far right candidate in Geert Wilders. The same story could be told in Austria with Norbert Hofer who was defeated. All three candidates ran on platforms of ultra-nationalism and anti-immigration, displaying contempt for constitutionalism and basic liberties. Their losses are good signs, but the fact they were contenders for election gives one pause about the state of democracy in three traditional bastions of freedom. And finally, Brexit and Donald Trump are only the most recent manifestations of democratic distemperment. Both represent a turning away from toleration, openness, and respect for rights. Since election Trump has embraced authoritarians across the world such as Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and in May 2017, in his visit to Saudi Arabia Trump told its leaders that the USA was not going to lecture other countries about their human right abuses, thereby abandoning the historic role of America as the world’s defender of democracy. The list could go on.

The point here is that while democratic values and governance at one time were accepted as given and inevitable, neither seem to be the case now. Moreover, this giveness and inevitability crept into public administration pedagogy. By that, it was assumed that one of the purposes or goals of public administration was the support and enabling of democracy. It is no longer clear that this is the case. However, Teaching Public Administration and the Journal of Public Affairs Education do not agree with that position. Instead, we believe in democratic values and governance and contend that the teaching of public administration remains rooted in, and committed to democracy. Indeed, we would want to go further and argue that it is important and necessary to promote and to protect those spaces which encourage the exchange of how we work with professionals and practitioners in the field and how their ideas and experiences inform the curriculum and the teaching and learning we are engaged with. Both our journals have their roots in those organizations and networks which have, quite consciously, promoted not just the teaching and learning associated with the field but have shaped too the values and underpinning assumptions and expectations which inform the work of public administrators, managers, and policy experts.

These intellectual and organizational roots while drawing on quite different political and administrative institutions and forms of governance do share a number of important values and expectations. Perhaps, the cornerstone of our shared histories is the centrality of democratic political institutions supported by the importance too of valuing and sustaining participatory approaches to decision-making; the necessity of ensuring our decision makers are accountable to society through a free press as well as vibrant political parties and an engaged network of civil society organizations and agencies. While these are necessary, they are not sufficient to meet the demands of the crises we have described above. We also think that developing, supporting, and sustaining a community of committed and engaged teachers and scholars of public administration in our institutions of higher education is central to our shared and collective task.

We think that an active community of teachers/scholars/researchers working in our universities and colleges and engaging too in the processes of critical reflection on practice as well as anticipating developments or responding to new ways of thinking provides one site of resistance to the crisis in democracy. Looking to extend these networks so that we learn with and from each other is one of the expectations of this joint initiative between us. We wanted to co-produce a joint issue in which we could highlight the importance of the teaching and learning of democratic values and ideas in the area of public administration. Across both our journals, we will be publishing separate papers but they are linked through this shared editorial. We wanted to use this as one way of explaining the background to the idea but also of pointing up the possibility of creating a shared (and different) space for dialogue, reflection, and influencing current thinking and ideas across the broad field of public administration.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Diamond

John Diamond is the director of the Institute for Public Policy and Professional Practice at Edge Hill University in the United Kingdom, where he also serves as the head of academic planning in the faculty of education. He currently serves as the editor of Teaching Public Administration.

David Schultz

David Schultz is a professor of political science at Hamline University, where he teaches courses in American politics. He is also a professor in the Hamline and University of Minnesota Schools of Law where he teaches election law. He also served as the co-editor of the Journal of Public Affairs Education from 2011 to 2017.