This paper is an analysis of the politics of public administration reform in Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic that examines why, despite the ambition and scope of such reform, its results have been disappointing and sometimes even counterproductive. It examines the genesis, implementation, and political consequences of policies to reform state administration. The first section lays out the theory of public administration reform -- its rationale, goals, and favored policy instruments. The second section compares the translation of public administration reform from theory to practice in these three countries. This comparison then forms the basis for some reflections on the difficulties of state-building after Communism.

ABSTRACT

An Exploratory Study of the Perspectives of K-12 Public School Latina School Leaders in One California Region

by

Helen Rodriguez

This dissertation utilized a qualitative research design to explore the perceptions of Latina K-12 educational leaders in a southern geographic region within California. Current trends among K-12 public schools in California reflect a disproportionate ratio of Latino(a) students to Latino(a) school administrators. This disparity creates a need for increased insight and understanding of cultural mores and customs typically associated with the ethnic make-up of the school population, which promotes the potential for successful administrative leadership. However, potential school administrators who are Latina are at particular risk to achieve a position of leadership within the public school setting for a variety of reasons. This research utilized interview data from 6 Latina leaders who were currently working as educational administrators, and had professional experience in schools from before their time as educational leaders. The participants were given pseudonyms that fit with the main themes in their interviews. The case descriptions presented the following from each participant: background, experiences with mentoring, leadership roles, views on female/male leadership, goals and challenges, views on Latina leaders, and networks. Potential trends in the perceptions of barriers that presented challenges to Latina school administrators from reaching positions of school leadership are discussed. Implications identify considerations for practice that will build capacity of Latina public school leadership that is reflective of the ethnic community they serve.

“Presidential administration” has been discussed for the last twenty years. However, scholars have not considered whether courts are doing the same thing. Like presidents, courts may oversee the quality of administrative action under authority granted by the Constitution and legislation. And also, like presidents, courts make policy decisions in lieu of the agency that has been delegated policymaking power.

This Article draws on case law and legal scholarship, as well as work from public administration and political science, to construct a paradigm of “judicial administration.” More specifically, it offers a history of and traces the tension between the “overseer” and “decider” approaches to judicial administration. In addition, it explains the implications of these approaches for the constitutionality and efficacy of judicial review today.

First, this Article considers judicial administration as accomplished through the reinforcement of administrative procedure. These efforts were criticized as judicial policymaking by formalists. However, as this Article notes, these decisions focus on reconciling administrative action with constitutional, technical, and rule-of-law norms and are thus rooted in overseer impulses. In other words, the decider dimensions of even the most intrusive judicial review of agency process have been overstated.

Second, and in contrast, this Article notes that the recent call to overturn Chevron constitutes uncritical advocacy for the decider approach to the judicial administration of statutory directives. In the past, courts have limited their role in the administration of legislation to that of overseer. However, today’s formalists seek to implement de novo review wholesale. This effort is, at its core, a push for courts to decide policy in lieu of the agencies to which Congress has delegated policymaking power or to which policymaking power belongs as a matter of executive authority.

This may not trouble functionalists much. But it should trouble the very formalists who denounce Chevron. First, this evinces an inconsistency in their position, given that many have condemned what they identify as judicial policymaking in administrative process. More broadly, as in presidential administration, the decider approach to judicial administration runs the risk of treading on the legislature’s authority to make the law. To the extent this is the case, calls to dismantle the administrative state and instate the judiciary in its place are focused on reimbursing the wrong branch of government.

For those interested in judicial intervention as a means of regulating the administrative state, including the exercise of presidential power, the overseer model of judicial administration is less likely to offend a formal conception of the separation of powers. Furthermore, longstanding paradigms of judiciary as overseer confront the pressing issues—namely, the denigration of administrative due process and corrosion of expertise in service of the President’s agenda—resulting from today’s unsupervised executive branch.

Nearly all government policy that shapes our lives, from the quality of our food to the air we breathe, must undergo a procedure known in the United States as “notice and comment rulemaking.” Notice and comment rulemaking is part of administrative law, which governs government actions and aims to manifest democratic values of participation and accountability. Notice and comment rulemaking does this by allowing the public to submit comments critiquing policies before they become law. How are these comments understood by the career civil servants undertaking rulemaking? The answer can help us understand how liberal democracies do the work of being democratic. Through 19 months of ethnographic research—including interviews, archival research, surveys, and participant-observation during a ten-month volunteer internship at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC—I collected data on how comments are understood in the context of environmental policymaking, how career civil servants implement administrative law, and how expertise is considered during rulemaking.

The research engages with anthropological theories of the state, arguing that the state cannot be fully understood without recognizing that it is peopled. Key to this argument is an illustration of how civil servants think of themselves within the bureaucratic structures they work and in the context of serving the public interest. These perspectives, while founded in the rule of law, are based on cultural norms and attitudes. Through these norms and processes that implement rulemaking, we can see how the state enacts democratic practices. A focus on rulemaking in the context of environmental policy allows me to reveal the different ways in which public comments (and the expertise therein) come to matter in different ways. That they matter differently is often based on what type of expertise they convey to career civil servants. This has implications for whether notice and comment rulemaking achieves the democratic ideals it was meant to manifest.

In many countries administrative procedures have been identified as a major obstacle to private investments and economic growth. Without overtly questioning the substantive aspects of government regulations, critics of the current state of administrative procedure challenge its complicated details and the time that applications and their decisions consume. Some of the literature dealing with administration as the agent of politics picks up the question of how public administrations and administered individuals interact strategically in the administrative process. Most often this line of research concentrates on regulated utilities and government procurement. However, there is hardly any theoretical economic basis for the study of one of the most important, if not the most important, aspects of administrative procedure: the adjudication in bulk of applications for permissions or similar (very often dichotomous) government decisions. Such decisions en masse often are not made within strategic settings, as is usually—and quite appropriately—assumed in the literature on government regulation of public utilities etc. Instead, with masses of applicants filing applications and many administrators deciding upon them, strategic interaction is unlikely to occur: no single applicant expects to be able to influence the investigative behavior of the administrators, no single administrator expects to influence the behavior of the average applicant. Thus, adaptive behavior prevails on both sides of the interaction. All individuals will adapt to the expected, viz. average, behavior of their counterparts. A model for this side of administrative procedure is missing. It is the goal of this paper to develop a first step in this direction.