Reinforcing Democratic Governance

Reinforcing Democratic Governance, provides a novel and important way to connect contemporary public administration with representative government. We engage a novel theoretical framework (Bertelli 2020) and empirically evaluate its predictions in the context of contemporary Europe. The essence of our project is a democratic dilemma: the discretion that modern governments give to administrative actors not only allows them to make choices about the means for implementing policies, but also choices among democratic values. What distinguishes this empirical project from extant literatures is its overarching research question: How does the structure and organization of public administration shape the democratic belief systems of officials?

Keywords:public management, value trade-offs, representative government, governance reform

Disciplines:Public management