As a European from “the continent”, I am particularly interested in the origins of the American “obsession” for government accountability and distrust in “the bureaucracy”. So I started reading some articles and books from the huge Public Administration literature, thanks to a class on this subject at the State University of New York at Albany. Here you can find just a note to myself (and to Public Administration geeks!). I really hope my understanding and reasoning will evolve over time, as I keep on reading 🙂
Woodrow Wilson mentions the European attitude towards Public Administration and politics when he cites quite rudely “a German professor of political science saying to his countrymen, ‘Please try to have an opinion about national affairs’” (Wilson 1887, p. 24).
In the US, public opinion seems to have (or have had) a different character. The fact that “the State” was not explicitly mentioned by the framers of the American Constitution represents for many the proof that “the bureaucracy” is something “somewhat illegitimate” (Rourke 1987, p. 232). The origins of the US “stateless” Constitution are not only historical – i.e. the hostility to the English establishment – but also cultural, such as the influence of the Ancient Roman Republic (Stillman 1990, p. 157) and the civic virtues of heroes like Cincinnatus who, after his service as consul and dictator, retired as a farmer avoiding any compromise with power. The same view is reflected in the Jeffersonian tradition, focused on bottom-up government and limited apparatus (Kettl 2002, p. 34).
While the uneasy reconciliation of Republican values with the stateless origin of the American Nation was made thanks to “the expedient of locating sovereignty in the whole people” (Caldwell 1976, p. 478), according to scholars like Norton Long and John Rohr one of the sources of legitimation of Public Administration is the opportunities that it opens for the citizens to be involved in the decision making and in the work of government (Rourke 1987, p. 230). It is not by chance that the recent paradigms of Open Government, Open Government Data (see for example Dawes et al. 2004) and collaboration in public services provision (see for example Noveck 2009) have all originated in the US, emphasizing the contribution of citizens and civil society to achieve goals of transparency and effectiveness of public policy.
In the “early voices” of the public administration science (Shafritz & Hyde 2012) the role of Public Administration as a way to reinforce democratic institutions and facilitate collaboration with the external environment seems to be not fully developed. For example, the works by Weber, Addams or Gulick are mainly focused on the internal issues regarding the functioning of the public administration machine. Wilson seems to negatively describe public opinion as something that (unfortunately?) comes with democracy, and that must be “educated” (…or manipulated?) by policy-makers (p. 21).
Lately, the Public Administration literature has taken into account the representativeness of public administration. The work by Kaufman shows that representativeness can be improved thanks to decentralization as the enabler of an “effective popular participation in government” (p. 266), even though this effort will not be maintained over time (p. 272).
The works by Wilson, Weber, Addams, Gulick, Kaufman are included in the anthology Shafritz, J. & Hyde, A. (2011). Classics of Public Administration (7th edition). Cenage Learning.
Caldwell, L. (1976). Novus ordo seclorum: The heritage of American public administration. Public Administration Review, 36(5), 476-488.
Dawes, S., Pardo, T.A., Cresswell, A.M. (2004). Designing electronic government information access programs: A holistic approach. Government Information Quarterly 21, 3–23.
Kettl, D. (2002). Administrative Traditions. In The transformation of governance: Public administration for 21st century America (pp. 26-49). Baltimore, M.D.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Noveck, B.S. (2009). Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. Brookings Institution Press, 2009.
Rourke, F. (1987). Bureaucracy in the American constitutional order. Political Science Quarterly, 102(2), 217-232.
Stillman, R. (1990). The peculiar stateless origins of American public administration and consequences for government today. Public Administration Review, 50(2), 156-167.
1. Focus on the long-term vision, not just on quick-wins. Changes in the open government ecosystem require long time. Government organizations are complex and removing the constraints to innovation requires special efforts. The temptation is strong for leaders with short-term mandates to focus on the “easy part”, which generates immediate benefit from the point of view of political communication, but yields only short-term, unsustainable results (unfortunately, this is the history of most of the digital governance efforts in 
