Public Value Management as a Democratic Innovation and its Viability Across Different Public Administration Traditions and Systems

The starting points for the emergence of the public value discourse in the 1990s and the justifications of the need of the concept were a deficit in democratic legitimacy, the delivery paradox, as well as market failure and the critique of new public management. Arguably the most productive interpretation of the public value concept rests along the lines of a normative, conceptual orientation for managerial action, accompanied by a (so far somewhat sparse) set of practical tools and reasoning for public managers (Moore 1995, Meynhardt 2009). Public value focuses on the ultimate purpose of the use of public resources (Horner & Hutton 2010) and can thus serve to strengthening output/outcome legitimacy and downward accountability (Horner & Hutton 2012). This paper identifies the roles prescribed to public officials as public value managers by the public value literature and examines these roles in relation to various dimensions of administrative traditions and cultures (Bevir et al. 2003; Dahlstrom et al. 2010, 2011; Hofstede et al. 2010; Painter and Peters 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2017) in view of strengthening democratic legitimacy. Five clusters of tasks and competencies were identified: (1) political management of the authorizing environment and securing accountability; (2) leveraging public value opportunities in the context of managerial discretion; (3) leadership and managing the transition towards democratic empowerment of citizens; (4) ensuring learning; and (5) seeing the bigger picture. It would seem that the prescribed roles are more compatible with cultural traditions that favour change, are open to ambiguity and informality, possess a welfarist orientation, and hold solidarity and responsibility in high regard. These roles are also more compatible with non-politicised public administrations that grant high societal status and autonomy (discretion) to civil servants, and provide them with generalist training and career options. Lastly, they are more compatible with pluralist, federalist or decentralised states with extensive consensualist governance and interlocking coordination structures, with a vital civil society and actively pursuing democratisation, and utilizing a large spectrum of sources of policy advice. One of the key open questions is under what conditions can a public value approach contribute to changes in the given public administration culture, in particular towards development of downward accountability mechanisms in the context of democratic backsliding and constraints to bureaucratic autonomy.