On Attacking and Defending American Democracy

• Author: Michael W. Spicer
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12764
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

454 Public Administration Review • May | June 2017

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 77, Iss. 3, pp. 454–457. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12764.

Michael W. Spicer is professor

emeritus of public administration and

urban studies in the Levin College of Urban

Affairs at Cleveland State University. His

publications include

The Founders, the

Constitution, and Public Administration

(Georgetown University Press, 1995),

Public Administration and the State

(University of Alabama Press, 2001), and

In

Defense of Politics in Public Administration

(University of Alabama Press, 2010). His

research interests include an examination

of the conflictive character of politics and

its implications for freedom and public

administration.

E-mail: m.spicer@csuohio.edu

Book Reviews

Alasdair Roberts , Four Crises of American Democracy:

Representation, Mastery, Discipline, Anticipation

( New York : Oxford University Press , 2017 ). 280

pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN: 9780190459895.

D emocracy has been an idea of ongoing

concern for American public administration

ever since its inception as a self-conscious

field of inquiry. Indeed, it can be argued that the

academic field of public administration in America

arose originally out of the question as to how best

to reconcile the requirements for an efficient and

energetic public administration with the values of

democracy. In light of this, the new book by Alasdair

Roberts, himself a prominent contributor to public

administration discourse, will likely be of interest to

readers concerned about the relationship between

public administration and democracy. Roberts’s

book deals with the periodic crises of democracy as

a form of government that have arisen over the past

century or so in the United States, or what he terms

moments of “democratic malaise” and what we can

learn from them. These moments were, in his words,

“moments when there were real doubts about whether

democratic institutions could be established at all,

whether those institutions were capable of managing

public affairs competently, and whether democracies

could defend themselves from internal and external

threats” (3).

Understanding Our Democratic Malaise

An examination of these moments of democratic

malaise is warranted right now because, as Roberts

sees matters, we are currently in such a moment of

malaise: a malaise that is “manifested by a softening

in public support for democratic institutions, a

rising chorus of complaints from intellectuals and

activists about the performance of democratic systems,

skepticism about the capacity of leading democracies

to fix their problems, and apprehensions about the

rise of non-democratic states such as China” (4).

There exists, he argues, “a widely held belief that

democracies cannot heal themselves, or that they

will be outpaced by non-democratic rivals”: a belief

predicated on a “notion that democracies are not

very creative when it comes to repairing weaknesses

in existing institutions” (12) and a perception that

“governmental institutions cannot be adjusted

easily” (14).

Roberts seeks to provide an historical context for

our current malaise by reminding us there is nothing

terribly new about democratic malaise. As he

emphasizes, there have been several occasions, across

the past century or so, “in which all of the elements

of today ’ s democratic malaise—a shaky economy,

a collapse in public confidence, handwringing by

intellectuals, and competition from a non-democratic

rival—have been combined,” and “every time,

intimations of doom have proved to be unjustified”

(18). At the same time, Roberts does not seek to brush

aside our current concerns about democracy. Rather,

he seeks in his book, as he puts it, “to tread a path

between dismissal and despair,” a middle ground that

takes “declarations of malaise seriously,” but “takes

warnings of impending catastrophe with a grain of

salt” and recognizes that “many democracies have a

well-honed capacity to reinvent themselves in response

to new challenges” (21).

Underlying Roberts’s historical examination of

complaints about democracy is his belief that such

complaints can be classified into four different

types. First, as he sees it, there are complaints about

representation. These are complaints that “arise

when ordinary people feel that they no longer

exercise real control over their government—or to

put it another way, when government appears to be

serving some group or special interest other than the

general public” (5). Second, there are complaints

about what Roberts terms “mastery” that have to do

with the perceived “inability of government to deal

competently with problems identified by the public”

(5). These complaints surface when democratic

governments are seen as somehow too weak and as

“incapable of controlling their environments in ways

Danny L. Balfour , Editor

Michael W. Spicer

Cleveland State University

On Attacking and Defending American Democracy