The Dilemma of the Unsatisfied Customer in a Market Model of Public Administration

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2005.00432.x
• Author: Janet M. Kelly
• Published date: 01 January 2005
• Date: 01 January 2005

76 Public Administration Review •January/February 2005, Vol. 65, No. 1

Janet M. Kelly

Cleveland State University

The Dilemma of the Unsatisfied Customer

in a Market Model of Public Administration

The relationship between administrative service performance and citizen satisfaction has been

assumed, but not demonstrated, in the application of market models to public service delivery.

Although the citizen satisfaction literature cautions that the link between objective and subjective

measures of service quality is tenuous at best, public-sector professional organizations define a

managerial focus on objective measures of service performance as accountability to citizens for

outcomes. What if we’re wrong?

Accountability and Administrative

Performance

A market-based entrepreneurial model of public man-

agement, the new paradigm for public administration (Behn

2001), may or may not have changed what government

does, but few would argue it has not changed how govern-

ment does. The new paradigm has caused a very important

idea to take root—that accountability to citizens and cus-

tomers is demonstrated by a commitment to measure and

report performance. It defines accountability as what the

public demands in exchange for the discretion they afford

administrators to make decisions about service provision.

If one looks closely, it is a theory of accountability, predi-

cated on the notion that citizens want good performance

from their government and that the aspects of performance

administrators can measure are the same aspects impor-

tant to citizens. Conceding the first point, this article ex-

plores the second. Are we sure that our drive to measure

and report the performance of public programs amounts to

accountability for outcomes that matter to citizens?

It may be useful to compare three models of adminis-

trative accountability. The accountability of the new para-

digm is citizen based, market driven, and distinguished by

the concept of a relationship between administrators and

the citizens and customers they serve, unmediated by

elected officials. It shares with traditional public adminis-

tration a confidence that management science can achieve

economy and effectiveness in public programs. It differs

in that the rules designed to constrain choices and limit

functions as a way to prevent the improper exercise of ad-

ministrative discretion in traditional public administration

are considered obstacles to a flexible, responsive, citizen-

centered administrative system (Romzek and Dubnick

1994). Administrators should be free to “steer, not row” in

the direction of providing outcomes that matter to citizens.

Many advocates of traditional public administration and

most dissenters to the new paradigm point out that private-

sector values are not sufficient for civil society, and that

the profession owes accountability to the collective inter-

est of citizens, not the aggregation of their preferences

(Kelly 1998; Terry 1998; Denhardt and Denhardt 2000;

Frederickson 1992). Loyalists to traditional public admin-

istration and proponents of the new paradigm share the

same concept of administrative accountability—account-

ability to citizens—but traditionalists insist on a more ex-

pansive definition of “citizen.”

Historically, public administration has looked to two

other sources for accountability. The first is elected offi-

cials, an accountability Redford described as “overhead

democracy” or a system in which control runs “through a

single line from the representatives of the people to all those

who exercise power in the name of the government” (1969,

70). The second is to itself, and the expectations for tech-

nical competence and ethical conduct that define the pro-

fession. Sixty years ago, scholars were arguing over

Janet M. Kelly is the Albert A. Levin Professor of Urban Studies and Public

Service at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland

State University. Her research interests include public financial management,

budgeting, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and performance measure-

ment. She recently published

Performance Budgeting for State and Local

Government

with William C. Rivenbark. E-mail: jkelly@urban.csuohio.edu.