What Is Behavioral Public Administration Good for?

• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Author: Anthony M Bertelli,Norma M. Riccucci
• Date: 01 January 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13283

What Is Behavioral Public Administration Good for? 179

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 82, Iss. 1, pp. 179–183. © 2020 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13283.

What Is Behavioral Public Administration Good for?

Abstract: Public administration has seen an influx of work addressing something that has been called “behavioral public

administration (BPA)”; A hallmark of BPA is the examination of public administration from a micro-level perspective

with attention to the psychological aspects of human behavior. However, scholars of public administration have long

applied a micro-level lens to their research, even from a psychological standpoint. We argue here that the call for BPA is

mainly an appeal for greater reliance on an analytical lens or research method, namely experimental designs. As argued

here, however, little attention has been given to major drawbacks: experiments tend not to be theory driven, they overstate

their importance to policy and management, and they fail to capture the significance of politics and institutions. If BPA is

to be more than a passing fancy, the limits of experimentation must be reevaluated for public administration.

Evidence for Practice

• BPA at present is more about the advocacy of experiments than a behavioral agenda for understanding and

shaping public administration in practice.

• Too few of the limitations of experiments in the context of public administration, as both a scholarly field

and a context of practice, are considered in contemporary BPA scholarship.

• Experiments can enhance our exploration of what works in practice but cannot inform management without

an integrated program that includes nonexperimental research and theory building.

The field of public administration has of late

seen an influx of work called “behavioral

public administration” (BPA) that appeals to

psychological theories and methods and calls for a micro-

level lens on individuals. Still, micro-level research can

be traced back at least to the classic work of Frederick

Taylor (1911). Many twentieth century scholars who

have shaped our field—some trained in psychology—

recognized the importance of studying individual

behavior within organizations (cf. Barnard 1938;

Maslow 1943). We observe that BPA presently

constitutes little more than an appeal to experimental

methods. With an eye toward strengthening its legacy,

we focus on its limitations: BPA experiments tend not to

be theory driven, they provide less useful information for

policy and management than is often claimed, and they

fail to capture the significance of politics and institutions

and, thus, are only weakly integrated into the scholarly

literature of public administration.

The Behavioral Revolution in Public Administration

Herbert Simon challenged mainstream economics in

his critique of the rational aspects of human social

behavior, arguing that because of cognitive and

emotional limitations, humans are unable to make

purely rational decisions to find optimal solutions;

instead they make decisions that are satisfactory

and that will suffice; that is, that satisfice. Simon

waded into the deepest water of “self-conscious”

study in public administration, viewing it primarily

as qualitative, atheoretical, and descriptive. In his

Administrative Behavior, Simon (1947a; 1957) brought

the behavioral revolution to our field, advocating for

the application of methods of the natural sciences to

human behavior (see Battaglio and Hall 2020). The

goal of this behavioral approach was to make public

administration a more scientific field of study. It was a

bellwether of a micro-level, quantitative, and empirical

approach that long preceded BPA.

Today, so much research in public administration has

focused on micro-level behavior (the worker as the

unit of analysis) that Moynihan (2018, 2) observes

that “some of us who had been doing behavioral

research, but not using those terms, woke up one

day to find that we had become good behavioralists.”

From street-level bureaucracy to public service

motivation, micro-level analysis of individuals has

been a dominant form of inquiry in our field. But

Anthony M Bertelli Norma M. Riccucci

Bocconi University, Pennsylvania State University Rutgers University-Newark

We thank Nicola Palma for excellent research assistance.

Norma M. Riccucci is Board of Governors

Distinguished Professor in the School of

Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers

University-Newark.

Email: riccucci@rutgers.edu

Anthony M. Bertelli is Professor of

Political Science at Bocconi University

and holds the Sherwin-Whitmore Chair of

Liberal Arts at Pennsylvania State University.

Email: anthony.bertelli@unibocconi.it

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