Citizen participation matters. Bureaucratic discretion matters more
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| Author | Sarah L. Young,James Tanner |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12867 |
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Citizen participation matters. Bureaucratic
discretion matters more
Sarah L. Young
1
| James Tanner
2
1
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw,
Georgia, USA
2
University of North Georgia, Dahlonega,
Georgia, USA
Correspondence
Sarah L. Young, Kennesaw State University,
School of Government & International Affairs,
Kennesaw, GA, USA.
Email: SHinkelY@Kennesaw.edu
Abstract
New Public Governance theory increases citizen participation
and expands bureaucrats' roles in the work of government.
Citizen participation creates new mechanisms for citizens to
influence the policy process. Bureaucrats' expanded roles
allow for broader bureaucratic discretion over policy imple-
mentation. When citizens' and bureaucrats' views on public
management decisions collide, whose views prevail? Do
citizen volunteers or bureaucrats have greater influence over
public decisions? We answer this question by studying the
U.S. Department of Energy's initiative to engage citizens in
environmental clean-up decisions. We assess 10 years of
meeting records and administrative decisions using a three-
step, mixed-method analysis to identify, weigh, and test the
influence of citizen participation and bureaucratic discretion.
The results indicate that while citizen participation matters,
bureaucratic discretion has a more significant influence over
administrative decision-making. The findings expose holes in
New Public Governance theory, which has implications for
democracy and demands deeper thought into structuring
citizen participation.
1|INTRODUCTION
Successive waves of public management theory increasingly prioritize citizens' roles in carrying out public goals.
Most recently, New Public Governance theory (NPG) emphasizes citizens' roles in achieving public goals, as opposed
Received: 1 August 2021 Revised: 11 May 2022 Accepted: 17 May 2022
DOI: 10.1111/padm.12867
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2022 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Public Admin. 2023;101:747–771. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/padm 747
to focusing on outcomes. NPG, rooted in sociology's network theory, links the stages of policy development
and implementation by emphasizing citizens' roles in the policy model (Kickert, 1993). Citizens become the
linking agents, interweaving multiple and complex institutional relationships within society (Kettl, 2000;
Kooiman, 1999). NPG prioritizes citizen engagement over all else because it is seen as the solution to system
fragmentation (Rhodes, 1997).
Under the lens of NPG, citizen participation is paramount to the whole policy process. There are many different
definitions and theoretical models of citizen participation, many of which are categorized as coproduction. Though
there are no clear, consistent definitions of citizen participation or coproduction, in their most basic forms, they both
require citizens to interact with public managers in a broad array of activities that pursue a public good or service
(Nabatchi et al., 2017, p. 766). NPG's pluralistic view sees citizens (meaning individual stakeholders with permanent
legal resident status [Roberts, 2021]) as linking agents, bridging inter-organizational relationships across organiza-
tions, bureaucracies, and even markets (Rhodes, 2015). Citizens are given front row seats to aspects of public admin-
istration that they would not otherwise have access to Yang and Pandey (2011) and are viewed as equals in the
governance process.
In a similar vein, public administrators are expected to implement policy and often have broad bureaucratic
discretion over the best ways to reach policy goals. Public administrators are integral to and have formative
effects on translating policy goals into policy implementation (Blom-Hansen et al., 2020). NPG expands the
role of public administrators from program managers focused on achieving policy goals to governance network
managers (Torfing & Triantafillou, 2013) responsible for overseeing “complex, nonroutine issues, policies, and
relationships in networks—that are meta-governing, boundary spanning, and collaborative”(Rhodes, 2015,
p. 45). At the same time, public administrators are expected to be politically neutral individuals capable of
managing competing and potentially conflicting stakeholder views (Spicer, 2001). In actuality, public adminis-
trators use broad discretion to introduce multiple avenues of political influence (Young et al., 2020). Problems
arise when we expand the role and influence of public managers while at the same time expecting them to
ignore their moral codes (Spicer, 2001).
The purpose of this paper is to assess the influences of citizen participation and bureaucratic discretion (both of
which are expanded under NPG theory) and determine which has a more significant impact on administrative
decision-making. These findings are important to theory and practice. Theoretically, the findings of this study could
provide evidence that NPG's claim that the process matters more than the outcome is a falsity. Citizens must be
equal governance partners in the policy process to have the positive impacts that NPG purports. Practically, this
research is important because the findings could have significant implications for when and how public managers
structure citizen participation. If citizens are only superficially engaged, their participation could negatively impact
the policy process, and potentially democracy.
This study uses a multi-step, mixed-method analysis of the Department of Energy's (DOE) citizen engage-
ment initiative. In the first part of this study, we examine the influences of citizen participation and bureaucratic
discretion through the lens of NPG. We build a theoretical argument about citizens' and bureaucrats' respective
influences on public management decisions. Second, we provide a case overview of the DOE's citizen initiative,
which is a citizen volunteer board that provides “information, advice, and recommendations concerning issues
affecting the EM (environmental management) program at various sites”(U.S. Office of Environmental
Management, n.d.). Third, we discuss the data and unique analytical approach. We describe how and why we
operationalized Moral Foundation Theory (MFT), conducted a second dual coded content analysis to weight cit-
izen and bureaucrat influence, and then tested for statistically significant differences across the groups' influ-
ences. Fourth, we present the results from each analytical step, which indicates a significant undervaluing of
citizen participation. Finally, we discuss the potential repercussions of undervaluing citizen participation in
terms of the theoretical implications to NPG, the practical implications of wasting public resources, and the
potential long-term implications it could cost democracy. We end with recommendations on steps forward and
lessons to be learned from the nonprofit volunteer literature.
748 YOUNG AND TANNER
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