Unit 6
Marketization of the State: The New Public Management and the Citizen as Consumer

Introduction

Unit 6 investigates the place and impact of the new public management, managerialism, and administrative systems on politics, public policy, and governance. While the public service is perhaps the one component of government the general public most commonly deals with (through interactions such as filing tax returns and applying for government benefits or government issued documents) the role of public administration in the larger system of governance remains something of a mystery to most of us. Nevertheless, public administration does play a significant part in our governance structures.

Over the last several decades, public administration has been the subject of restructuring, a process nicely captured in the catchphrase “reinventing government.” Unlike previous periods of public administration reform, where the general view has been that “change agendas” come and go but public service status quo is unaffected, this time things are different. The reforms introduced through neo-liberal restructuring are not transient and superficial but prolonged, deep, and substantive (Peters and Savoie 1998, 3). Among other things, they call for the state bureaucracy to be shrunk to a much smaller core; market and contractual mechanisms to guide bureaucratic transactions; the treatment of citizens more like customers; the movement to alternative service delivery (ASD) mechanisms; and the encouragement of private-public partnerships. This unit explores the impact and implications of these public administration reforms for the Canadian political system.

Learning Objectives

When you have completed Unit 6, you should be able to achieve the following learning objectives.

  1. Explain the politics-administration dichotomy
  2. Explore the concepts of the “implicit civil service contract” and “burning the village” with regard to public administration
  3. Outline in what ways the nature of the relationship between the civil service and the elected policy-makers has changed in recent years
  4. Identify and explain the significance of the managerialist approach to governance
  5. Elucidate why it is so difficult to measure the effectiveness of managerialist reform
  6. Describe what is meant by the concept of the “marketization of the state”
  7. Clarify the concept of “public markets” and explain their role in the delivery of “public goods”
  8. Explain the significance of the shift in the view of public administration from citizen to customer
  9. Explore the ways in which changes in the workings of public administration affects governance