The Public Interest as a Practical Tool

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Thomas Barth
May 1, 2026

As I considered an appropriate final paper assignment for my MPA Capstone course this semester, I decided that a useful synthesizing exercise would be for students to reflect on a public administration challenge from the lens of the public interest. As Richard Flathman noted in 1966,

“The problems associated with ‘public interest’ are among the crucial problems of politics. Determining justifiable governmental policy in the face of conflict and diversity is central to the political order; it is a problem which is never solved in any final sense but which we are constantly trying to solve. The much-discussed difficulties with the concept are difficulties with morals and politics. We are free to abandon the concept, but if we do we will simply have to wrestle with the problems under some other heading.”

A thorough discussion of the public interest as a concept in political and public administration history is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is worth reflecting on a few examples of how we might use this lens to assist in determining what is in the public interest and when it is absent.

Carol Lewis suggests the duty to pursue the public interest is defined by two demands made on professionals in public service: (1) to reflect on its many facets disclosed through broad representation and dialogue and (2) to engage genuinely the duties and values associated with four aspects of public interest: democracy, mutuality, sustainability and legacy.

Jack Knott notes that our separation of powers system creates multiple overseers for bureaucratic agencies, giving them a degree of discretionary power not easily attained in a unitary system. However, the public interest can only be served if this discretion is checked by legal due process, public transparency requirements and professional norms. With these checks in place, executive agencies can better carry out the state’s activities and policies in the public interest and join the overall system of checks and balances as a protection against undue influence of political factions.

Bozeman examines the negative proposition in his consideration of public value failure, which occurs when: (1) mechanisms for value articulation and aggregation have broken down; (2) “imperfect monopolies” occur; (3) benefit hoarding occurs; (4) there is a scarcity of providers of public value; (5) a short time horizon threatens public value; (6) a focus on substitutability of assets threatens conservation of public resources; and (7) market transactions threaten fundamental human subsistence.

A final very practical effort to frame an operational view of the public interest is provided by Charles Goodsell, who identifies six “constitutive rules or values” that speak directly to the public administrator’s world:

• Legality-morality: adherence to law, the Constitution and basic precepts of moral behavior such as honesty and integrity
• Political responsiveness: conformity to the overriding wishes of citizens or relevant groups, similar to Downs’ minimal consensus model of preserving majority rule and minority rights
• Political consensus: commitment to finding common ground among competing interests rather than concern with self-interest
• Concern for logic: justifiable actions that are logical and tied to reasonable purposes
• Concern for effects: ensuring policy effects on all affected persons are examined and determined to be beneficial, fair and consistent with community values
• Agenda awareness: concern for inarticulated or unrepresented needs within society and the interests of ignored or powerless groups

Goodsell argues that these six rules or values can be used as a screen to determine the degree to which a policy, program or action is in the public interest, and reflects that a public administrator must be concerned not just with what is accomplished but how it is achieved.

As public administrators work within political agendas from both sides of the aisle that purport to be promoting the public interest, it is vitally important to reflect on how these claims stack up against reasonable standards that can be derived from scholarly writing grounded in objective reflection on the Constitution and other foundational sources.

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 Author: Dr. Tom Barth is a Professor Emeritus in the Gerald G. Fox MPA program at UNC Charlotte. [email protected].

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