Paradoxes of Complementarity in Public Administration: Part 3 – Perusing the Periodic Table of Public Personnel

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

By Erik Devereux
January 24, 2025

This is the third column on paradoxes among theories of public administration that inhabit three distinct levels of analysis—constitutional/institutional, organizational and personnel (first column, second column). Complementarity in this context refers to how our subject of scientific investigation—a public administration—can evidence contradictory properties simultaneously. To fully appreciate complementarity, attention must turn to the veritable atoms in the system—individual public servants within a bureaucracy. Let us agree for now to put aside the debate initiated by Ted Lowi in his 1991 presidential address to the American Political Science Association in which he accused Herb Simon of having damaged social science by focusing attention on individual decision makers to the exclusion of other levels of analysis. A future entry in this series of columns will return to the Lowi-Simon debate.

Research on public administrators (again: at the individual level) can be divided into three large clumps.

One of these clumps consists of the general body of research regarding workers in all workplace settings. These approaches emerge from organizational and personal psychology in conjunction with anthropology, sociology, and behavioral economics. Here are found KITA, Douglas McGregor’s Theory X vs. Theory Y, Equity Theory and Expectancy Theory. Principal-Agent Theory also lives in this clump with its focus on how to structure implicit and explicit contracts to override the endemic human elements of worker discretion.

Out of the first clump emerged another body of research unique to public administration: The literature on Public Service Motivation (PSM). According to studies of PSM, many of those employed in public and nonprofit organizations have a high level of intrinsic motivation related to such values as “making a difference” and “serving the public interest” rather than seeking the highest possible levels of income and wealth. There are controversies surrounding PSM include those who argue it simply does not exist. As someone who has taught in the MPA and MPP core since 1991 I personally believe PSM is real and I also believe its presence within individual students or workers cannot easily be explained. (For those of you who are parents, good luck explaining your children’s personalities.)

I already briefly discussed the third clump in the prior column within this series: the literature on street-level bureaucrats. In particular, research showing how some street-level bureaucrats conceive of themselves as citizen-agents acting to help the public overcome administrative hurdles speaks to a version of individual motivation situated in a systemic context. Whereas PSM arises intrinsically, the citizen-agent frame in large part arises through iterative interactions between a public administrator, “red tape” and members of public. That said, in some instances we find street-level bureaucrats who are completely devoted to being state-agents and strictly enforce the rules and regulations promulgated from above. There are those workers who oscillate between both modes depending on the characteristics of those among the public who are appealing for their assistance.

Complementarity means that, in the case of a specific worker in a public organization, any of these theories might be evident depending on what you choose to measure! Complementarity suggests that it is a fool’s errand to seek one theory of worker behavior in public administration that either eliminates or subsumes the others. Depending on context, hypothesis and measurement, you will get different results using the same research subjects. Not that there is anything wrong with that—after all, PAR needs papers.

This complementarity becomes absolutely fundamental to public administration practice when we seek to change organizational behavior. Almost all approaches to improving performance, increasing responsiveness, fostering innovation or otherwise influencing public sector organizations do little to modify the individual “atoms” in the “material”— those workers I have just discussed. Go ahead and reorganize, impose performance management regimes, or otherwise move around the big building blocks of government. If little is done regarding the people inside of those blocks then there should not be high expectations of achieving significant, long lasting change.

Shockingly, incoming President Donald Trump and his White House advisors completely understand this. Their tactic is to terrorize key public servants in the federal government in the hopes of causing mass resignations. Instead of trying to get the existing “atoms” into a different “state of mind”, Trump wants to insert entirely different “atoms” into the system. Among the many problems likely to occur is that the people Trump wants to put into government evidence little or no PSM. Instead, they have strong ideologies, a generic hatred of government, and political loyalties which, among other aspects, tend to worship money and wealth. The U.S. is about to engage in an experiment regarding the realities of PSM and other forms of complementarity in the forthcoming efforts to remake the federal bureaucracies in Trump’s image.

This is one of the junctures in history where we must have faith in our knowledge as a community of research and practice. Our accumulated knowledge unambiguously shows that what President Trump, the Project 2025 team at the Heritage Foundation and others of this ilk have in mind for the federal bureaucracy simply will not work as intended. Now we wait and see.

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Author: Erik Devereux is Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy, Management, and Analytics at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He has a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Political Science, 1985) and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (Government, 1993). He is the author of Methods of Policy Analysis: Creating, Deploying, and Assessing Theories of Change (available for free here). Email: [email protected]. More content is available here.

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