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‘Governance Fatigue’ and Public Mismanagement: The Case for Classic Bureaucracy and Public Values

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Configurations, Dynamics and Mechanisms of Multilevel Governance

Part of the book series: Comparative Territorial Politics ((COMPTPOL))

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Abstract

The scholarly discourse about public administration has been shaped in recent decades by an anti-Weberian approach which left many students of the public sector unsatisfied due to its one-sidedness and a resulting distance towards real-world governmental agencies and the way they function. After all, public administration, on the one hand, remains hierarchical, rule-bound and ‘bureaucratic’ in nature as characterized by Max Weber. On the other hand, classic bureaucracy is far less monolithic, hierarchized and rule-bound than its stylized textbook version may make us believe. Bureaucratic governance requires autonomy, discretion, institutional integrity and a sense of responsibility among the leadership. To neglect these classic ingredients of bureaucracy may imply to neglect its classic virtues as well. This chapter illustrates this risk with an empirical case of public mismanagement in Germany that claimed the lives of 21 people.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

    Wolfgang Seibel

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  1. Wolfgang Seibel
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Correspondence to Wolfgang Seibel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Nathalie Behnke

  2. Department of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Jörg Broschek

  3. Institute for Political Science, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Jared Sonnicksen

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Seibel, W. (2019). ‘Governance Fatigue’ and Public Mismanagement: The Case for Classic Bureaucracy and Public Values. In: Behnke, N., Broschek, J., Sonnicksen, J. (eds) Configurations, Dynamics and Mechanisms of Multilevel Governance. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05511-0_4

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