The Persistence of Hierarchy

Introduction

Hierarchical governance in advanced democracies is being replaced by collaborative arrangements among public and private organizations: so goes a popular narrative within public administration, one of many narratives that constitute a discourse of transformation in state–society relations. While these narratives vary by the nationality of their authors and by how authors interpret what they perceive as significant change, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have been claiming that revolutionary advances in information and communication technologies, a public policy agenda of rapidly increasing complexity, and more engaged civil society actors distrustful of government have inaugurated an era, often characterized as ‘the new governance’, that, to some, is approaching ‘governance without government’. If not obsolete, traditional institutions of hierarchical control, public bureaucracies, are, in this view, partnering with and becoming subordinate to a wide variety of consociational arrangements empowered and largely controlled not by government but by civil society.

This new governance discourse emerged late in the twentieth century concurrently with the more robust and popular discourse celebrating the advent of a ‘new public management’ (NPM). The central NPM claim was that hierarchical, rule-bound governance was giving way to institutional arrangements featuring market-like competition and choice among entities, public and private, that provide publicly- financed services. While the new governance narrative has outlasted NPM as a theme of transformist arguments, administrative technologies that mimic the incentives of competitive markets are now widely accepted by policymakers as legitimate tools of government, if not of the new paradigm many advocates foresaw.

Post-hierarchical narratives also incorporate other themes and logics, including, for example, revolutionary advances in interpersonal communication and societal access to information — digital-era governance — and post-industrial developments in direct democracy. Some of these narratives proceed from a critical theory perspective and promote non-instrumental conceptions of governance based on post-rational, non-oppressive, deliberative, and self-liberating institutions and altogether different principles of democratic legitimacy than those associated with traditional representative institutions, even in their transformed versions.

[Page 219]A strong-minded group of dissenters contests these narratives, arguing that public bureaucracies remain essential to the effective functioning of representative democracy. Changes in the technologies and practices of governance, they insist, extend and elaborate but do not replace traditional principles of democratic delegation and control. Although posing new problems of accountability, these adaptations are, in this counter-narrative, responsive to the increasing interdependence of governments and civil society as they confront complex new and emerging policy challenges. So long, however, as public policies depend on authority and resources provided through representative institutions, these dissenters argue that hierarchically- ordered administration structures reflecting the rule of law will remain at the heart of liberal representative governance.

These kinds of claims and counterclaims raise two basic questions. First, how and to what extent is hierarchical governance actually being transformed, if it is? What kinds of evidence support, or might support, various narratives either of adaptation or of transformation? Secondly, why is transforming change occurring, if indeed it is? Hierarchy and bureaucratic government have emerged and been elaborated over thousands of years, surviving dynastic change, wars, dramatic economic transformations, and the revolutionary emergence of popular democracy. If we are arriving at public administration's equivalent of ‘the end of history’, why is that happening now?

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