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Sample Syllabus
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COURSE DESCRIPTION: ON THE STUDY
OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Public Administration is the general field of study for understanding what govern-
ments at different levels and their partners and contractors do, how public poli-
cies and programs are determined, designed, and implemented, how public funding
is generated and public resources allocated among competing priorities. Public
administration encompasses how governments and their partners at different levels
plan, organize, provide, produce, distribute and assess the roles and responsibilities
Public Administration seeks to enhance governance at all levels—both in inter–
national terms, to promote understanding of public policy and management in
different states and economies around the globe, and in multi-jurisdictional terms,
to promote trust and effective relationships among different stakeholders and part-
ners across the public, private, and non-profit sectors.
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COURSE REQUIREMENTS
1. Students are required to attend all scheduled class sessions. It is the student’s
responsibility to ascertain all announcements and assignments, and to obtain class
handouts, and provide notice, in advance if possible, if you will not be in class.
2. Students are expected to complete the assigned readings and written assign-
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY CODE
Please read the Academic Integrity Code in your student handbook if you are
CLASS SCHEDULE FOR
INTRODUCING
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Week Lecture Subject Readings
1 Class Introduction
Defining Public Administration:
Chapter 1
2 The Political and Cultural Environment of Public
Policy and its Administration:
• The Context of Public Policy Formulation
• Political vs. Managerial Perspectives
Chapter 2
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Sample Syllabus
Week Lecture Subject Readings
4 Government/Governance in an Intergovernmental
Context:
• A Critique of Devolution and Federalism
Chapter 4
5 Law and Ethics in Public Administration:
• What the Public Manager Needs to Know about
Chapter 5
6 Organizations in the Public Sector:
• Management and Organization
• The Tenets of Organizational Design and Structure
• Public Administration’s Pursuit of Bureaucracy
and Reform
Chapter 6
7 Organization Behavior and Developmentin the
Public Sector:
Organizations Still Matter?
Chapter 7
8 Public Management and Technology:
• Understanding Managerialism
• Management Systems and Fads
• Productivity, TQM, BPR
• E-Government and E-Management
Chapter 8
9 Leadership and Management in the Public Sector:
Chapters 9 and 10
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Week Lecture Subject Readings
11 Public Management and HRM:
• Collective Bargaining and Unions
Chapter 11
12 Public Management and Budgeting:
Chapter 13
13 Understanding Public Sector Accountability and
Performance:
• The Context of Evaluation—Policy vs. Programs
• The Pursuit of Economy, Efficiency, and
Effectiveness in Government
• Performance Measurement and GPRA
• High Performance vs. High Reliability in
Chapter 14
SAMPLE FINAL EXAM QUESTIONS
Note to Instructors: Good essay questions for a final exam in a Public Administra-
tion course should cross chapter boundaries and require the student to apply the
concepts they have mastered to understanding changes and challenges in the exter–
nal environment. (And, after all, specific multiple choice questions are provided for
each chapter.)
Provided here are 20 sample questions (all of which we have used in our classes
as part of either an in-class or take-home final) for your possible use. We favor a
longer format for questions, but have also provided a set of eight shorter questions
that could be used.
1. Increasing importance is being given to understanding how public administra-
tors should operate in the twenty-first-century era of “networks” and “gover–
nance”. Part of this relates to the challenge public managers face in informing
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Sample Syllabus
(b) supporting participatory democracy, and (c) promoting social innovation?
2. The “virtual state” is a euphemism for rapidly forming new tech/info plat-
forms for interactivity and connectivity that will replace the institutional
forms of bureaucracy built over the past century as part of the advance of
3. While there has always been criticism of the accomplishments of adminis-
trative change efforts in US public administration, new voices are question-
ing the direction and vision of how to make bureaucracy more responsive
and responsible. Jocelyne Bourgon, a distinguished Canadian public
administrator, in a 2011 work entitled A New Synthesis of Public Admin-
4. Organizational structure has been a core premise of the study of public
management since Weber’s foundational treatise on Bureaucracy. Much of
the reform effort of the latter part of the twentieth century has focused on
moving past hierarchical forms of organizational management and various
problems spawned by rigid control systems and over-regulation. But this
debate is very bi-modal. In highly developed countries with a history of
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5. Human resources management in the past century has largely been con-
cerned with preserving the ideals of the traditional merit system—such
as safeguarding entry, promotion, and tenure within the civil service. The
assumption has always been that the public servants are motivated more
6. The premise of having an “executive budget” as opposed to a legislative-
budget dominant spending process was a central thread in twentieth-century
government public administration reform. Once the executive budget was
established, the emphasis moved to how budgets should seek to improve
7. While budgeting now debates how to distinguish between outputs and
outcomes, two larger questions have emerged. First—budgets have become
more and more political—meaning that budget standoffs and government
shutdowns show that budgeting is not securing the cooperation of the exec-
budgeting both unworkable and irrelevant?
8. The first discussion of ethics in public administration in the 1940s was about
means of control and the growing recognition that the roles of modern
government officials would be increasingly more specialized and complex—
making it more difficult for adequate checks and balances to be established.
Fast forward through Watergate and other political scandals, and the central
debate about ethical behavior and public integrity in government has shifted.
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Sample Syllabus
9. The study of organizations played a central role in the development of
Public Administration. Originally, two schools of thought developed the-
ories about the nature, design, and behaviors of organizations, not only
in government but in society. Unfortunately, neither school really debated
the merits of its position with the other—what each thought was import-
ant about organizations was largely ignored or rejected by the other.
10. Few envisioned ethics developing into a cornerstone of public administration
reform, perhaps largely because the very definition of bureaucracy assumed
legal and therefore ethical restraint in public service behaviors. Over time
11. Some have argued the development of public administration in the late
nineteenth to early twentieth century was a first part of the foundation of
the American government reform effort. Others point to the various gov-
ernment commissions that have examined and prescribed changes in how
government should be organized and managed. Briefly discuss the concept
12. Human resources management in the past century has largely been con-
cerned with traditional merit system issues such as safeguarding entry,
promotion, and tenure within the civil service. But the least decade has been
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13. No discussion of public management is finished until evaluation is
addressed. Indeed—one of the early management theorists in public admin-
14. The first major statement about boundaries within public administration
concerned the politics-administration dichotomy. By the mid-twentieth
century, it had been largely rejected as impractical with the advent of big
government, large centralized organizations, and complex administrative
and regulatory processes. Some now argue that there should be a new
Why or why not?
15. In the first textbook (White) dedicated to public administration in the
United States, the assumption was clearly stated that “public administration
should start from a base of management rather than a foundation of law
16. Public Administration has with its inception always been considered a
reform by itself. The merit system, executive budgeting, appointed admin-
istrators, and competitive procurement systems, all hallmarks of public
administration, were hailed as major efforts to improve government effi-
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17. “Our faith in managers trained in the profession of management collapses
in the face of how governments work” noted Henry Mintzberg, a leading
Management Theorist in a classic HBR article. What Mintzberg was allud-
ing to is now referred to as the “quality of governance” issue—specifically
18. The study of organizations—their goals, designs and structures, their rules
and processes for managing human performance—has been a cornerstone of
public administration. But much has changed within organizational theory
in a dynamic new century dominated by new forms of groups (networks)
19. Most of the debate within public budgeting in the past century has been
about how decisions are made. The “systems theorists” believed that bud-
geting decisions can be continually improved with better policy analysis and
program management evaluation, while the “incrementalists” saw budgeting
20. The emergence of governance and globalization has shaken conventional
ideas about the forms and functions of governments in this century. The
problem with government(s), and by extension, Public Administration—
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intergovernmental relations. Now we have two serious big challenges that
threaten to totally undermine the relationship between governance and
intergovernmental management. The more immediate challenge is the global
migration and refugee crises—whether it is Syrians and Afghans seeking
SHORTER ESSAY QUESTIONS
1. Do you think bureaucracy (a) was a good idea for its time but has simply
failed to evolve with change, (b) was a necessary first step for developing
public organizations but is no longer needed, or (c) had some serious flaws
that could be overlooked at first but with change, needed to replaced?
2. According to a leading textbook among business schools, “The problem of
3. What constitutes High Performance in Government—should managers
“pursue excellence” by taking risks and experimenting with new manage-
ment constructs? Or should managers seek steady, low variation, high-quality
administrative “constancy”?
4. What should be the “goal” of budgeting in government? Should it be more
political, i.e. to allocate resources to programs and policy directives that the
majority desire—or at least what elected leaders advocate—or should it be
more managerial and seek to ensure integrity, transparency, and efficiency in
how resources are expended by government agencies?
5. Looking to the future, non-profits and NGOs seem destined to be even more
significant in the coming decade. Partly this is because non-profits seem to be
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7. Public management has always been in the forefront in the pursuit of diver–
sity, positing that government’s credibility with its polity is linked to how
well its public service mirrors the population it seeks to serve. But even the
most ardent proponents of promoting diversity and social equity in govern-
ment would agree that a new theory of representative bureaucracy must be
