Legitimacy Of Public Administration: Crisis And Beyonds

Legitimacy has been a central issue since the emergency of Public Administration. In 1946, Herbert Simon criticized the management principles summarized by Gulick and Urwick as being no more than proverbs. Simon-Waldo Debate in 1952 is the symbol of identity criris of Public Administration. Vincent Ostrom has discussed the intelligence crisis in American Public Administration, which he called "identity crisis" in 1973. The identity crisis of Public Administration continues after that. The whole perspectives of the legitimacy of public administration cannot be revealed simply by the deviation from thoughts of The Federalists, although the theory of Public Administration mainly stemmed from American. The issue of legitimacy of public administration must be researched in the combination dimension of intelligence tradition and the inner logic of public administration, the deeper analyze and the more convincing conclusions can be obtained only by this.The theoretical development from bureaucratic administration to democratic administration theory is also a process from construction to crisis and finally to the rectifying of legitimacy of public administration. Bureaucratic administration obtained its discipline independence by politic-administration dichotomy, set up the public administrative organization by bureaucracy, took the scientific management as its principal, gained the field legitimacy by democracy-avoid and value free. However, the crisis accumulated within the bureaucratic administration can’t be settled within the paradigm, for the inherent tensions between politics and administration, bureaucracy and democracy, efficiency and publicity. The rising of democratic administration, which contains NPA, the Blacksburg Manifesto, NPM, NPS and governance theory, aimed at the deficiency of bureaucratic administration, introduced the value of democracy and publicity into public administration, which balanced the value of public administration and found outlets for the legitimacy crisis of public administration. It’s in this sense that democratic administration makes a theory advance to bureaucratic administration.Referenced the legitimacy structure of the field of politics, management and law, and based on the structure of public administration itself, the legitimacy structure of public administration can be divided into Organizational and Institutional Legitimacy, Practicing Legitimacy and Academic Legitimacy. From this point, we can reconstruct the concept of legitimacy of public administration, expand the meaning of legitimacy of public administration by putting the institutional and practical legitimacy into it, and give a unified intension and extension of the term. By structure analysis, we can describe the legitimacy of public administration in detail. The legitimacy crisis of public administration thus can be explained as follows:the regulative, normative and cognitive legitimacy crisis within the organizational and institutional legitimacy, the process and performance legitimacy crisis within the practice legitimacy, and the lack of the discipline consensus, poor research methods and the weak academic community identity confirm within the academic legitimacy. The outlets which democratic administration offered to legitimacy of public administration lay on this.As to the research method of this article, historical research and literature research are employed to make a longitudinal and diachronic dimension of the issue, while comparative research and structure analyze method make a latitude and transverse dimension. Through the integrated dimension, a unified interpretation system was founded, and the theoretical explanatory power was strengthened.