PA

Definitions

Even in the digital age, public servants tend to work with both paper documents and computer files: "There has been a significant shift from paper to electronic records during the past two decades. Although government institutions continue to print and maintain paper documents as “official records,” the vast majority of records are now created and stored in electronic format."[10] (pictured here is Stephen C. Dunn, Deputy Comptroller for the US Navy)

In 1947 Paul H. Appleby defined public administration as "public leadership of public affairs directly responsible for executive action". In a democracy, it has to do with such leadership and executive action in terms that respect and contribute to the dignity, the worth, and the potentials of the citizen.[11] One year later, Gordon Clapp, then Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority defined public administration "as a public instrument whereby democratic society may be more completely realized." This implies that it must "relate itself to concepts of justice, liberty, and fuller economic opportunity for human beings" and is thus "concerned with "people, with ideas, and with things."[12] According to James D. Carroll & Alfred M. Zuck, the publication by "Woodrow Wilson of his essay, "The Study of Administration" in 1887 is generally regarded as the beginning of public administration as a specific field of study".[13]

Drawing on the democracy theme and discarding the link to the executive branch, Patricia M. Shields asserts that public administration "deals with the stewardship and implementation of the products of a living democracy."[14] The key term "product" refers to "those items that are constructed or produced" such as prisons, roads, laws, schools, and security. "As implementors, public managers engage these products." They participate in the doing and making of the "living" democracy. A living democracy is "an environment that is changing, organic", imperfect, inconsistent and teaming with values. "Stewardship is emphasized because public administration is concerned "with accountability and effective use of scarce resources and ultimately making the connection between the doing, the making and democratic values."[15]

More recently scholars claim that "public administration has no generally accepted definition", because the "scope of the subject is so great and so debatable that it is easier to explain than define".[16] Public administration is a field of study (i.e., a discipline) and an occupation. There is much disagreement about whether the study of public administration can properly be called a discipline, largely because of the debate over whether public administration is a subfield of political science or a subfield of administrative science", the latter an outgrowth of its roots in policy analysis and evaluation research.[16][17] Scholar Donald Kettl is among those who view

public administration "as a subfield within political science".[18] According to Lalor a society with a public authority that provides at least one public good can be said to have a public administration whereas the absence of either (or a fortiori both) a public authority or the provision of at least one public good implies the absence of a public administration. He argues that public administration is the public provision of public goods in which the demand function is satisfied more or less effectively by politics, whose primary tool is rhetoric, providing for public goods, and the supply function is satisfied more or less efficiently by public management, whose primary tools are speech acts, producing public goods. The moral purpose of public administration, implicit in its acceptance of its role, is the maximisation of the opportunities of the public to satisfy its wants.[19]

The North American Industry Classification System definition of the Public Administration (NAICS 91) sector states that public administration "... comprises establishments primarily engaged in activities of a governmental nature, that is, the enactment and judicial interpretation of laws and their pursuant regulations, and the administration of programs based on them". This includes "Legislative activities, taxation, national defense, public order and safety, immigration services, foreign affairs and international assistance, and the administration of government programs are activities that are purely governmental in nature".[20]

From the academic perspective, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the United States defines the study of public administration as "A program that prepares individuals to serve as managers in the executive arm of local, state, and federal government and that focuses on the systematic study of executive organization and management. Includes instruction in the roles, development, and principles of public administration; the management of public policy; executive-legislative relations; public budgetary processes and financial management; administrative law; public personnel management; professional ethics; and research methods."[21]

History

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. You may improve this article, discuss the issue on the talk page, or create a new article, as appropriate. (February 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Antiquity to the 19th century

Dating back to Antiquity, Pharaohs, kings and emperors have required pages, treasurers, and tax collectors to administer the practical business of government. Prior to the 19th century, staffing of most public administrations was rife with nepotism, favoritism, and political patronage, which was often referred to as a "spoils system". Public administrators have long been the "eyes and ears" of rulers. In medieval times, the abilities to read and write, add and subtract were as dominated by the educated elite as public employment. Consequently, the need for expert civil servants whose ability to read and write formed the basis for developing expertise in such necessary activities as legal record-keeping, paying and feeding armies and levying taxes. As the European Imperialist age progressed and the militarily powers extended their hold over other continents and people, the need for a sophisticated public administration grew.

The eighteenth-century noble, King Frederick William I of Prussia, created professorates in Cameralism in an effort to train a new class of public administrators. The universities of Frankfurt an der Oder and University of Halle were Prussian institutions emphasizing economic and social disciplines, with the goal of societal reform. Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi was the most well-known professor of Cameralism. Thus, from a Western European perspective, Classic, Medieval, and Enlightenment-era scholars formed the foundation of the discipline that has come to be called public administration.

Lorenz von Stein, an 1855 German professor from Vienna, is considered the founder of the science of public administration in many parts of the world. In the time of Von Stein, public administration was considered a form of administrative law, but Von Stein believed this concept too restrictive. Von Stein taught that public administration relies on many prestablished disciplines such as sociology, political science, administrative law and public finance. He called public administration an integrating science, and stated that public administrators should be concerned with both theory and practice. He argued that public administration is a science because knowledge is generated and evaluated according to the scientific method.

Modern American public administration is an extension of democratic governance, justified by classic and liberal philosophers of the western world ranging from Aristotle to John Locke [22] to Thomas Jefferson.[23][24]

Woodrow Wilson

In the United States of America, Woodrow Wilson is considered the father of public administration. He first formally recognized public administration in an 1887 article entitled "The Study of Administration." The future president wrote that "it is the object of administrative study to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and, secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost either of money or of energy."[7] Wilson was more influential to the science of public administration

than Von Stein, primarily due to an article Wilson wrote in 1887 in which he advocated four concepts:

Separation of politics and administration Comparative analysis of political and private organizations Improving efficiency with business-like practices and attitudes toward daily operations Improving the effectiveness of public service through management and by training civil

servants, merit-based assessment

The separation of politics and administration has been the subject of lasting debate. The different perspectives regarding this dichotomy contribute to differentiating characteristics of the suggested generations of public administration.

By the 1920s, scholars of public administration had responded to Wilson's solicitation and thus textbooks in this field were introduced. A few distinguished scholars of that period were, Luther Gulick, Lyndall Urwick, Henri Fayol, Frederick Taylor, and others. Frederick Taylor (1856–1915), another prominent scholar in the field of administration and management also published a book entitled 'The Principles of Scientific Management' (1911). He believed that scientific analysis would lead to the discovery of the 'one best way' to do things and /or carrying out an operation. This, according to him could help save cost and time. Taylor's technique was later introduced to private industrialists, and later into the various government organizations (Jeong, 2007).[25]

Taylor's approach is often referred to as Taylor's Principles, and/or Taylorism. Taylor's scientific management consisted of main four principles (Frederick W. Taylor, 1911):

Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

Provide 'Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task' (Montgomery 1997: 250).

Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system (approach): 'It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.'[26]

The American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) the leading professional group for public administration was founded in 1939. ASPA sponsors the journal Public Administration Review, which was founded in 1940.[27]

US in the 1940s

Luther Gulick (1892–1993) was an expert on public administration.

The separation of politics and administration advocated by Wilson continues to play a significant role in public administration today. However, the dominance of this dichotomy was challenged by second generation scholars, beginning in the 1940s. Luther Gulick's fact-value dichotomy was a key contender for Wilson's proposed politics-administration dichotomy. In place of Wilson's first generation split, Gulick advocated a "seamless web of discretion and interaction".[28]

Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick are two second-generation scholars. Gulick, Urwick, and the new generation of administrators built on the work of contemporary behavioral, administrative, and organizational scholars including Henri Fayol, Fredrick Winslow Taylor, Paul Appleby, Frank Goodnow, and Willam Willoughby. The new generation of organizational theories no longer relied upon logical assumptions and generalizations about human nature like classical and enlightened theorists.

Gulick developed a comprehensive, generic theory of organization that emphasized the scientific method, efficiency, professionalism, structural reform, and executive control. Gulick summarized the duties of administrators with an acronym; POSDCORB, which stands for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. Fayol developed a systematic, 14-point, treatment of private management. Second-generation theorists drew upon private management practices for administrative sciences. A single, generic management theory bleeding the borders between the private and the public sector was thought to be possible. With the general theory, the administrative theory could be focused on governmental organizations. The mid-1940s theorists challenged Wilson and Gulick. The politics-administration dichotomy remained the center of criticism.

1950s to the 1970s

During the 1950s, the United States experienced prolonged prosperity and solidified its place as a world leader. Public Administration experienced a kind of heyday due to the successful war effort and successful post war reconstruction in Western Europe and Japan. Government was

popular as was President Eisenhower. In the 1960s and 1970s, government itself came under fire as ineffective, inefficient, and largely a wasted effort. The costly American intervention in Vietnam along with domestic scandals including the bugging of Democratic party headquarters (the 1974 Watergate scandal) are two examples of self-destructive government behavior that alienated citizens.

The costly Vietnam War alienated US citizens from their government (pictured is Operation Arc Light, a US bombing operation)

There was a call by citizens for efficient administration to replace ineffective, wasteful bureaucracy. Public administration would have to distance itself from politics to answer this call and remain effective. Elected officials supported these reforms. The Hoover Commission, chaired by University of Chicago professor Louis Brownlow, to examine reorganization of government. Brownlow subsequently founded the Public Administration Service (PAS) at the university, an organization which has provided consulting services to all levels of government until the 1970s.[citation needed]

Concurrently, after World War II, the whole concept of public administration expanded to include policy-making and analysis, thus the study of 'administrative policy making and analysis' was introduced and enhanced into the government decision-making bodies. Later on, the human factor became a predominant concern and emphasis in the study of Public Administration. This period witnessed the development and inclusion of other social sciences knowledge, predominantly, psychology, anthropology, and sociology, into the study of public administration (Jeong, 2007).[25] Henceforth, the emergence of scholars such as, Fritz Morstein Marx with his book 'The Elements of Public Administration' (1946), Paul H. Appleby 'Policy and Administration' (1952), Frank Marini 'Towards a New Public Administration' (1971), and others that have contributed positively in these endeavors.

1980s–1990s

In the late 1980s, yet another generation of public administration theorists began to displace the last. The new theory, which came to be called New Public Management, was proposed by David Osborne and Ted Gaebler in their book Reinventing Government.[29] The new model advocated the use of private sector-style models, organizational ideas and values to improve the efficiency and service-orientation of the public sector. During the Clinton Administration (1993–2001), Vice President Al Gore adopted and reformed federal agencies using NPM approaches. In the 1990s, new public management became prevalent throughout the bureaucracies of the US, the UK and, to a lesser extent, in Canada. The original public management theories have roots

attributed to policy analysis, according to Richard Elmore in his 1986 article published in the "Journal of Policy Analysis and Management".[30]

Some modern authors define NPM as a combination of splitting large bureaucracies into smaller, more fragmented agencies, encouraging competition between different public agencies, and encouraging competition between public agencies and private firms and using economic incentives lines (e.g., performance pay for senior executives or user-pay models).[31] NPM treats individuals as "customers" or "clients" (in the private sector sense), rather than as citizens.[32]

Some critics argue that the New Public Management concept of treating people as "customers" rather than "citizens" is an inappropriate borrowing from the private sector model, because businesses see customers as a means to an end (profit), rather than as the proprietors of government (the owners), opposed to merely the customers of a business (the patrons). In New Public Management, people are viewed as economic units not democratic participants which is the hazard of linking an MBA (business administration, economic and employer-based model) too closely with the public administration (governmental, public good) sector. Nevertheless, the NPM model (one of four described by Elmore in 1986, including the "generic model") is still widely accepted at multiple levels of government (e.g., municipal, state/province, and federal) and in many OECD nations.

In the late 1990s, Janet and Robert Denhardt proposed a new public services model in response to the dominance of NPM.[33] A successor to NPM is digital era governance, focusing on themes of reintegrating government responsibilities, needs-based holism (executing duties in cursive ways), and digitalization (exploiting the transformational capabilities of modern IT and digital storage). One example of this is openforum.com.au, an Australian non-for-profit eDemocracy project which invites politicians, senior public servants, academics, business people and other key stakeholders to engage in high-level policy debate.

Another new public service model is what has been called New Public Governance, an approach which includes a centralization of power; an increased number, role and influence of partisan-political staff; personal-politicization of appointments to the senior public service; and, the assumption that the public service is promiscuously partisan for the government of the day.[34]

In the mid-1980s, the goal of community programs in the US was often represented by terms such as independent living, community integration, inclusion, community participation, deinstitutionalization, and civil rights. Thus, the same public policy (and public administration) was to apply to all citizens, inclusive of disability. However, by the 1990s, categorical state systems were strengthened in the US (Racino, in press, 2014), and efforts were made to introduce more disability content into the public policy curricula[35] with disability public policy (and administration) distinct fields in their own right.[36][37] Behaviorists have also dominated "intervention practice" (generally not the province of public administration) in recent years, believing that they are in opposition to generic public policy (termed ecological theory, of the late Urie Brofenbrenner).

Increasingly, public policy academics and practitioners have utilized the theoretical concepts of political economy to explain policy outcomes such as the success or failure of reform efforts and/or the persistence of sub-optimal outcomes.[38]

Core branchesIn academia, the field of public administration consists of a number of sub-fields. Scholars have proposed a number of different sets of sub-fields. One of the proposed models uses five "pillars":[9]

Organizational theory in public administration is the study of the structure of governmental entities and the many particulars inculcated in them.

Ethics in public administration serves as a normative approach to decision making. Policy analysis serves as an empirical approach to decision making. Public budgeting is the activity within a government that seeks to allocate scarce

resources among unlimited demands. Human resource management is an in-house structure that ensures that public service

staffing is done in an unbiased, ethical and values-based manner. The basic functions of the HR system are employee benefits, employee health care, compensation, and many more (e.g., human rights, Americans with Disabilities Act). The executives managing the HR director and other key departmental personnel are also part of the public administration system.

Decision-making models

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Given the array of duties public administrators find themselves performing, the professional administrator might refer to a theoretical framework from which he or she might work. Indeed, many public and private administrative scholars have devised and modified decision-making models.

Niskanen's budget-maximizing

In 1971, Professor William Niskanen proposed a rational choice variation which he called the "budget-maximizing model". He claimed that rational bureaucrats will universally seek to increase the budgets of their units (to enhance their stature), thereby contributing to state growth and increased public expenditure. Niskanen served on President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors; his model underpinned what has been touted as curtailed public spending and increased privatization. However, budgeted expenditures and the growing deficit during the Reagan administration is evidence of a different reality. A range of pluralist authors have critiqued Niskanen's universalist approach. These scholars have argued that officials tend also to be motivated by considerations of the public interest.

Dunleavy's bureau-shaping

The bureau-shaping model, a modification of Niskanen, holds that rational bureaucrats only maximize the part of their budget that they spend on their own agency's operations or give to contractors and interest groups. Groups that are able to organize a "flowback" of benefits to senior officials would, according to this theory, receive increased budgetary attention. For instance, rational officials will get no benefit from paying out larger welfare checks to millions of low-income citizens because this does not serve a bureaucrats' goals. Accordingly, one might instead expect a jurisdiction to seek budget increases for defense and security purposes in place programming. If we refer back to Reagan once again, Dunleavy's bureau shaping model accounts for the alleged decrease in the "size" of government while spending did not, in fact, decrease. Domestic entitlement programming was financially de-emphasized for military research and personnel.

Academic fieldSee also: Master of Public Administration and Doctor of Public Administration

University programs preparing students for careers in public administration typically offer the Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree, although in some universities, an MA in Public Administration is awarded. In the United States, the academic field of public administration draws heavily on political science and administrative law. Some MPA programs include economics courses to give students a background in microeconomic issues (markets, rationing mechanisms, etc.) and macroeconomic issues (e.g., national debt). Scholars such as John A. Rohr write of a long history behind the constitutional legitimacy of government bureaucracy. In Europe (notably in Britain and Germany), the divergence of the field from other disciplines can be traced to the 1720s continental university curriculum. Formally, official academic distinctions were made in the 1910s and 1890s, respectively.

The goals of the field of public administration are related to the democratic values of improving equality, justice, security, efficiency and effectiveness of public services in a non-profit venue; business administration, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with expanding market share, generating revenue and earning profit. For a field built on concepts (accountability, governance, decentralization and clientele), these concepts are often ill-defined and typologies often ignore certain aspects of these concepts (Dubois & Fattore 2009).[39]

The more specific term "public management" refers to ordinary, routine or typical management that aims to achieve public good. In some definitions, "public management" refers to private sector, market-driven perspective on the operation of government. This typically involves putting senior executives on performance contracts, rather than tenured positions, instituting pay-for-performance systems for executives, creating revenue-generating agencies and so on. This latter view is often called "new public management" (NPM) by its advocates. New Public Management represents a reform attempt that emphasizes the professional nature of public administration[citation needed]. NPM advocates aim to replace the academic, moral or disciplinary emphasis of traditional public administration with a professional focus. Some theorists advocate

a "bright line" differentiation of the professional field from related academic disciplines like political science and sociology; it remains interdisciplinary in nature.

One public administration scholar, Donald Kettl, argues that "...public administration sits in a disciplinary backwater", because "...[f]or the last generation, scholars have sought to save or replace it with fields of study like implementation, public management, and formal bureaucratic theory".[18] Kettl states that "public administration, as a subfield within political science...is struggling to define its role within the discipline".[18] He notes two problems with public administration: it "has seemed methodologically to lag behind" and "the field's theoretical work too often seems not to define it"-indeed, "some of the most interesting recent ideas in public administration have come from outside the field".[18]

Public administration theory is the domain in which discussions of the meaning and purpose of government, the role of bureaucracy in supporting democratic governments, budgets, governance, and public affairs takes place. In recent years, public administration theory has periodically connoted a heavy orientation toward critical theory and postmodern philosophical notions of government, governance, and power. However, many public administration scholars support a classic definition of the term emphasizing constitutionality, public service, bureaucratic forms of organization, and hierarchical government.

Comparative public administration

Comparative public administration or CPA is defined as the study of administrative systems in a comparative fashion or the study of public administration in other countries.[39][40] There have been several issues which have hampered the development of comparative public administration, including: the major differences between Western countries and developing countries;[41] the lack of curriculum on this sub-field in public administration programs; and the lack of success in developing theoretical models which can be scientifically tested.[42] Even though CPA is a weakly formed field as a whole, this sub-field of public administration is an attempt at cross-cultural analysis, a "quest for patterns and regularities of administrative action and behavior."[40] CPA is an integral part to the analysis of public administration techniques. The process of comparison allows for more widely applicable polices to be tested in a variety of situations.

Comparative public administration emerged during the post World War II time period in order to seek international developmental strategies which aided in the containment of Communism during the Cold War. (Riggs 1954, Heady 1960)[41] The developers of this field expanded on a general theory, a research agenda, and generalized "lessons learned". (Riggs 1954, Heady 1960) A prominent figure of Public Administration, Woodrow Wilson, commented on the study by saying, "Like principles of civil liberty are everywhere fostering like methods of government; and if comparative studies of the ways and means of government should enable us to offer suggestions which will practicably combine openness and vigor in the administration of such governments with ready docility to all serious, well-sustained public criticism, they will have approved themselves worthy to be ranked among the highest and most fruitful of the great departments of political study."[42] As the financial state of the powering countries began to stabilize toward the decline of the Cold War, the field of CPA began to diminish.[41] The resulting decline caused the lack of further expansion of this study making it irrelevant.

Comparative public administration lacks curriculum, which has prevented it from becoming a major field of study. This lack of understanding of the basic concepts that build this field's foundation has ultimately led to its lack of us. For example, Dr. William Waugh, a professor at Georgia State University has stated "Comparative studies are difficult because of the necessity to provide enough information on the sociopolitical context of national administrative structures and processes for readers to understand why there are differences and similarities."[43] He also asserts, "Although there is sizable literature on comparative public administration it is scattered and dated."[43]

Waugh argues that public administration requires an understanding of different administrative structures and a comparison of different public administration models. The literature to build this base of knowledge is scattered and often hard to obtain. The lack or ill-formed use of comparative public administration has been detrimental for many countries, including the United States. Fred Riggs a political scientist, states that "comparisons to the United States also can be problematic, because of the tendency of many American scholars to presume the American organizational structures and processes are models for other nations to emulate, which was a failing of early developmental administrative studies."[43] In this, he claims the misuse and misapplication of comparative public administration has led to it being underdeveloped.

The development and better use comparative public administration could lead to better understanding. In 2002, the National Security Strategy was used in the battle of hearts and minds.[44] They tried to assimilate with an Arab and Islamic audience to push American values and democracy in an attempt to stop terrorism, when in fact the lack of comparison on the public level was ineffective and backfired.[44] The lack of willingness to understand their culture led to more tension in the Middle East.[44] In conclusion of these events there are not enough resources directed to the study of comparative public administration. For a basic understanding of sociopolitical structure of a society or culture is a key component of comparative public administration.

Despite all of its set backs there are examples of the application of well-formed Comparative Public Administration working in the world today. One of which is the comparison on the national level David Clark an author in this field states "In spite of similarities in public management reform rhetoric, it is argued that there is increasing divergence in the philosophy & practice of public service in the two nations, & and these differences reflect regimes that incorporate different ideals of citizenship."[45] This highlights the benefit of proper comparison of public administration. By examining patterns that emerge in international public sectors one can identify similarities and differences in many things including ideals of citizenship on the local level. Although the United States failed use of Comparative Public Administration in the Middle East is noted, they did properly incorporate it domestically. "During the Clinton administration, the focus on residential energy consumption in the United States was elevated to a high level with the inauguration of the Million Solar Roofs initiative, in which the Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored workshops, developed a pool of existing federal lending and financing options, and worked with partners in the solar and building industries to remove market barriers to strengthen grassroots demand for solar technologies".[46]

This grassroots demand may have come from the comparative knowledge that concluded "In the United States, residential and commercial buildings combined now use 71% of all electricity produced and account for 79% of all electricity expenditures. Annual CO2 emission attributed to electricity consumption in these U.S. buildings constitute 43% of the country's annual total CO2 emission, which is approximately equivalent to the total CO2 emission of Japan, France, and the United Kingdom combined. These levels support the claim of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that energy use in buildings offer more potential for reducing carbon emission than any other single sector in the United States and abroad.".[46] This example compares CO2 emission in the U.S. to other countries and through the buildings sector; the U.S. could cut down on CO2 emission. The field of comparative public administration is often misunderstood for the definition itself is complex and requires layers of understanding. The field will require many more years of collaborative research before it becomes a widely recognized academic study.

Master's degrees

The Knapp-Sanders Building, the home of the School of Government at the University of North Carolina.

Some public administration programs have similarities to business administration programs, in cases where the students from both the Master's in Public Administration (MPA) and Master's in Business Administration (MBA) programs take many of the same courses.[citation needed] In some programs, the MPA (or MAPA) is more clearly distinct from the MBA, in that the MPA often emphasizes substantially different ethical and sociological criteria that pertain to administering government programs for the public good that have not been key criteria for business managers, who typically aim to maximize profit and/or share price.

The MPA is related to similar graduate-level government studies programs including Master of Arts (MA) programs in public affairs, public policy, and political science. MPA degrees may be more likely to include program emphases on policy analysis techniques or other topical focuses such as the study of international affairs as opposed to MA degrees, which tend to focus on constitutional issues such as separation of powers, administrative law, contracting with government, problems of governance and power, and participatory democracy. Some MPA degrees may be more oriented towards training students to undertake public service work tasks, whereas some MA programs may have a more academic, theoretical focus. Some universities offer their Masters in public administration as an MA degree (e.g., Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and the University of Kerala in India).

Some universities offer mid-career Master's programs, sometimes called an MC/MPA, that can be taken part-time (often outside of business hours) by public servants and public service managers who are working full-time. Community programs may offer internships or continuing education credits. One example is the Maxwell School's mid-career Masters at Syracuse University, which was launched by Robert Iversen in the 1970s.

Doctoral degrees

There are two types of doctoral degrees in public administration: the Doctor of Public Administration (DPA) and the Ph.D. in public administration. The DPA is an applied-research doctoral degree in the field of public administration, focusing on the practice of public administration more than on its theoretical aspects. The DPA requires coursework beyond the Masters level and a thesis, dissertation or other doctoral project. Upon successful completion of the doctoral requirements, the title of "Doctor" is awarded and the post-nominals of D.P.A. can be used. Some universities use the Ph.D. as their doctoral degree in public administration (e.g., Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and the University Of Kerala in India). The Ph.D. is typically sought by individuals aiming to become professors of public administration or researchers. Individuals pursuing a Ph.D. in public administration often pursue more theoretical dissertation topics than their DPA counterparts.

Notable scholars

Main article: List of notable public administration scholars

Notable scholars of public administration have come from a range of fields. In the period before public administration existed as its own independent discipline, scholars contributing to the field came from economics, sociology, management, political science, administrative law, and, other related fields. More recently, scholars from public administration and public policy have contributed important studies and theories.

International organizationsThere are a number of international public administration organizations. The Commonwealth Association of Public Administration and Management (CAPAM) is diverse, as it includes the 54 member states of the Commonwealth from India and the UK to Nauru. Its biennial conference brings together ministers of public service, top public officials and leading scholars. The oldest organization is the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS). Based in Brussels, Belgium, the IIAS is a worldwide platform providing a space for exchanges that promote knowledge and good practices to improve the organization and operation of public administration. The IIAS also aims to ensure that public agencies will be in a position to better respond to the current and future expectations and needs of society. The IIAS has set up four entities: the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA), the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA), The Latin American Group for Public Administration (LAGPA) and the Asian Group for Public Administration (AGPA). IASIA is an association of organizations and individuals whose activities and interests focus on public administration and management. The activities of its members include education and training of

administrators and managers. It is the only worldwide scholarly association in the field of public management. EGPA, LAGPA and AGPA are the regional sub-entities of the IIAS. Another body, the International Committee of the US-based Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA), has developed a number of relationships around the world. They include sub regional and National forums like CLAD, INPAE and NISPAcee, APSA, ASPA.[47]

The Center for Latin American Administration for Development (CLAD), based in Caracas, Venezuela, this regional network of schools of public administration set up by the governments in Latin America is the oldest in the region.[48] The Institute is a founding member and played a central role in organizing the Inter-American Network of Public Administration Education (INPAE). Created in 2000, this regional network of schools is unique in that it is the only organization to be composed of institutions from North and Latin America and the Caribbean working in public administration and policy analysis. It has more than 49 members from top research schools in various countries throughout the hemisphere.[49]

NISPAcee is a network of experts, scholars and practitioners who work in the field of public administration in central Europe and Eastern Europe, including the Russian Federation and the Caucasus and Central Asia.[50] The US public administration and political science associations like NASPAA, American Political Science Association (APSA)[51] and American Society of Public Administration (ASPA).[52] These organizations have helped to create the fundamental establishment of modern public administration.

Public management"Public management" is an approach to government administration and non-profit administration that resembles and/or draws on private-sector management and business techniques and approaches. These business approaches often aim to maximize efficiency and effectiveness and provide improved customer service. A contrast is drawn with the study of public administration, which emphasizes the social and cultural drivers of government that many contend (e.g. Graham T. Allison and Charles Goodsell) makes it different from the private sector.[citation needed] Studying and teaching about public management are widely practiced in developed nations.

Organizations

Many entities study public management in particular, in various countries, including:

In the US, the American Society for Public Administration. Indiana University Bloomington

In Canada, the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, the Observatoire de l'Administation publique, and various projects of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and Infrastructure Canada

In the UK, Warwick Business School, the London School of Economics, University College London, the UK local democracy project and London Health Observatory.

In the Netherlands, The Hague University of Applied Sciences In Australia, the Institute of Public Administration Australia.

In France, the École nationale d'administration and the IMPGT, Institute of Public Management and Territorial Governance (CNFPT) in Aix-en-Provence, Aix-Marseille University.

In Belgium, the Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven. In Germany, the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer, the Hertie

School of Governance, the Bachelor and Master of Politics, Administration & International Relations (PAIR) at the Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, and the Bachelor and Master of Public Policy & Management and the Executive Public Management Master of University of Potsdam.

In Switzerland, the University of Geneva and the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration (IDHEAP).

In Italy, the SDA Bocconi School of Management, the graduate business school of Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.

In Cyprus, the Cyprus International Institute of Management or CIIM. In Ireland, the Institute of Public Administration, Dublin. In South Africa, Regenesys Business School through the Regenesys School of Public

Management and MANCOSA.[53]

Comparative public management, through government performance auditing, examines the efficiency and effectiveness of two or more governments.

See also

Book: Public administration

Administration (government) Administrative law Budgeting Bureaucracy Civil society Community services

o Max Weber Doctor of Public Administration Municipal government Official Politics Professional administration Public administration theory Public policy Public policy schools Teleadministration Theories of administration The Study of Administration

Public management academic resources

International Journal of Public Sector Management , ISSN 0951-3558, Emerald Group Publishing

Public Management Review, ISSN 1471-9045 (electronic) ISSN 1471-9037 (paper) Routledge

Public Works Management & Policy, ISSN 1552-7549 (electronic) ISSN 1087-724X (paper), SAGE Publications

Notes1.

"Random House Unabridged Dictionary". Dictionary.infoplease.com. Retrieved 2014-08-23. Handbook of Public Administration. Eds Jack Rabin, W. Bartley Hildreth, and Gerard J. Miller. 1989: Marcel Dekker, NY. p. iii Robert and Janet Denhardt. Public Administration: An Action Orientation. 6th Ed. 2009: Thomson Wadsworth, Belmont CA. Kettl, Donald and James Fessler. 2009. The Politics of the Administrative Process. Washington D.C.: CQ Press. Jerome B. McKinney and Lawrence C. Howard. Public Administration: Balancing Power and Accountability. 2nd Ed. 1998: Praeger Publishing, Westport, CT. p. 62 UN Economic and Social Council. Committee of Experts on Public Administration. Definition of basic concepts and terminologies in governance and public administration. 2006 Wilson, Woodrow. June, 1887. The Study of Administration, Political Science Quarterly 2. Public administration. (2010) In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved August 18, 2010, from Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Shafritz, J.M., A.C. Hyde. 2007. Classics of Public Administration. Wadsworth: Boston. https://www.ipc.on.ca/wp-content/uploads/Resources/up-erdms_e.pdf Appleby, Paul 1947. "Toward Better Public Administration," Public Administration Review Vol. 7, No. 2 pp. 93–99. Clapp, Gordon. 1948. "Public Administration in an Advancing South." Public Administration Review Vol. 8. no. 2 pp. 169–75. Clapp attributed part of this definition to Charles Beard. Carroll, J.D. & Zuck, A.M. (1983). "The Study of Public Administration Revisited". A Report of the Centennial Agendas project of the American Society for Public Administration. Washington, DC; American Society for Public Administration. Shields, Patricia. 1998. "Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Science: A Tool for Public Administration" Research in Public Administration Vol. 4. pp. 195–225. Shields, Patricia. 1998. "Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Science: A Tool for Public Administration" Research in Public Administration Vol. 4. p. 199. https://web.archive.org/web/20120929081522/http://thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0006540Accessed. Archived from the original on September 29, 2012. Retrieved August 20, 2010. Missing or empty |title= (help)

Haveman, R. H. (1987). Policy analysis and evaluation research after twenty years. "Policy Studies Journal", 16(1): 191–218. Kettl, Donald F. "The Future of Public Administration" (PDF). H-net.org. Retrieved October 25, 2010. Lalor, Stephen 'A General Theory of Public Administration' (2014) "Definition Public Administration (NAICS 91)". Ic.gc.ca. Retrieved October 25, 2010. "CIP user site". Nces.ed.gov. Retrieved 2014-08-23. Second Treatise on Government Declaration of Independence Ryan, M., Mejia, B., and Georgiev, M. (Ed). 2010. AM Gov 2010. McGraw Hill: New York. Jeong Chun Hai Ibrahim, & Nor Fadzlina Nawi. (2007). Principles of Public Administration: An Introduction. Kuala Lumpur: Karisma Publications. ISBN 978-983-195-253-5 Frederick W. Taylor. (1856–1915). 'Principles of Scientific Management.' New York & London: Harper Brothers; Also see, Jeong Chun Hai Ibrahim, & Nor Fadzlina Nawi. (2007). Principles of Public Administration: An Introduction. Kuala Lumpur: Karisma Publications. ISBN 978-983-195-253-5 "Our Web Site Has Moved!". Aspanet.org. Retrieved 2014-08-23. Fry, Brian R. 1989. Mastering Public Administration; from Max Weber to Dwight Waldo. Chatham, New Jersey: Chatham House Publishers, Inc. p. 80 Kamensky, John M. (May–June 1996). "Role of the "Reinventing Government" movement in Federal management reform". Public Administration Review. Wiley. 56 (3): 247–55. doi:10.2307/976448. JSTOR 976448. Elmore, Richard F. (1986). "Graduate education in public management: working the seams of government". Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Wiley. 6 (1): 69–83. doi:10.1002/pam.4050060107. Margetts, Helen; Dunleavy, Patrick; Bastow, Simon; Tinkler, Jane (July 2006). "New public management is dead – long live digital-era governance". Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. Oxford Journals. 16 (3): 467–94. doi:10.1093/jopart/mui057. Diane Stone, (2008) 'Global Public Policy, Transnational Policy Communities and their Networks,' Journal of Policy Sciences. Denhardt, Robert B.; Vinzant Denhardt, Janet (November–December 2000). "The new public service: serving rather than steering". Public Administration Review. Wiley. 60 (6): 549–59. doi:10.1111/0033-3352.00117. JSTOR 977437. Aucoin, Peter (2008). New Public Management and the Quality of Government: Coping with the New Political Governance in Canada, Conference on "New Public Management and the Quality of Government", SOG and the Quality of Government Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 13–15 November 2008, p. 14. Elmore, Richard F.; Watson, Sara; Pfeiffer, David (1992). "A case for including disability policy issues in public policy curricula". Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (Curriculum and Case Notes). Wiley. 11 (1): 167–73. doi:10.2307/3325146. Zola, Irving K. (1993), "Introduction", in Brown, Susan T., An Independent Living Approach to Disability Policy Studies, Berkeley, CA: Research and Training Center on Public Policy And Independent Living, World Institute on Disability, OCLC 36404707.

Racino, Julie A. (2015). Public administration and disability community services administration in the US. Boca Raton: CRC Press. ISBN 9781466579828. Corduneanu-Huci, Cristina; Hamilton, Alexander; Masses Ferrer, Issel (2012). Understanding Policy Change: How to Apply Political Economy Concepts in Practice. Washington DC.: The World Bank. Dubois, Hans F. W.; Fattore, Giovanni (2009). International Journal of Public Administration. 32. Rou

The Ownership of Transportation Networks: A RationaleTo explain the patterns of public and private ownership of transportation networks in the United States and elsewhere, one would need to take a longer view of the development of transportation systems. While such explanations are beyond the scope of the current text, they may be found elsewhere[1]. We will focus instead on some of the common economic themes that lead to observed outcomes.

Market Failure

Public ownership of transportation networks has been more prevalent in certain locations and at certain times during history. A common rationale in more modern times given in support of the public ownership of transportation facilities has been that of market failure. Though the formal concept of market failure is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating to developments in welfare economics during the early 20th century, earlier forms of it were used to justify public ownership of certain transportation facilities in the United States. In the colonial U.S., a system of post roads was maintained by the federal government (as will be discussed later), as these roads were considered vital to communication. Most mail and other types of communication moved by road, and hence it was considered critical to government administrative (and perhaps also judicial) functions that such roads be maintained. A secondary justification was that such roads would facilitate trade and interstate commerce. This is a type of positive externality argument. While it might have been possible for some such roads to be financed and built privately, there was concern that the desired network would not develop quickly enough, with lower-priority roads linking parts of the rural hinterland to established urban centers significantly lagging the completion of other segments, and thus leaving rural areas with poor lines of communication.

Other types of market failure arguments may also apply in the current context. Some road and rail networks may exhibit economies of scale, leading to more efficient provision by fewer firms with high levels of output. In an extreme case, strong economies of scale may indicate the presence of a natural monopoly, where it becomes more efficient for a single provider to produce a good. In addition to monopoly or market power justifications, there are some public good aspects of transportation networks. The next section discusses the nature of roads as different types of goods, with some local roads having the characteristics of public goods (non-rivalry and non-excludability). Private firms might undersupply a public good if there is not sufficient motivation (i.e. profit) for them to do so.

Government Failure

While the existence of market failures may provide a rationale for public ownership of transportation networks under certain circumstances, there is also a countervailing argument that cautions against public ownership as a response to instances of market failure. The public sector analogy to market failure is known as government failure, and refers to situations where government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of resources than would occur in the absence of the intervention.

There are many types of government failure, but the ones most relevant in the context of transportation policy tend to be legislative in nature. They include issues of logrolling, pork barrel spending and rent-seeking.

Logrolling is a term applied to political allocation processes to describe the act of vote-trading among members of a political body. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, in their seminal work on political economy entitled The Calculus of Consent [2] , described a formal model of simple majority voting incorporating as an example the maintenance of local roads by a group of rural farmers. Buchanan and Tullock show how bargaining (vote trading) among the participants allows for agreements that ensure the maintenance of all roads. However, the cost of this bargaining is shown to be an aggregate overinvestment of resources, since each farmer must pay for the maintenance of all other local roads in order to ensure the maintenance of the road that serves his property. There is a direct analogy between this process and the process used to allocate resources for transportation by the U.S. Congress. The rapid growth of federal transportation programs during recent re-authorization cycles, not only in terms of absolute expenditures but also in terms of the number and scope of programs, provides strong evidence of this.

Pork barrel spending has become one of the more ubiquitous forms of government failure in U.S. transportation policy. The term refers to the process of elected officials securing spending on projects or programs for the primary benefit of members of their home district[3]. This practice has become synonymous with the process of earmarking, in which provisions are included in bills or committee reports to direct spending to specific projects, often without any form of evaluation to determine the project's social desirability. The most recent federal transportation bill, authorized in 2005, included more than 6,000 earmarks, totalling more than $24 billion in spending. The project which came to represent the most egregious example of pork barrel spending in transportation was the proposed $398 million Gravina Island Bridge in Alaska, infamously known as the "Bridge to Nowhere". Other prominent examples of pork barrel spending include Boston's Big Dig, the Johnstown Airport and Interstate 99 in Pennsylvania, and the Coconut Road Interchange in Florida. Pork barrel spending has also influenced the design of federal highway and public transit programs, both of which are structured to spread benefits as widely as possible across congressional districts in order to ensure local support.

Rent-seeking[4] involves the manipulation of the economic environment by private individuals or groups in order to extract economic rents. Governments are a primary target of rent-seekers, since they may offer special priviliges in the form of budget allocations or regulatory treatment, and are susceptible to interest group lobbying. A classic example in the field transportation is the Davis-Bacon Act, which applies to all federally-funded public works projects in the United States. The Act requires the payment of "locally prevailing" wages to workers employed on such projects. The term "prevailing" is generally understood to refer to local unionized wage rates, including fringe benefits. Originally passed in 1931, the law has survived numerous attempts to repeal it or weaken its provisions, owing largely to political support from unionized construction labor. The Davis-Bacon Act, among other provisions (such as the Buy America Act), is cited as a source of rising construction costs on many federally-funded projects[5].

In practice, both market failure and government failure have influenced the nature of ownership arrangements in the provision of transportation. In addition to these considerations, the type of good represented by different transportation assets may influence not only the distinction of public versus private ownership, but also which level of government should be responsible for providing transportation infrastructure and services in the case of public ownership. As we will also see, there are a range of possible outcomes in terms of the degree of private involvement in the provision of transportation.

The Nature of Transportation as a Good and Its Ownership

Elements of Vehicle/Highway System

The existing vehicle/highway system can be characterized as having a sort of quasi-private form of ownership. While in many elements are publicly owned:

Road infrastructure Traffic control Public transit services

The system does have several elements that are privately supplied including:

Private vehicles Time Roadside Services (Gas, Food, Lodging) Origins Destinations Parking

Functional Highway Classification by Type of Good

There are four types of goods that are determined by their technical characteristics concerning excludability and rivalry:

' ' Excludability 'Yes No

Rivalry Yes Private “Congesting”No Club Public

Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous,

Private goods are both excludable and rivalrous.

Club goods (for instance a country club membership) are excludable, but non-rivalrous (in the absence of crowding).

Congesting goods are rivalrous but not excludable, for instance a crowded street. While an individual cannot be excluded from a city street, that person’s presence may cost you extra time and his occupation of space does prevent you from occupying the same space at a given time. (Note that limited access highways are potentially excludable, unlike city streets.)

Excludability

Excludability implies that the good’s provider can prevent a user from obtaining it without charge

National defense for instance is non-excludable, America’s nuclear weapons protect anyone in the country, whether or not they want it. On the other hand the sale of anything in a store is excludable – the owner can prevent a customer from obtaining a good unless the customer pays (assuming enforceable property rights etc.).

Rivalry

Rivalry implies that one person’s consumption of a particular good prevents another individual from consuming it.

National defense again is non-rivalrous – one person’s protection does not prevent another’s protection. Shoes are rivalrous, only one person can wear a pair at a time.

Roads

Hierarchy of roads delineates which roads serve property access and which roads serve movement

Roads exist largely to serve two purposes: movement and access (specifically, access to property). Different types of roads have characteristics of different types of goods based on their functional classification[6]. In other words, there is a correspondence between the functional classification of a road and the type of good it represents. What types of roads are which type of goods?

Limited access highways (freeways) and some arterials with signalized intersections and few access points, could be considered private goods, since it is possible to identify and exclude users with appropriate toll technologies. These roads are also rivalrous since, in the absence of pricing or other measures to limit demand, an additional user can affect the use of the road by others.

Local roads lie on the other end of the spectrum in terms of functional classification, since they exist primarily to provide property access. Local streets can be excludable if access to them is restricted. Access restrictions may take many forms, ranging from the simple posting of signs indicating that access is restricted to residents to actual physical restrictions, such as gates. The latter type of restriction is typically associated with gated communities or other forms of private residential development. Local streets are also generally non-rivalrous in that their low levels of traffic tend to preclude problems with congestion. This combination of characteristics (excludability and non-rivalry) indicates that some local streets may be considered club goods[7]. The oldest such example in the United States is that of Benton Place in St. Louis, Missouri, where adjoining property owners were required to join a private association which was responsible for road maintenance, with assessments being levied on each association member [8].

Local streets are typically provided by local governments with no restrictions on access. In the absence of access restrictions local streets may be both non-rivalrous and non-excludable, leading them to take on more of the character of a public good. Note the term "public good" in this case is defined by the economic characteristics of the good, and not simply by the fact that it is supplied by the public sector.

Between limited-access highways and local streets are a middle level of road, collectors, that link local streets with limited-access highways. These “linking collectors” serve both access and mobility functions, since they may also provide access to some adjacent properties. These roads may be considered “congesting” or common goods.

The characterization of roads in terms of functional classification may also inform decisions about which level of government should be responsible for providing a given road (assuming the decision is made to provide the road publicly). Local units of government seem best suited to providing local streets, since they are closest to the problem. Roads that provide for a higher level of movement, such as limited-access highways, ought to be provided by higher-level jurisdictions, such as states. Of course, there are tradeoffs involved in each of these decisions. Smaller jurisdictions may not be able to fully realize scale economies, while larger jurisdictions may encounter problems with span of control. Between these extremes there is some optimal mix of expenditures between different levels of government that minimizes capital and operating costs[9].

Realms of Public and Private Involvement

Spectrum of transportation infrastructure ownership

One can think of the degree of public and private involvement in the provision of transportation as falling somewhere along a continuum between fully public and fully private ownership. Returning to the example of road provision, the figure outlines the various forms of possible public and private ownership structures, along with the types of functional class roads they might apply to.

Under conventional forms of government ownership and provision, responsibility for road provision is divided between federal, state, and local government. Federal and state governments have primary responsibility for arterial roads (including the Interstate system in the U.S.), with states also operating some more heavily-used collector roads. Local governments provide some combination of collector and local roads. In addition, some local roads may be provided by non-governmental organizations, such as homeowners' associations and individual private landowners (as in the case of apartment complexes).

One could also conceive of roads being provided under a public utility framework, where responsibility for maintenance and operation of the roads was transferred to a quasi-public authority. This might be an acceptable way to provide the network of linking collectors that connect local roads with higher-level arterials (limited-access highways) and serve both access and mobility functions.

Alternately, the private sector can be involved in the provision of roads to varying degrees. Most public works and transportation departments involve the private sector to at least a minimal degree in such activities as planning, design, construction and maintenance.

The more limited forms of private involvement in road provision tend to involve the outsourcing of road design, construction and maintenance activities to private consulting and construction firms. Private contractors may enter into service contracts with government agencies to provide

certain specified operations and maintenance activities. These contracts may apply to all classes of publicly-owned roads. Outsourcing may also apply to more comprehensive management contracts, in which the contractor may be responsible for the design and construction of a road (often under so-called design-build project delivery systems), sometimes coupled with provisions for operations and major maintenance activities. These types of contracts often are applied to the construction of new arterial roads in cases where a public authority is unwilling to give up full control of a project.

Greater private sector involvement in terms of project financing and risk assumption are possible through agreements between public authorities and private contractors for the franchising of road projects [10]. Franchise agreements often leave the ownership of the road in the hands of the public sector, while leasing it out to private operators who agree to operate and maintain the road for over a given period specified in the contract. This method is often adopted for projects involving the construction of new arterial roads, where the contractor is responsible for some combination of design, construction, finance, operation and maintenance activities. Many contracts are structured such that the management and operation of the road asset will revert back to the public authority after the expiration of the contract. Franchise arrangements for highways also typically involve contracts that contain rather detailed provisions regarding pricing, operations, and maintenance requirements.

The greatest amount of private participation in road provision is made possible via the divestiture of existing roads by the public sector. Divestiture involves the outright sale of an existing road to a private firm, who is then free to operate the road and collect charges from users to financing its operation. Examples of full divestiture of roads are rare in the United States though, as will be discussed later, there has been some renewed interest in the franchising of existing highways in recent years.

Public Role in Private Provision of Infrastructure

The public sector has generally had three different types of roles that interact with private sector in the provision of transportation infrastructure.

The public sector may be the recipient of privately provided infrastructure. Traditionally the public sector owns, operates, and maintains street and road infrastructure. However developers may build local roads and streets and dedicate them to the public sector as part of their role in making land suitable for occupancy. These private in-kind contributions are the most common type of private provision of infrastructure.

The public sector may play a role as facilitator in the provision of infrastructure. Government agencies may provide planning and coordination activities in anticipation of the development of an infrastructure project, possibly including the assembly of land for right-of-way (which in some cases may require the use of eminent domain powers). Some public entities will also offer financial inducements to facilitate the provision of infrastructure. In addition to some of the tax advantages offered to private investors in the financing of infrastructure projects (which will be discussed in the next section), public entities may sometimes provide matching grants to encourage private investment. A more

traditional role of the public sector in facilitating private investment has been for the state to act as a broker for infrastructure projects, combining its traditional coordination activities with the discretion to select a private developer for an infrastructure project from among multiple competing proposals.

The third type of role that the public sector might play is to serve as an investor in infrastructure projects. Governments may serve as stockholders in some private projects, though this practice has been limited in the US (see the preceding section on the history of state involvement in US road provision for the early precedents to this policy). In some cases, the public sector may form a transportation corridor development corporation to guide the development of an infrastructure project. Lastly, the public sector may play a more traditional role as developer in an infrastructure project.

Private Role in Public Sector

There are also many situations in which the private sector plays a role in the public sector's provision of transportation. Consider the case of highways. The private sector is often intimately involved in several aspects of the development of highways. Private consultants are often hired to provide expertise in the planning and design functions on specific roadway projects. Private construction contractors are hired to manage the actual construction of transportation projects once the design work has been completed. Sometimes these functions are more closely integrated into what are termed "design-build" contracts.

The private sector may also be invited to participate in the operation of public facilities. In some cases, existing assets such as toll roads will be put out to bid for the right to operate them for a limited period of time. Recent examples of this include the Indiana Toll Road and the Chicago Skyway. Sometimes a public entity will sell an asset to a private investor, then lease it from the investor and continue to operate it, an arrangement referred to as a leaseback scheme. Under such a scheme, the public entity benefits by being able to raise cash through the sale of the asset, while the investor is able to claim the tax benefits from the depreciation of the asset.

The private sector may also be encouraged to take on a greater role in the provision of new infrastructure. Beyond the traditional planning, design and construction functions, public entities may award contracts that require private firms to take on responsibility for the financing and ongoing operation of a road. These contracts are referred to as Design-Build-Operate-Maintain (DBOM) or Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) contracts, with the latter containing provisions for the transfer of the asset back to public ownership after a given concessionary period.

Differences in Transportation Ownership by CountryThere is a great deal of diversity reflected in the international experience with the ownership and development of transportation networks. Here we will provide a brief survey of the experiences in a few of the more developed, industrialized countries of the world.

United States

Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution states that:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; … To establish post offices and post roads; …

Amendment IX adds:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Also, Amendment X provides that:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

It is not entirely clear what the above provisions prescribe in terms of ownership and operation of transportation infrastructure. On one hand, Article 1, Section 8 provides for the establishment of post roads, which initially were meant to imply major routes connecting cities, essentially the equivalent of modern highways. However, as the population grew and mail service became more widespread the designation of post roads became less clear. Also, a law passed in 1838 extended the designation to all railroads. The addition of Amendment X indicates that transportation activities not under the purview of the federal government (for example, those identified in Article 1), should be left the states or to private individuals. States, in turn, could devolve some powers to local units of government.

Early federal road bills were vetoed by Presidents James Madison, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson, primarily on the grounds that they overstepped the bounds of federal authority granted by the Constitution.

One might interpret the above provisions as prescribing a rather limited federal role for transportation, especially considering the declining importance of having a set of federally-designated post roads and the development of rather robust roadway networks. In contrast, the federal role in transportation has grown considerably, particularly during the latter half of the 20th century. While states have taken on increasing roles in constructing and maintaining transportation networks, the federal government still has a large presence in terms of regulatory policy and financing. These two activities are the primary instruments through which the United States implements its transportation policies.

Currently, governments provide the majority of the system of roads and highways in the U.S. In turn, they recover part of the cost through the imposition of fuel taxes, vehicle license fees, sales taxes on motor vehicles, weight-distance charge from trucks, and various other fees and penalties (fines). The federal portion of the motor fuels tax, currently at 18.4 cents per gallon, is directed to the federal Highway Trust Fund. Most of the federal Trust Fund revenues are distributed to the states as aid for highway and bridge construction. The remaining share is distributed for mass

transit grants to cities and for environmental remediation projects related to leaky underground fuel storage tanks. States add their own motor fuel taxes, which raises the US national average motor fuel tax to 47 cents per gallon. Some state and local governments also operate toll facilities, mostly roads and bridges, which account for a little over 5 percent of all transportation-related revenues. Most of the toll facilities in the U.S. are located in older, northeastern states and many of them predate the initiation of the Interstate Highway System. More recently, faster-growing Sunbelt states like California, Florida and Texas have accounted for most of the growth in the mileage of toll roads in the U.S.

The Interstate Highway System (also known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways) is a unique feature of the U.S. transportation system. It is comprised of a national network of over 46,000 miles of grade-separate, limited-access highways. The network was initially planned during the 1940s, while the U.S. was involved in World War II, and was presented to the public primarily as a critical component of national defense. The stated goal was to provide the ability to move large amounts of troops and equipment across the country quickly. A second important goal was to facilitate interstate commerce, coinciding with the growth of commercial truck traffic, though this goal was not as prominently promoted. Construction on the Interstate system began in 1956, under the Eisenhower administration. Today, states retain much of the responsibility for maintaining the Interstate system, with the federal government providing grants funded the federal fuel tax. The Interstate system remains publicly owned, largely on the grounds that national defense is too important to place in private hands.

Most airports in the United States are owned and operated by municipal governments or local authorities. This remains the case despite a recent attempt to privatize Chicago's Midway Airport. The privatization proposal, initiated in 2008, would have taken the form of a long-term (99-year) lease from the City of Chicago in exchange for a $2.5 billion up-front payment. The lease arrangement fell through when the consortium that would have operated the airport was unable to put together a full financing package.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposes taxes on aviation fuels, passenger tickets and several other aviation-related items in order to fund the Airport and Airway Trust Fund (AATF). The Trust Fund, authorized in 1970 under the Airport and Airway Development Act, finances air traffic control and grants to local authorities for airport improvements. These funds are supplemented by revenues raised by local airport authorities from sources such as landing fees (based on the maximum landing weight of aircraft), passenger facility charges (PFCs), parking charges, and concessions for retail activities at major airports. Each airport has its own user charge schedules. Airport expansion costs are usually raised by airport bonds secured by signatory (major) carriers. This gives the signatory airlines power to veto any major changes to landing fee structures or airport slot allocation systems. This veto power has proven to carry weight, for example, when LaGuardia Airport's incumbent airlines blocked a recent proposal to auction off airport slots during peak traffic periods.

Airport congestion has become a recurrent problem in many locations throughout the U.S., often affecting the on-time performance of carriers. Only a handful of airports, such as those in the New York City area and Boston's Logan Airport, use landing fees during peak periods in order to mitigate congestion. The fees are typically designed to get smaller aircraft to move their flights to off-peak periods or to other nearby, less congested airports. Airport gate and Landing slots are a similar type of mechanism for allocating peak capacity. Some landing slots are transferable among carriers. However, the method used by most airports to allocate slots to carriers tends to confer windfall gains on existing carriers.

Expanding capacity at U.S. airports has proven difficult in recent years due to political and environmental considerations. When physical expansion is undertaken, it is often in the form of adding a runway to an existing airport rather than building an entirely new one. In the U.S., Denver International Airport has been the only new airport built since 1974.

Canada

Governments provide system of roads and highways;

recovers a part of the cost through fuel taxes, vehicle license fees, and other fees and penalties;

limited number of toll roads and bridges.

Transport Canada owns and operate most of the airports in Canada, and provide enroute air traffic control and navigational aid services;

Toronto, Montreal's Dorval, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary airports were transferred to respective local authorities in 1992.

Some examples of private provision of airport facilities; o Toronto airport's terminal 3 ($500 mm)o Renovation and reconstruction of terminals 1 and 2 ($750 mm)

a push towards further defederalization and privatization of airports. recovers a part of the costs through air transport tax, landing fees, concession and other

rentals, general terminal fees, parking fees, etc.

The development of Canadian policies toward transportation have some importance differences from those in the United States. Like the U.S., Canada has maintained some degree of shared responsibility for transportation between the national government and the country's 10 provinces. However, unlike the U.S., Canada has devolved responsibility to lower levels of government to a much greater degree. With the exception of air transportation and marine navigation, most transportation functions are devolved to provincial and lower levels of government[11]. Canada has also undertaken more extensive measures to privatize certain types of infrastructure and services, particularly in air transportation (e.g. airports and air traffic control).

Canadian transportation policy, especially toward issues of ownership of transportation infrastructure, has gone through significant change since the mid-1980s, when a wave of economic liberalization affected many sectors of the Canadian economy, including transportation. The roots of regulatory reform in Canada's transportation sector can be traced back to the MacPherson Royal Commission on Transportation (1961-62), which was tasked with studying the issues of the railway industry, which came under financial stress during the 1950s when it started losing commercial traffic to competing modes such as intercity trucking and waterways. The Commission recommended broader regulatory liberalization across the transportation sector with a more limited role for government subsidy in guiding transportation policy. Many of the Commission's recommendations toward Canada's railways were adopted with the 1967 National Transportation Act, though the recommendations regarding regulatory liberalization of other modes were not. Liberalization policies toward other modes were picked up again during the 1980s under a more conservative national government.

Railway companies themselves provide their own infrastructure; roadbeds, tracks, yards and stations; Ports Canada, a crown corporation, owns and operates major ports in Canada; each port authority (e.g., Port of Vancouver) enjoys substantial autonomy.

While a department of the Canadian government, Transport Canada, has broad responsibility setting regulations and policies affecting transportation in Canada, decisions about road construction are placed under the jurisdiction of individual Canadian provinces. The Trans-Canada Highway, a transcontinental highway link, was built through a federal-provincial partnership that emphasized connecting and upgrading major inter-regional links within provinces. Apart from this effort, there is little federal involvement in the provision of roads. Roads costs are partially recovered through a combination of fuel taxes, vehicle license fees, and other fees and penalties. Fuel taxes in Canada include a combination of federal and provincial excise and sales taxes, a portion of which are directed to a Gas Tax Fund which is used to finance municipal infrastructure.

Canadian provinces make limited use of toll facilities in the road sector. The primary use of tolls on Canadian roads is to provide a revenue stream to repay bonds issued for road construction. Some highways that were initially tolled have since seen the tolls decommissioned. Most recently, the Coquihalla Highway had its toll facility decommissioned in 2008. Originally completed in 1987 at a cost of $848 million, the highway's tolls were removed after the BC government had collected a roughly equal amount of revenue during the toll road's 20 years of operation.

Private participation in the development of road infrastructure has been limited to a couple of major facilities. Ontario Provincial Highway 407 was built between the late 1980s and late 1990s under a 35-year lease to a private consortium. Under the original agreement, the highway was to be transferred back to the provincial government at the end of the lease. However, in 1999 the Ontario government passed a budget-balancing resolution that included a 99-year lease of the highway to a private consortium. The 407 facility is one of few in the world to use an all-electronic toll collection system. The other major privately-developed road infrastructure project in Canada is the Confederation Bridge, an 8-mile toll bridge connecting the mainland province of New Brunswick with the island province of Prince Edward Island, off Canada's eastern coast.

The Confederation Bridge was completed in 1997 under a build-operate-transfer agreement between the Canadian government and a private developer, Strait Crossing Development Incorporated. A subsidiary of the developer, Strait Crossing Bridge Limited (SCBL) will operate the bridge for 35 years and collect tolls, with the operation of the bridge reverting back to the Canadian government at the end of the lease. SCBL services the debt issued to pay for the bridge's construction with a combination of toll revenue and subsidy payments from the Canadian government for the ferry services it continues to operate at a loss in order to provide transportation for pedestrians, cyclists and other types of vehicles that are prohibited from using the bridge. It is important to note that the original motivation for building the bridge was to provide a fixed link across the Northumberland Strait to better connect Prince Edward Island with mainland Canada, and to partially replace the ferry service that previously carried most traffic to the island.

Transport Canada also retains a large role in Canada's aviation system. Prior to 1996, it had responsibility for both aviation regulation and provision of air traffic services. While it retains most of its regulatory functions, Transport Canada's responsibility for provision air traffic service has been greatly reduced. The adoption of the National Airports Policy in the early 1990s led to the divestiture of many smaller airports, while Transport Canada retained ownership over the larger airports in the National Airports System. The larger airports are leased to local private operating authorities. The National Airports Policy resulted in privatization of other aspects of the aviation system as well. A new private, non-profit company (Nav Canada) owns and operates Canada's air traffic control and air navigation systems.

Japan

Japan's major intercity roads are owned and operated by regionally-based public corporations.

Regionally based public corporations own and operate major intercity roads;

other roads financed by fuel taxes many toll roads make profit after paying back the capital costs of construction and

expansion.

Local authorities own major airports such as Narita and Kansai International airports;

Landing fees and passenger fees are high; Government subsidize contruction and expansion costs

Europe

European Commission has proposed to establish a rail infrastructure company to own and maintain railroad tracks and stations, and let rail carriers use it for fees to provide competing services.

PrivatizationGomez-Ibanez and Meyer[12] have identified three types of privatization that may apply to transportation systems. Privatization may take the form of the sale of existing state-owned businesses, private infrastructure development, or the outsourcing of conventional public sector functions by contracting with private vendors.

Sale of existing state owned business

The first type of privatization is the sale of former state-owned business (public enterprises). During the 1980s, many governments in Europe and the developing world (South America in particular) initiated the sale of state-owned enterprises. Western European countries, led by France and the United Kingdom, were eager to return to the private sector many industries that were nationalized following World War II. These industries included public utilities, transportation, and some heavy industry (e.g. British Steel in the UK). Similar developments were taking place in the developing world, led by South American countries such as Chile and Argentina. The rationale was largely the same: a belief that the private sector could operate such enterprises more efficiently. Around the same time, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the former Communist Bloc left many Eastern European countries to make the transition toward a market economy. This transition affected the transportation sector in a large number of countries, where governments were eager to promote private sector participation in functions such as the provision of urban and intercity bus services. Reviews of early experiences with such reforms have started to appear for countries such as Poland[13] and Hungary[14].

Private Infrastructure Development

The second type of privatization involves private participation in infrastructure development. While there has been more experience outside of the United States with private transportation infrastructure development in recent years, there are some limited examples domestically. These include the privately-developed SR 91 Express Lanes in California, the Dulles Greenway in the Northern Virginia suburbs of the Washington, D.C. region, and the Las Vegas Monorail, one of the few examples of privately financed passenger rail systems in the U.S. In most cases where the private sector is invited to participate in transportation infrastructure development, the primary motive is raising new money for transportation, something that can be more difficult to accomplish under a system that is reliant on tax financing.

Outsourcing of conventional public sector functions by contracting with private vendors

The third type of privatization is the outsourcing of conventional public sector functions by contracting with private vendors. This type of privatization has gained wider acceptance in the U.S. and has become fairly standard practice for many transportation and public works departments. Functions such as road maintenance and highway management are routinely contracted to private firms.

Many urban public transit agencies in the U.S. also contract with private vendors to provide maintenance services, direct operation of some transit routes, or both. For example, a number of cities in the northeastern U.S. have contracted with Amtrak or one of several private firms to operate commuter rail services. The selection of Amtrak as the operator in some cases was due to the fact that Amtrak owns the rail infrastructure on some lines where it also provides intercity passenger service.

In both cases, the primary motive for outsourcing maintenance, management or operations is financial gain on the part of government. Many governments have been able to realize cost savings in the provision and maintenance of transportation infrastructure through competitive contracting of services[15]. The savings may then be used to either expand or improve the quality of service, to pay down existing debt levels, or to lower the burden of taxation that is borne by citizens.

Disadvantages of Privatization

Privatization of transportation infrastructure and services may also have some disadvantages. These can be categorized in terms of whether they apply to private firms or to society more broadly.

Disadvantages to private firms

Private firms must pay taxes Private firms must borrow funds at market interest rates Private firms do not have eminent domain powers

Disadvantage to society

Type 1 privatization (sale of state-owned businesses) may upset existing property/equity relationships. Winners and losers are created.

Cost savings may lead to unemployment when firms cut back on unprofitable services. These workers must find employment elsewhere in the economy, something that may not easy to do during periods of recession.

Environmental sensitivity may not be in a private firm's objective function.

Lessons for Success

Privatization is easier when:

There is competition in input and output markets Possible efficiency gains are large Few redistributions or transfers are required There are few controversies with the environment or opposition to economic growth An activity or service covers its cost BUT profits are not TOO high

Transit Bus Privatization

One industry within the transportation sector where privatization has gained momentum in recent decades has been bus transit, particularly urban (intracity) bus services. The relatively low fixed costs associated with provision of bus services provides the potential for a market with relatively low barriers to entry and intense competition.

Regulation Cycle

Like many modes of transportation, urban bus transit has gone through many stages of growth, maturity, decline and some degree of rationalization. Gomez-Ibanez and Meyer[12] have identified a 10-stage cycle of regulation and privatization that broadly reflects the experience with bus transit in many countries around the world. The 10 stages are listed below.

1. Entrepreneurial2. Consolidation3. Regulation of Fares and Franchises4. Decline in Profits5. Withdrawal of capital and services6. Public takeover7. Public subsidies8. Declining efficiency9. Vicious cycle of subsidy cuts, fare increases, service cuts, declining riders10. Privatization [Go to 1 or 3]

While most cities begin at the first stage (entrepreneurial) of the cycle, some remain in the stages of public ownership and subsidy (stages 6 and 7), while others have moved on to various degrees of privatization (stage 10). Where privatization has taken place, the cycle indicates that cities typically revert to either an entrepreneurial phase or to a phase in which services are privately provided, but certain aspects of provision such as fares and franchises are regulated.

Types of Privatization

Depending on which policy objectives are being pursued, bus transit privatization may either eliminate or supplement public ownership. Where governments are looking to divest themselves of the ownership and operation of buses services and to end or limit the provision of subsidies, they may allow greater entry for private providers and limit regulatory involvement. Partial forms of privatization can also allow governments to continue to pursue certain social objectives (for example, providing service to low-income users), while maintaining ownership of bus service. An example of this is the competitive tendering of bus services, which is a more common form of partial privatization in the U.S., where the public sector retains ownership of bus services but enters into a contract with a private provider to operate the service. Decisions on fares, scheduling and service levels typically remain in the hands of the public organization.

Conditions on Privatization

Fares

Deregulation of fares (Colombo Sri Lanka, Santiago Chile) [Colombo kept the public company with low fares and overcrowding; Santiago had a proliferation of modes, drivers formed route associations and raised fares, service is better but still crowding]

Regulation of fares (everywhere else)

Routes

Deregulation of routes ... direct subsidies to specific routes Regulation of routes ... must provide service on unprofitable routes -> cross subsidy

Britain's Buses

The most high-profile experiment with transit bus privatization in recent history has been the privatization and deregulation of local bus services in the UK. Privatization began with the passage of the Transport Act of 1985 which privatized and deregulated bus services throughout the UK, though London did not fully deregulate its services, opting instead for a system of franchised routes. The Transport Act was passed under the conservative Thatcher regime, as part of a series of sweeping economic reforms which privatized several former state-owned enterprises.

The Act requires only that firms register the commencement of, or changes to, a bus service at least 42 days in advance. Under the law, bus operators are only allowed to offer scheduled services, prohibiting jitney-type services. Local governments may refuse to allow a service only in the event of serious safety or traffic congestion problems. They may also supplement privately registered routes by offering unserved routes for competitive tender[16].

New entrants - low cost by lower wages, lower overhead, flexible work rules, do not usually lower prices, passengers are unlikely to wait.

The privatization and deregulation of bus services in Britain was designed to inject competition into the supply of bus services and thus to exert downward pressure on costs. This goal was largely achieved, as new entrants with with lower costs entered many markets and exerted pressure on incumbent operators. The newer firms tended to achieve lower costs through lower wages, more flexible work rules, and lower overhead costs[17]. Existing firms were forced to respond by cutting their own costs. Since these firms retained many employees from their pre-deregulation days while simultaneously hiring new workers, a two-tiered wage structure began to emerge reflecting the compensation of these different groups. Another source of cost savings was the substitution of smaller vehicles (minibuses), operating more frequently and at higher speeds, for larger buses. Heseltine and Silcock[18] report that just a few years after the initiation of deregulation, former National Bus Company operators claimed to have reduced costs per bus mile by 15 to 20 percent, while former Passenger Transport Executive operators reduced costs by an average of 30 percent.

While significant cost savings were achieved by the deregulated operators, passenger fares increased as broad-based government subsidies were withdrawn. Examining the experience with the first 10 years of deregulation, Mackie et al.[19] reported that throughout the UK, passenger

fares increased by an average of about 19 percent, while real subsidies declined by an average of 38 percent. Demand, measured in terms of passenger journeys, declined by an average of 22 percent nationwide, thought the decline was much lower in the London metropolitan region. Higher fares were an important factor in explaining the decline, as was the instability in the newly deregulated bus markets. However, the decline could not be accounted for by diminished service levels, as bus-kilometers of service rose in every region examined[19].

One of the more interesting developments in the evolution of the deregulated bus industry was the competitive strategy that was employed by the newly-private firms. There were initially many small operators in most of the larger markets, though the industry became much more concentrated within a few years, either through the exit of unprofitable firms or through acquisition of smaller operators by larger competitors. There are essentially no economies of scale in providing local bus services, but large firms have been able to successfully drive out competition by engaging in price wars and using profitable routes to subsidize fares on more competitive routes (cross-subsidization). Maintenance of competitive conditions on routes is made even more difficult by the scheduling practices employed by the deregulated operators. Since operators may set any schedule they like, subject to the provision of publishing the change six weeks in advance, many competing operators have an incentive to engage in "route jockeying" or "headrunning", wherein an operator schedules its service to run immediately ahead of its competitors (and thus take its competitors' customers). This practice works since passengers are often indifferent to which bus they choose to reach a specific destination, provided prices and quality are roughly equal, and is made easier by the fact that operators must publish their schedules. Such a strategy often invites retaliatory behavior by incumbent operators, who have been observed to respond by running service so frequently as to prevent competitors from attracting sufficient patronage to survive, a practice known as "route swamping"[20].

In contrast, transit contracting in United States consists mostly of paratransit services, with only some fixed routes.

Curb Rights

Drawing on the experience of bus deregulation in the UK, as well as previous experience with private provision of transit the United States and around the world, Klein et al.[21] diagnosed the problems associated with private competition in bus transit as an absence of property rights. Specifically, they suggest that fixed-route (though not necessarily fixed-schedule) transit services are able to function where operators have a right to pick up congregations of passengers along a route.

The congregation function in urban transit is considered essential to establishing a market for transit services. Klein et al. note that the establishment of private jitney services (services operating with smaller vehicles on relatively fixed routes, though not on fixed schedules) is common where there are substantial congregations of passengers at points along a route served by a regular, fixed-schedule service. Particularly in "thick" transit markets, the fixed-schedule service acts as an "anchor" around which the private jitney operators target their service. Klein et al. draw on a historical example from the US of jitney operations emerging during the 1910s and

picking up passengers along the routes of streetcars, often running ahead of the scheduled streetcar arrivals[21]. However, problems may arise when there are no rights assigned to pick up passengers at particular locations and during particular time periods. In the case of the streetcars, the issue was dealt with by the streetcar operators appealing to local governments to enforce their exclusive franchise rights and drive out the jitneys. While this action may have (temporarily) preserved the streetcars' viability, it also drove out potential market entrants who were willing to provide valued services to customers.

In the case of thick markets, like the streetcar example, the problem of "interloping" (or inter-temporal poaching of passengers) by new market entrants like the jitney operators is not as severe. If demand levels are sufficiently high, a route can sustain several competing operators. However, when markets are "thin" (i.e. when demand levels are lower), the problem of interloping becomes more severe. When a number of competing operators enter a thin market where scheduled service is provided, the anchor of the scheduled service may be "dissolved" by the competing operators. Operators may be hesitant to invest in providing scheduled service if they cannot appropriate the returns from picking up congregations of passengers and are not protected from interloping competitors. If interloping continues to occur in this kind of market, the result may be the destruction of the market altogether. This process has been observed in many of the smaller cities in the UK following deregulation, where intense competition and frequent interloping have become destructive and resulted in a large amount of concentration among a limited number of operators.

One possible solution to this problem that has been used in the past has been for a local government to offer exclusive rights to operate a particular route. However, this type of arrangement creates many of the same problems typically associated with monopolies (higher prices, lack of innovation in service provision). The role envisioned by Klein et al. for government is one of creating and enforcing property rights to serve passengers at particular locations and times ("curb rights")[21]. The term "curb right" is used to denote the fact that the operator would have rights over a particular space along a street (a "curb zone"), including a bus stop area and the adjoining sidewalk, which would serve as a location for passengers to congregate. These curb spaces could then be auctioned to private operators who wished to use them to pick up congregations of passengers. The provision of rights over these congregations of passengers would ensure a minimal market to establish regular, scheduled service and protect this market from interlopers. Klein et al also suggest the possibility of local governments protecting against monopoly abuse by reserving some curb zones as "commons" areas for jitney services when a single firm seeks to buy up all of the curb zones along a particular route, giving it a de facto monopoly. Where markets are sufficiently thick, the establishment of curb rights can also improve the quality of services by ensuring a market for both scheduled services and unscheduled, jitney operations.

Road PrivatizationUnlike buses, roads are not easily contestable. Buses tend to have low fixed costs and higher variable costs, which implies few barriers to entry. The roads most likely to be private (limited-access roads) under the framework discussed previously also tend to be more costly to provide and entail high fixed costs. In this case, market power is a serious consideration. Many limited-

access highways function essentially as local monopolies, making the introduction of direct competition difficult.

Issues of competition can also be problematic in urban settings. Where new private toll roads or road capacity are built in urban areas, the toll road must often compete with one or more free alternatives, making it difficult to attract sufficient traffic. In the case of the privately-built 91 Express Lanes in Orange County, CA, the local topography made the provision of parallel routes difficult. The primary competitor to the toll lanes was the parallel free lanes on the SR-91 freeway, which tend to become badly congested during the peak period. After several years of operation, the worsening peak-period conditions on the free lanes led to growing public demands for additional capacity. While the significant peak-period congestion ensured a market for the toll road, it also imposed a heavy economic cost on the users of the free lanes in the form of delays. Since the lease agreement with the private operator prohibited the addition of untolled capacity, the Orange County Transportation Authority had no choice but to purchase the toll road and take over its operation.

Other aspects of road networks can also make privatization difficult. For example, on low volume roads, tolls often cannot recover costs. This typically leads to other forms of financing. One possibility is to finance such roads through general revenue sources, essentially treating them as local public goods. Another is to adopt shadow tolls or other forms of availability payments.

Roads are also a long term investment, implying a need for guarantees of stability. Long-term traffic forecasting is difficult and often involves large margins of error. Uncertainty about future traffic demand translates into uncertainty regarding future revenue streams from road tolls. Under private financing arrangements, risks associated with revenue uncertainty often get capitalized into interest rates, leading to higher borrowing costs. Problems of uncertain traffic demand can be particularly acute when a private road is being built in a growing area, where future development is anticipated to form a significant part of the base of demand for the road. An illustration of this problem is provided by the experience of the Dulles Greenway in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the Greenway's original owners defaulted on their loan due to lower-than-projected demand and revenue.

Reluctance

Since the establishment of the publicly-owned National Highway System in the U.S. there has been continued reluctance to build new private roads or privatize existing roads. There have been a handful of exceptions, however. During the 1990s there were two notable projects that involved private ownership and financing: California's SR91 Express Lanes and the The Dulles Greenway). More recently, the privately financed and developed South Bay Expressway was completed in 2007 in the eastern suburbs of the San Diego region. In addition, there have been a couple of cases where existing toll roads have been leased to private entities under long-term

lease agreements (an example of the "franchise" framework discussed previously). These types of arrangements have been agreed to for operation of the Chicago Skyway and the Indiana Toll Road.

There are several possible explanations for the reluctance to move toward greater privatization of roads in the U.S.:

The reluctance may reflect apprehension toward privatization in general, due to some high-profile and problematic experiences with privatization and deregulation in other industries such as California's electricity deregulation and Britain’s experience with Railtrack.

Private roads must offer a significant and apparent advantage over public control. The burden of proof is on those who want to change the status quo. They must prove why

privatization would be beneficial to all interested parties. The case for privatization must be compelling, and for most places to try it, it must have

been done somewhere else first. Not just net gains, but also distributional effects must be considered. Privatization may

create winners and losers, and the losers are likely to be the most vocal opponents, complicating matters politically.

Thought QuestionThe 2000 Libertarian Party Platform asserts "Government interference in transportation is characterized by monopolistic restriction, corruption and gross inefficiency. We therefore call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, … We call for the privatization of …, public roads, and the national highway system. …"

Is Government Ownership Characterized By:

Monopolistic Restriction Corruption Gross Inefficiency

Would Private Ownership Be Characterized by:

Monopolies Corruption Gross Inefficiency ?

Public Policy Questions

Should the freight railways continue to provide their own infrastructure ? If yes, should they be subsidized to the extent that truckers are being subsidized indirectly ?

What are the advantanges and disadvantages of creating a common rail infrastructure corporation ?

Should the governments (i.e., tax payers) subsidize a part of infrastructure costs ?

Should the extent of subsidy be equalized across all modes of transportation ?

If so, should we subsidize an equal amount per passenger-km or an equal proportion of the total modal costs ?

ExerciseWho should own Metro Transit? How should it be organized? Work in pairs, identify alternative ownership regimes, discuss their merits.

References1.

Garrison, W.L. and Levinson, D.M. (2006), The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and Deployment, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Buchanan, J.M. and Tullock, G. (1962), The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Knight, B. (2004), "Parochial interests and the centralized provision of local public goods: evidence from congressional voting on transportation projects", Journal of Public Economics, 88: 845-866. Tullock, Gordon (June 1967). "The welfare costs of tariffs, monopolies, and theft". Western Economic Journal 5 (3): 224-232. ISSN 00433640. Retrieved 2010-05-20. Winston, C. (2000), "Government Failure in Urban Transportation", Fiscal Studies, 21(4): 403-425. Levinson, D.M. (2005), "Paying for the Fixed Costs of Roads", Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 39(3): 279-294. Buchanan, J.M. (1965), "An Economic Theory of Clubs", Economica, 32(125): 1-14. Beito, B.T. and Smith, B. (1990), "The Formation of Urban Infrastructure Through Non-Governmental Planning: The Private Places of St. Louis", Journal of Urban History, 16: 263-303. Levinson, D.M. and Yerra, B. (2002), “Highway Costs and the Efficient Mix of State and Local Funds”, Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 1812: 27-36. Fielding, G.J. and Klein, D.B (1993), "How to Franchise Highways", Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 27(2): 113-130.

Heaver, T.D. and Waters, W.G. II (2005), "Transportation Policy in Canada" in K.J. Button and D.A. Hensher, eds. Handbook of Transport Strategy, Policy and Institutions, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers. Gomez-Ibanez, Jose A.; Meyer, John R. (1993). Going Private: The International Experience with Transport Privatization. Brookings Institution. Pucher, J. (1995), "The Road to Ruin? Impacts of Economic Shock Therapy on Urban Transport in Poland", Transport Policy, 2(1): 5-13. Nelson, J.D. and Saleh, W. and Prileszky, I. (1997), "Ownership and Control of the Bus Industry: The Case of Hungary", Journal of Transport Geography, 5(2): 137-146. Poole, R.W., Jr. and Fixler, P.E., Jr. (1987), "Privatization of Public-Sector Services in Practice: Experience and Potential", Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 6(4): 612-625. Klein, Daniel B.; Moore, Adrian T.; Reja, Binyam (1997). "Curb rights: eliciting competition and entrepreneurship in urban transit". The Independent Review 11 (1): 29-54. doi:10.2139/ssrn.473441. Retrieved 2010-05-13. Gomez-Ibanez, Jose A.; Meyer, John R. (1990). "Privatizing and deregulating local public services: lessons from Britain's buses". Journal of the American Planning Association 56 (1): 9-21. doi:10.1080/01944369008975740. Retrieved 2010-05-17. Heseltine, P.M.; Silcock, D.T. (September 1990). "The effects of bus deregulation on costs". Journal of Transport Economics and Policy 24 (3): 239-254. Retrieved 2010-05-17. Mackie, Peter; Preston, John; Nash, Christopher (July 1995). "Bus deregulation: ten years on". Transport Reviews 15 (3): 229-251. doi:10.1080/01441649508716914. Retrieved 2010-05-18. Dodgson, J.S.; Katsoulacos, Y.S. (1991). "Competition, contestability, and predation: the economics of competition in deregulated bus markets". Transportation Planning and Technology 15 (2/4): 263-275. doi:10.1080/03081069108717458. Retrieved 2010-05-17. Klein, Daniel B.; Moore, Adrian T.; Reja, Binyam (1997). Curb Rights: A Foundation for Free Enterprise in Urban Transit. Brookings Institution. ISBN 0-8157-4940-6.

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Social science is a major category of academic disciplines, concerned with society and the relationships among individuals within a society. It in turn has many branches, each of which is considered a "social science". The main social sciences include economics, political science, human geography, demography, and sociology. In a wider sense, social science also includes some fields in the humanities [1] such as anthropology, archaeology, jurisprudence, history, and linguistics. The term is also sometimes used to refer specifically to the field of sociology, the original 'science of society', established in the 19th century.

Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the natural sciences as tools for understanding society, and so define science in its stricter modern sense. Interpretivist social scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing empirically falsifiable theories, and thus treat science in its broader sense. In modern academic practice, researchers are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies (for instance, by combining the quantitative and qualitative researchs). The term social research has also acquired a degree of autonomy as practitioners from various disciplines share in its aims and methods.

Contents

1 History 2 Branches

o 2.1 Anthropology o 2.2 Communication studies o 2.3 Economics o 2.4 Education o 2.5 Geography o 2.6 History o 2.7 Law o 2.8 Linguistics o 2.9 Political science o 2.10 Psychology o 2.11 Sociology

3 Additional fields of study 4 Methodology

o 4.1 Social research o 4.2 Theory

5 Education and degrees 6 See also 7 Notes and references 8 Bibliography

o 8.1 20th and 21st century sources o 8.2 19th century sources o 8.3 General sources o 8.4 Academic resources o 8.5 Opponents and critics

9 External links

HistoryMain article: History of the social sciences

The history of the social sciences begins in the Age of Enlightenment after 1650, which saw a revolution within natural philosophy, changing the basic framework by which individuals understood what was "scientific". Social sciences came forth from the moral philosophy of the time and were influenced by the Age of Revolutions, such as the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.[2] The social sciences developed from the sciences (experimental and applied), or the systematic knowledge-bases or prescriptive practices, relating to the social improvement of a group of interacting entities.[3][4]

The beginnings of the social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in the grand encyclopedia of Diderot, with articles from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other pioneers. The growth of the social sciences is also reflected in other specialized encyclopedias. The modern period saw "social science" first used as a distinct conceptual field.[5] Social science was influenced by positivism,[2] focusing on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoiding the negative; metaphysical speculation was avoided. Auguste Comte used the term "science sociale"

to describe the field, taken from the ideas of Charles Fourier; Comte also referred to the field as social physics.[2][6]

Following this period, there were five paths of development that sprang forth in the social sciences, influenced by Comte on other fields.[2] One route that was taken was the rise of social research. Large statistical surveys were undertaken in various parts of the United States and Europe. Another route undertaken was initiated by Émile Durkheim, studying "social facts", and Vilfredo Pareto, opening metatheoretical ideas and individual theories. A third means developed, arising from the methodological dichotomy present, in which social phenomena were identified with and understood; this was championed by figures such as Max Weber. The fourth route taken, based in economics, was developed and furthered economic knowledge as a hard science. The last path was the correlation of knowledge and social values; the antipositivism and verstehen sociology of Max Weber firmly demanded this distinction. In this route, theory (description) and prescription were non-overlapping formal discussions of a subject.

Around the start of the 20th century, Enlightenment philosophy was challenged in various quarters. After the use of classical theories since the end of the scientific revolution, various fields substituted mathematics studies for experimental studies and examining equations to build a theoretical structure. The development of social science subfields became very quantitative in methodology. The interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behaviour, social and environmental factors affecting it, made many of the natural sciences interested in some aspects of social science methodology.[7] Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social research of medicine, sociobiology, neuropsychology, bioeconomics and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative research and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences. In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a free-standing discipline of applied mathematics. Statistical methods were used confidently.

In the contemporary period, Karl Popper and Talcott Parsons influenced the furtherance of the social sciences.[2] Researchers continue to search for a unified consensus on what methodology might have the power and refinement to connect a proposed "grand theory" with the various midrange theories that, with considerable success, continue to provide usable frameworks for massive, growing data banks; for more, see consilience. The social sciences will for the foreseeable future be composed of different zones in the research of, and sometime distinct in approach toward, the field.[2]

The term "social science" may refer either to the specific sciences of society established by thinkers such as Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, or more generally to all disciplines outside of "noble science" and arts. By the late 19th century, the academic social sciences were constituted of five fields: jurisprudence and amendment of the law, education, health, economy and trade, and art.[3]

Around the start of the 21st century, the expanding domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic imperialism.[8]

Branches

For a topical guide to this subject, see Outline of social science § Branches of social science .

Social Science areas

The following are problem areas and discipline branches within the social sciences.[2]

Environmental Studies Anthropology Area studies Business studies Civics Communication studies Criminology Demography Development studies Economics Education Geography History Industrial relations Information science Law Library science Linguistics Media studies Political science Psychology Public administration Sociology Social work Sustainable Development

The social science disciplines are branches of knowledge taught and researched at the college or university level. Social science disciplines are defined and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned social science societies and academic departments or faculties to which their practitioners belong. Social science fields of study usually have several sub-disciplines or branches, and the distinguishing lines between these are often both arbitrary and ambiguous.

Anthropology

Main articles: Anthropology and Outline of anthropology

Anthropology is the holistic "science of man", a science of the totality of human existence. The discipline deals with the integration of different aspects of the social sciences, humanities, and human biology. In the twentieth century, academic disciplines have often been institutionally divided into three broad domains. The natural sciences seek to derive general laws through reproducible and verifiable experiments. The humanities generally study local traditions, through their history, literature, music, and arts, with an emphasis on understanding particular individuals, events, or eras. The social sciences have generally attempted to develop scientific methods to understand social phenomena in a generalizable way, though usually with methods distinct from those of the natural sciences.

The anthropological social sciences often develop nuanced descriptions rather than the general laws derived in physics or chemistry, or they may explain individual cases through more general principles, as in many fields of psychology. Anthropology (like some fields of history) does not easily fit into one of these categories, and different branches of anthropology draw on one or more of these domains.[9] Within the United States, anthropology is divided into four sub-fields: archaeology, physical or biological anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and cultural anthropology. It is an area that is offered at most undergraduate institutions. The word anthropos (άνθρωπος) is from the Greek for "human being" or "person." Eric Wolf described sociocultural anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences."

The goal of anthropology is to provide a holistic account of humans and human nature. This means that, though anthropologists generally specialize in only one sub-field, they always keep in mind the biological, linguistic, historic and cultural aspects of any problem. Since anthropology arose as a science in Western societies that were complex and industrial, a major trend within anthropology has been a methodological drive to study peoples in societies with more simple social organization, sometimes called "primitive" in anthropological literature, but without any connotation of "inferior."[10] Today, anthropologists use terms such as "less complex" societies or refer to specific modes of subsistence or production, such as "pastoralist" or "forager" or "horticulturalist" to refer to humans living in non-industrial, non-Western cultures, such people or folk (ethnos) remaining of great interest within anthropology.

The quest for holism leads most anthropologists to study a people in detail, using biogenetic, archaeological, and linguistic data alongside direct observation of contemporary customs.[11] In the 1990s and 2000s, calls for clarification of what constitutes a culture, of how an observer knows where his or her own culture ends and another begins, and other crucial topics in writing anthropology were heard. It is possible to view all human cultures as part of one large, evolving global culture. These dynamic relationships, between what can be observed on the ground, as opposed to what can be observed by compiling many local observations remain fundamental in any kind of anthropology, whether cultural, biological, linguistic or archaeological.[12]

Communication studies

Main articles: Communication studies and History of communication studies

Communication studies deals with processes of human communication, commonly defined as the sharing of symbols to create meaning. The discipline encompasses a range of topics, from face-

to-face conversation to mass media outlets such as television broadcasting. Communication studies also examines how messages are interpreted through the political, cultural, economic, and social dimensions of their contexts. Communication is institutionalized under many different names at different universities, including "communication", "communication studies", "speech communication", "rhetorical studies", "communication science", "media studies", "communication arts", "mass communication", "media ecology," and "communication and media science."

Communication studies integrates aspects of both social sciences and the humanities. As a social science, the discipline often overlaps with sociology, psychology, anthropology, biology, political science, economics, and public policy, among others. From a humanities perspective, communication is concerned with rhetoric and persuasion (traditional graduate programs in communication studies trace their history to the rhetoricians of Ancient Greece). The field applies to outside disciplines as well, including engineering, architecture, mathematics, and information science.

Economics

Main articles: Economics and Outline of economics

Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth.[13] The word "economics" is from the Greek οἶκος [oikos], "family, household, estate," and νόμος [nomos], "custom, law," and hence means "household management" or "management of the state." An economist is a person using economic concepts and data in the course of employment, or someone who has earned a degree in the subject. The classic brief definition of economics, set out by Lionel Robbins in 1932, is "the science which studies human behavior as a relation between scarce means having alternative uses." Without scarcity and alternative uses, there is no economic problem. Briefer yet is "the study of how people seek to satisfy needs and wants" and "the study of the financial aspects of human behavior."

Buyers bargain for good prices while sellers put forth their best front in Chichicastenango Market, Guatemala.

Economics has two broad branches: microeconomics, where the unit of analysis is the individual agent, such as a household or firm, and macroeconomics, where the unit of analysis is an economy as a whole. Another division of the subject distinguishes positive economics, which seeks to predict and explain economic phenomena, from normative economics, which orders choices and actions by some criterion; such orderings necessarily involve subjective value judgments. Since the early part of the 20th century, economics has focused largely on measurable quantities, employing both theoretical models and empirical analysis. Quantitative models, however, can be traced as far back as the physiocratic school. Economic reasoning has been increasingly applied in recent decades to other social situations such as politics, law, psychology, history, religion, marriage and family life, and other social interactions. This paradigm crucially assumes (1) that resources are scarce because they are not sufficient to satisfy

all wants, and (2) that "economic value" is willingness to pay as revealed for instance by market (arms' length) transactions. Rival heterodox schools of thought, such as institutional economics, green economics, Marxist economics, and economic sociology, make other grounding assumptions. For example, Marxist economics assumes that economics primarily deals with the investigation of exchange value, of which human labour is the source.

The expanding domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic imperialism.[8][14]

Education

Main articles: Education and Outline of education

A depiction of world's oldest university, the University of Bologna, in Italy

Education encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, positive judgement and well-developed wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental aspects the imparting of culture from generation to generation (see socialization). To educate means 'to draw out', from the Latin educare, or to facilitate the realization of an individual's potential and talents. It is an application of pedagogy, a body of theoretical and applied research relating to teaching and learning and draws on many disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, sociology and anthropology.[15]

The education of an individual human begins at birth and continues throughout life. (Some believe that education begins even before birth, as evidenced by some parents' playing music or reading to the baby in the womb in the hope it will influence the child's development.) For some, the struggles and triumphs of daily life provide far more instruction than does formal schooling (thus Mark Twain's admonition to "never let school interfere with your education"). Family members may have a profound educational effect — often more profound than they realize — though family teaching may function very informally.

Geography

Main articles: Geography and Outline of geography

Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into two main sub fields: human geography and physical geography. The former focuses largely on the built environment and how space is created, viewed and managed by humans as well as the influence humans have on the space they occupy. This may involve cultural geography, transportation, health, military operations, and cities. The latter examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation and life, soil, oceans, water and landforms are produced and interact.[16] Physical geography examines phenomena related to the measurement of earth. As a result of the two subfields using different approaches a third field has emerged, which is environmental geography. Environmental geography combines physical and human geography and looks at the interactions between the environment and humans.[17] Other branches of geography include social geography, regional geography, and geomatics.

Geographers attempt to understand the earth in terms of physical and spatial relationships. The first geographers focused on the science of mapmaking and finding ways to precisely project the surface of the earth. In this sense, geography bridges some gaps between the natural sciences and social sciences. Historical geography is often taught in a college in a unified Department of Geography.

Modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline, closely related to GISc, that seeks to understand humanity and its natural environment. The fields of urban planning, regional science, and planetology are closely related to geography. Practitioners of geography use many technologies and methods to collect data such as GIS, remote sensing, aerial photography, statistics, and global positioning systems (GPS).

History

Main articles: History and Outline of history

History is the continuous, systematic narrative and research into past human events as interpreted through historiographical paradigms or theories.

History has a base in both the social sciences and the humanities. In the United States the National Endowment for the Humanities includes history in its definition of humanities (as it does for applied linguistics).[18] However, the National Research Council classifies history as a social science.[19] The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history. The Social Science History Association, formed in 1976, brings together scholars from numerous disciplines interested in social history.[20]

Law

Main articles: Law and Outline of law

A trial at a criminal court, the Old Bailey in London

The social science of law, jurisprudence, in common parlance, means a rule that (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions.[21] However, many laws are based on norms accepted by a community and thus have an ethical foundation. The study of law crosses the boundaries between the social sciences and humanities, depending on one's view of research into its objectives and effects. Law is not always enforceable, especially in the international relations context. It has been defined as a "system of rules",[22] as an "interpretive concept"[23] to achieve justice, as an "authority"[24] to mediate people's interests, and even as "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction".[25] However one likes to think of law, it is a completely central social institution. Legal policy incorporates the practical manifestation of thinking from almost every social science and the humanities. Laws are politics, because politicians create them. Law is philosophy, because moral and ethical persuasions shape their ideas. Law tells many of history's stories, because statutes, case law and codifications build up over time. And law is economics, because any rule about contract, tort, property law, labour law, company law and many more can have long-lasting effects on the distribution of wealth. The noun law derives from the late Old English lagu, meaning something laid down or fixed[26] and the adjective legal comes from the Latin word lex.[27]

Linguistics

Main articles: Linguistics and Outline of linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure, recognized as the father of modern linguistics

Linguistics investigates the cognitive and social aspects of human language. The field is divided into areas that focus on aspects of the linguistic signal, such as syntax (the study of the rules that govern the structure of sentences), semantics (the study of meaning), morphology (the study of the structure of words), phonetics (the study of speech sounds) and phonology (the study of the abstract sound system of a particular language); however, work in areas like evolutionary linguistics (the study of the origins and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) cut across these divisions.

The overwhelming majority of modern research in linguistics takes a predominantly synchronic perspective (focusing on language at a particular point in time), and a great deal of it—partly owing to the influence of Noam Chomsky—aims at formulating theories of the cognitive processing of language. However, language does not exist in a vacuum, or only in the brain, and approaches like contact linguistics, creole studies, discourse analysis, social interactional linguistics, and sociolinguistics explore language in its social context. Sociolinguistics often makes use of traditional quantitative analysis and statistics in investigating the frequency of features, while some disciplines, like contact linguistics, focus on qualitative analysis. While certain areas of linguistics can thus be understood as clearly falling within the social sciences, other areas, like acoustic phonetics and neurolinguistics, draw on the natural sciences. Linguistics draws only secondarily on the humanities, which played a rather greater role in linguistic inquiry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ferdinand Saussure is considered the father of modern linguistics.

Political science

Main articles: Political science, Outline of political science, and Politics

Aristotle asserted that man is a political animal in his Politics.[28]

Political science is an academic and research discipline that deals with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behaviour. Fields and subfields of political science include political economy, political theory and philosophy, civics and comparative politics, theory of direct democracy, apolitical governance, participatory direct democracy, national systems, cross-national political analysis, political development, international relations, foreign policy, international law, politics, public administration, administrative behaviour, public law, judicial behaviour, and public policy. Political science also studies power in international relations and the theory of great powers and superpowers.

Political science is methodologically diverse, although recent years have witnessed an upsurge in the use of the scientific method,[29][page needed] that is, the proliferation of formal-deductive model building and quantitative hypothesis testing. Approaches to the discipline include rational choice, classical political philosophy, interpretivism, structuralism, and behaviouralism, realism, pluralism, and institutionalism. Political science, as one of the social sciences, uses methods and techniques that relate to the kinds of inquiries sought: primary sources such as historical documents, interviews, and official records, as well as secondary sources such as scholarly articles are used in building and testing theories. Empirical methods include survey research, statistical analysis or econometrics, case studies, experiments, and model building. Herbert Baxter Adams is credited with coining the phrase "political science" while teaching history at Johns Hopkins University.

Psychology

Main articles: Psychology and Outline of psychology

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was the founder of experimental psychology.

Psychology is an academic and applied field involving the study of behaviour and mental processes. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of mental illness. The word psychology comes from the ancient Greek ψυχή, psyche ("soul", "mind") and logy ("study").

Psychology differs from anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology in seeking to capture explanatory generalizations about the mental function and overt behaviour of individuals, while the other disciplines focus on creating descriptive generalizations about the functioning of social groups or situation-specific human behaviour. In practice, however, there is quite a lot of cross-fertilization that takes place among the various fields. Psychology differs from biology and neuroscience in that it is primarily concerned with the interaction of mental processes and behaviour, and of the overall processes of a system, and not simply the biological or neural processes themselves, though the subfield of neuropsychology combines the study of the actual neural processes with the study of the mental effects they have subjectively produced. Many people associate psychology with clinical psychology, which focuses on assessment and treatment of problems in living and psychopathology. In reality, psychology has myriad specialties including social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, educational psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, mathematical psychology, neuropsychology, and quantitative analysis of behaviour.

Psychology is a very broad science that is rarely tackled as a whole, major block. Although some subfields encompass a natural science base and a social science application, others can be clearly distinguished as having little to do with the social sciences or having a lot to do with the social sciences. For example, biological psychology is considered a natural science with a social scientific application (as is clinical medicine), social and occupational psychology are, generally speaking, purely social sciences, whereas neuropsychology is a natural science that lacks application out of the scientific tradition entirely. In British universities, emphasis on what tenet of psychology a student has studied and/or concentrated is communicated through the degree conferred: B.Psy. indicates a balance between natural and social sciences, B.Sc. indicates a strong (or entire) scientific concentration, whereas a B.A. underlines a majority of social science credits. This is not always necessarily the case however, and in many UK institutions students studying the B.Psy, B.Sc, and B.A. follow the same curriculum as outlined by The British Psychological Society and have the same options of specialism open to them regardless of whether they choose a balance, a heavy science basis, or heavy social science basis to their

degree. If they applied to read the B.A. for example, but specialized in heavily science-based modules, then they will still generally be awarded the B.A.

Sociology

Main articles: Sociology and Outline of sociology

Émile Durkheim is considered one of the founding fathers of sociology.

Sociology is the systematic study of society and human social action. The meaning of the word comes from the suffix "-ology", which means "study of", derived from Greek, and the stem "soci-", which is from the Latin word socius, meaning "companion", or society in general.

Sociology was originally established by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in 1838.[30] Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the descriptive understanding of the social realm. He proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism, an epistemological approach outlined in The Course in Positive Philosophy [1830–1842] and A General View of Positivism (1844). Though Comte is generally regarded as the "Father of Sociology", the discipline was formally established by another French thinker, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who developed positivism as a foundation to practical social research. Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method. In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.[31]

Karl Marx rejected Comte's positivism but nevertheless aimed to establish a science of society based on historical materialism, becoming recognized as a founding figure of sociology posthumously as the term gained broader meaning. Around the start of the 20th century, the first

wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, developed sociological antipositivism. The field may be broadly recognized as an amalgam of three modes of social thought in particular: Durkheimian positivism and structural functionalism; Marxist historical materialism and conflict theory; and Weberian antipositivism and verstehen analysis. American sociology broadly arose on a separate trajectory, with little Marxist influence, an emphasis on rigorous experimental methodology, and a closer association with pragmatism and social psychology. In the 1920s, the Chicago school developed symbolic interactionism. Meanwhile, in the 1930s, the Frankfurt School pioneered the idea of critical theory, an interdisciplinary form of Marxist sociology drawing upon thinkers as diverse as Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. Critical theory would take on something of a life of its own after World War II, influencing literary criticism and the Birmingham School establishment of cultural studies.

Sociology evolved as an academic response to the challenges of modernity, such as industrialization, urbanization, secularization, and a perceived process of enveloping rationalization.[32] Because sociology is such a broad discipline, it can be difficult to define, even for professional sociologists. The field generally concerns the social rules and processes that bind and separate people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, communities and institutions, and includes the examination of the organization and development of human social life. The sociological field of interest ranges from the analysis of short contacts between anonymous individuals on the street to the study of global social processes. In the terms of sociologists Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, social scientists seek an understanding of the Social Construction of Reality. Most sociologists work in one or more subfields. One useful way to describe the discipline is as a cluster of sub-fields that examine different dimensions of society. For example, social stratification studies inequality and class structure; demography studies changes in a population size or type; criminology examines criminal behaviour and deviance; and political sociology studies the interaction between society and state.

Since its inception, sociological epistemologies, methods, and frames of enquiry, have significantly expanded and diverged.[33] Sociologists use a diversity of research methods, drawing upon either empirical techniques or critical theory. Common modern methods include case studies, historical research, interviewing, participant observation, social network analysis, survey research, statistical analysis, and model building, among other approaches. Since the late 1970s, many sociologists have tried to make the discipline useful for non-academic purposes. The results of sociological research aid educators, lawmakers, administrators, developers, and others interested in resolving social problems and formulating public policy, through subdisciplinary areas such as evaluation research, methodological assessment, and public sociology.

New sociological sub-fields continue to appear — such as community studies, computational sociology, environmental sociology, network analysis, actor-network theory and a growing list, many of which are cross-disciplinary in nature.

Additional fields of studyAdditional applied or interdisciplinary fields related to the social sciences include:

Archaeology is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, features, biofacts, and landscapes.

Area studies are interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical, national/federal, or cultural regions.

Behavioural science is a term that encompasses all the disciplines that explore the activities of and interactions among organisms in the natural world.

Computational social science is an umbrella field encompassing computational approaches within the social sciences.

Demography is the statistical study of all human populations. Development studies a multidisciplinary branch of social science that addresses issues of

concern to developing countries. Environmental social science is the broad, transdisciplinary study of interrelations between

humans and the natural environment. Environmental studies integrate social, humanistic, and natural science perspectives on the

relation between humans and the natural environment. Information science is an interdisciplinary science primarily concerned with the collection,

classification, manipulation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information. International studies covers both International relations (the study of foreign affairs and global

issues among states within the international system) and International education (the comprehensive approach that intentionally prepares people to be active and engaged participants in an interconnected world).

Legal management is a social sciences discipline that is designed for students interested in the study of state and legal elements.

Library science is an interdisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, and other areas to libraries; the collection, organization, preservation and dissemination of information resources; and the political economy of information.

Management in all business and human organization activity is simply the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives.

Marketing the identification of human needs and wants, defines and measures their magnitude for demand and understanding the process of consumer buying behaviour to formulate products and services, pricing, promotion and distribution to satisfy these needs and wants through exchange processes and building long term relationships.

Political economy is the study of production, buying and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government.

Public administration is one of the main branches of political science, and can be broadly described as the development, implementation and study of branches of government policy. The pursuit of the public good by enhancing civil society and social justice is the ultimate goal of the field. Though public administration has been historically referred to as government management,[citation needed] it increasingly encompasses non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that also operate with a similar, primary dedication to the betterment of humanity.

Methodology

Social research

Main article: Social research

The origin of the survey can be traced back at least early as the Domesday Book in 1086,[34][35] while some scholars pinpoint the origin of demography to 1663 with the publication of John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality.[36] Social research began most intentionally, however, with the positivist philosophy of science in the 19th century.

In contemporary usage, "social research" is a relatively autonomous term, encompassing the work of practitioners from various disciplines that share in its aims and methods. Social scientists employ a range of methods in order to analyse a vast breadth of social phenomena; from census survey data derived from millions of individuals, to the in-depth analysis of a single agent's social experiences; from monitoring what is happening on contemporary streets, to the investigation of ancient historical documents. The methods originally rooted in classical sociology and statistical mathematics have formed the basis for research in other disciplines, such as political science, media studies, and marketing and market research.

Social research methods may be divided into two broad schools:

Quantitative designs approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence, and often rely on statistical analysis of many cases (or across intentionally designed treatments in an experiment) to create valid and reliable general claims.

Qualitative designs emphasize understanding of social phenomena through direct observation, communication with participants, or analysis of texts, and may stress contextual and subjective accuracy over generality.

Social scientists will commonly combine quantitative and qualitative approaches as part of a multi-strategy design. Questionnaires, field-based data collection, archival database information and laboratory-based data collections are some of the measurement techniques used. It is noted the importance of measurement and analysis, focusing on the (difficult to achieve) goal of objective research or statistical hypothesis testing. A mathematical model uses mathematical language to describe a system. The process of developing a mathematical model is termed 'mathematical modelling' (also modeling). Eykhoff (1974) defined a mathematical model as 'a representation of the essential aspects of an existing system (or a system to be constructed) that presents knowledge of that system in usable form'.[37] Mathematical models can take many forms, including but not limited to dynamical systems, statistical models, differential equations, or game theoretic models.

These and other types of models can overlap, with a given model involving a variety of abstract structures. The system is a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole. The concept of an integrated whole can also be stated in terms of a system embodying a set of relationships that are differentiated from relationships of the set to other elements, and from relationships between an element of the set and elements not a part of the relational regime. A dynamical system modeled as a mathematical formalization has a fixed "rule" that describes the time dependence of a point's position in its ambient space. Small changes in the state of the system correspond to small changes in the numbers. The evolution rule of the dynamical system is a fixed rule that describes what future states follow from the

current state. The rule is deterministic: for a given time interval only one future state follows from the current state.

See also: Scholarly method, Teleology, Philosophy of science, and Philosophy of social science

Theory

Main article: Social theory

Other social scientists emphasize the subjective nature of research. These writers share social theory perspectives that include various types of the following:

Critical theory is the examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across social sciences and humanities disciplines.

Dialectical materialism is the philosophy of Karl Marx, which he formulated by taking the dialectic of Hegel and joining it to the materialism of Feuerbach.

Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical discourse; it aims to understand the nature of gender inequality.

Marxist theories , such as revolutionary theory and class theory, cover work in philosophy that is strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory or is written by Marxists.

Phronetic social science is a theory and methodology for doing social science focusing on ethics and political power, based on a contemporary interpretation of Aristotelian phronesis.

Post-colonial theory is a reaction to the cultural legacy of colonialism. Postmodernism refers to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture,

cinema, and design, as well as in marketing and business and in the interpretation of history, law, culture and religion in the late 20th century.

Rational choice theory is a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behaviour.

Social constructionism considers how social phenomena develop in social contexts. Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for

instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts. Structural functionalism is a sociological paradigm that addresses what social functions various

elements of the social system perform in regard to the entire system.

Other fringe social scientists delve in alternative nature of research. These writers share social theory perspectives that include various types of the following:

Intellectual critical-ism describes a sentiment of critique towards, or evaluation of, intellectuals and intellectual pursuits.

Scientific criticalism is a position critical of science and the scientific method.

Education and degreesMost universities offer degrees in social science fields.[38] The Bachelor of Social Science is a degree targeted at the social sciences in particular. It is often more flexible and in-depth than other degrees that include social science subjects.[39]

In the United States, a university may offer a student who studies a social sciences field a Bachelor of Arts degree, particularly if the field is within one of the traditional liberal arts such as history, or a BSc: Bachelor of Science degree such as those given by the London School of Economics, as the social sciences constitute one of the two main branches of science (the other being the natural sciences). In addition, some institutions have degrees for a particular social science, such as the Bachelor of Economics degree, though such specialized degrees are relatively rare in the United States.

See alsoMain article: Outline of social science

Science portal

GeneralSociety · Culture · Structure and agency · Humanities (human science)

Methods

Historical method · Empiricism · Representation theory · Scientific method · Statistical hypothesis testing · Regression · Correlation · Terminology

Areas

Political sciences · Natural sciences · Behavioural sciences · Geographic information science

History

History of science · History of technology

Lists

Fields of science · Outline of academic disciplines

People

Émile Durkheim · Max Weber · Karl Marx · Herbert Spencer · Sir John Lubbock · Alfred Schutz

Other

Behaviour · Ethology and Ethnology · Game theory · Gulbenkian commission · Labelling · "Periodic table of human sciences" (Tinbergen's four questions) · Social action · Philosophy of social sciences

Notes and references

1.

"humanity" 2.b, Oxford English Dictionary 3rd Ed. (2003) Kuper, A., and Kuper, J. (1985). The Social Science Encyclopaedia.

Social sciences, Columbian Cyclopedia. (1897). Buffalo: Garretson, Cox & Company. Page 227.

Peck, H. T., Peabody, S. H., and Richardson, C. F. (1897). The International Cyclopedia, A Compendium of Human Knowledge. Rev. with large additions. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.

William Thompson (1775–1833) (1824). An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth.

According to Comte, the social physics field was similar to that of natural sciences.

Vessuri, H. (2002). "Ethical Challenges for the Social Sciences on the Threshold of the 21st Century". Current Sociology. 50: 135–150. doi:10.1177/0011392102050001010.

Lazear, E. P. (2000). "Economic Imperialism". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 115: 99–146. doi:10.1162/003355300554683.

Wallerstein, I. (2003). "Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines". Current Anthropology. 44 (4): 453–465. doi:10.1086/375868.

Lowie, Robert (1924). Primitive Religion. Routledge and Sons.; Tylor, Edward (1920). Primitive Culture. New York:: J. P. Putnam's Sons. Originally published 1871.

Nanda, Serena and Richard Warms. Culture Counts. Wadsworth. 2008. Chapter One

Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The remaking of social analysis. Beacon Press. 1993; Inda, John Xavier and Renato Rosaldo. The Anthropology of Globalization. Wiley-Blackwell. 2007

economics - Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Becker, Gary S. (1976). The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Links to arrow-page viewable chapter. University of Chicago Press.

An overview of education

"What is geography?". AAG Career Guide: Jobs in Geography and Related Geographical Sciences. Association of American Geographers. Archived from the original on October 6, 2006. Retrieved October 9, 2006.

Hayes-Bohanan, James. "What is Environmental Geography, Anyway?". Retrieved October 9, 2006.

"About NEH". National Endowment for the Humanities.

Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States: Continuity and Change

See the SSHA website

Robertson, Geoffrey (2006). Crimes Against Humanity. Penguin. p. 90. ISBN 978-0-14-102463-9.

Hart, H. L. A. (1961). The Concept of Law. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-876122-8.

Dworkin, Ronald (1986). Law's Empire. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-51836-5.

Raz, Joseph (1979). The Authority of Law. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-956268-7.

Austin, John (1831). The Providence of Jurisprudence Determined.

see Etymonline Dictionary

see Merriam-Webster's Dictionary

Ebenstein, Alan (2002). Introduction to Political Thinkers. Boston, MA: Wadsworth.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1403934223

A Dictionary of Sociology, Article: Comte, Auguste

Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapter 1.

Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Modernity's Consciousness of Time, Polity Press (1990), paperback, ISBN 0-7456-0830-2, p. 2.

Giddens, Anthony, Duneier, Mitchell, Applebaum, Richard. 2007. Introduction to Sociology. Sixth Edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Chapter 1.

A. H. Halsey (2004), A history of sociology in Britain: science, literature, and society, p. 34

Geoffrey Duncan Mitchell (1970), A new dictionary of sociology, p. 201

Willcox, Walter (1938) The Founder of Statistics .

Eykhoff, Pieter System Identification: Parameter and State Estimation, Wiley & Sons, (1974). ISBN 0-471-24980-7

Peterson's (Firm : 2006- ). (2007). Peterson's graduate programs in the humanities, arts, & social sciences, 2007. Lawrenceville, NJ: Peterson's.

Bibliography

20th and 21st century sources

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