Citizen-Administrator Connections

Abstract

As public administrators attempt to decide where to site public facilities, they often conduct activities designed to encourage citizen participation. It frequently is not clear that public involvement is enhanced through those activities. Perhaps one of the reasons those activities are less successful than they might be is that administrators and citizens enter into them without a very thorough understanding of their own motivations, much less the motivations of others. More important for the connection that citizens and administrators make during these activities, they may not understand the dynamics that are set in motion when their own motivations interact with those of others involved in the activity. After discussing the importance of this topic for public administration theory, this article speculates about the dynamics that are likely to be set in motion when a variety of citizens' motivations connect with a variety of administrators' motivations. It concludes that progress in the important project of improving the citizen-administrator connection is likely to be rather slow.

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