The state has a vital role in the delivery of a wide array of public services from justice and security to services for individual citizens and private enterprises. Besides traditional public services, such as health care or education, there are administrative services, such as delivery of licenses and permissions, which are subject to regulation of administrative proceedings. Service delivery can be defined as any contact with the public administration during which customers – citizens, residents or enterprises – seek or provide data, handle their affairs or fulfil their duties. These services should be delivered in an effective, predictable, reliable and customer-friendly manner by competent public officials. Due to rapid expansion of the use of information and communication technologies, electronic service delivery is an effective means to reduce costs, both in time and money, for the customer as well as the government. Good service delivery requires that the government understands the need to promote citizen-oriented administration. Good administration is a policy objective put into practice coherently, through various regulatory and other mechanisms, to ensure quality public services. The public interacts with public administration in several roles: as client, customer, contractor, regulatee, participant, and litigant as well as in street-level encounters. Public administration penetrates the economy and society. The public's evaluation of public administration, explored in this chapter, is complex. As citizens, people tend to find government wasteful, untrustworthy, and unresponsive. As clients and customers, they find it satisfactory; as regulatees, they are less favourable. The managerial, political, and legal perspectives offer different views of the public. Participation is emphasized by the political per spective and offers some possibilities for strengthening the "public" in public administration. The new public management, by contrast, views the public primarily as customers. The perspectives can be synthesized to a certain extent by applying them to different areas of public administration, such as service and therapy. There is also broad agreement that paperwork reduction, plain language, and government can improve the relationship between public administration and the public. The development and growth of the contemporary administrative state have myriad ramifications for the public. Certainly, the public has benefited greatly from public administration. Public administrators are concerned with the provision of public goods and quasi-public goods, such as defence of the political community, roads, and recreational and cultural facilities. They are also actively involved in providing justice, safety, economic security, health, education, and other benefits to the public or segments of it. But the provision of these benefits has not been without important social, political, and economic costs. Too often in the past, public administration texts failed to address the place of the "public" in the public administrative state. Today, by contrast, the new public management (NPM) puts relationships with the public at the forefront of public administrative practice

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Against this backdrop the chapter concludes with some general remarks that identify some of the implications of the N PM for the public The N PM has b... View the full answer