Apr 21
My paper “The aims of public administration: Reviving the classical view” has been accepted for publication in Perspectives on Public Management and Governance. The working version of the paper is available here. More about PPMG here.
Links to some of my work focusing on the need to develop a new approach to American public administration:
The aims of public administration: Reviving the classical view. Forthcoming in Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2018.
Lecture. Statecrafting: A new approach to public administration. Presentation to the BK21 Conference organized by the Graduate School of Public Administration of Seoul National University in New York City on Saturday, January 14, 2017.
Why realism is central to public administration. Medium.com, December 26, 2016.
For public administration, fragility is the new reality. Medium.com, October 7, 2016.
Lecture. One world: Building a single body of knowledge for statecraft. Keynote address to 3rd International Conference on Democratic Governance in the Developing World, Washington DC, July 19, 2016.
Public management: A flawed kind of statecraft, in Milward et al. “Is Public Management Neglecting the State?” Governance 29, no. 3 (2016): 1-26.
Large Forces: What’s Missing in Public Administration. CreateSpace: October 2013.
What’s wrong with the intellectual history of Public Administration, Public Voices, 11.2 (2010), pp. 10-14.
The path not taken: Leonard White and the macrodynamics of administrative development. Public Administration Review, 69.4 (July/August 2009): 764-775.
I’m honored to be selected as the inaugural Director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The announcement is here. I’m also grateful to have had the opportunity to work with my colleagues at the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri since 2015.
I gave a talk at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on March 28. The title was: “Turner’s convergence: Sectionalist governance in the US and Europe.” Listen to the talk and download Powerpoint for the presentation here.
I talked about Four Crises of American Democracy with John Fugelsang on his SiriusXM Insight show, Tell Me Everything, on March 23. Listen to the interview here. Fugelsang says: “The political climate in the 2016 presidential election has only reinforced the perception that we are in a state of crisis. Roberts’ new book is amazing in how well it distills and explains the root causes of the crises facing our democracy and how they might be addressed. It is informative and also compulsively readable.”
I talked about Four Crises of American Democracy with Mitch Jeserich, host of KPFA’s Letters and Politics, on March 13. Listen to the interview here.
On a World Bank blog, Sina Odugbemi discusses Four Crises of American Democracy. Odugbemi says that the book “furnishes us with a way of thinking about what might be wrong with liberal democracy in any specific national context that is as elegant and as thought-provoking as anything that I have encountered recently.” Read the review.
I participated in a conversation about the longterm sustainability of federal entitlement programs with Curtis Dubay at Mizzou Law today. The conversation was sponsored by the Mizzou Law’s chapter of the Federalist Society and moderated by 3L Hannah Mudd.
Judge Jeff Harris visited with my Law and Public Policy class at Mizzou Law today. Judge Harris, presently circuit judge of Missouri’s 13th Judicial Circuit, talked to the class about his experience in all three branches of Missouri government. His visit was hosted by a student team consisting of EC Duckworth, Ariel Kiefer, Cailynn Hayter, and Ellen Henrion.
Michael Spicer writes a review of Four Crises of American Democracy, in Public Administration Review: “Roberts’ thoughtful and elegant defense of democracy is to be welcomed, coming as it does at a time when serious doubts about the capacity of ordinary democratic politics and institutions to address our problems are being voiced, both on the right and left of our political spectrum. It is also a healthy reminder to critics of our system of all ideological hues that the real world alternatives to democratic politics and institutions are not necessarily likely to serve us much better. Moreover, packing as it does a wide range of modern history into less than 200 pages of text, it is a refreshingly accessible read and a much-needed reminder both to social scientists and citizens in general about the importance of paying attention to history and what it can teach us about democracy.” The review is available here.
