The 1991 John Gaus Lecture: Politics, Political Science and the Public Interest

The field of crisis and risk communication research has always been multidisciplinary bringing together researchers from many fields like business, public relations, political science, sociology, psychology, journalism, tourism, and public health. However, there is often a common perception outside the fields of crisis communication that is a corporate discipline focused mostly on helping organizations manage their reputations. As the pieces in this issue demonstrate, our field serves the public interest in many ways and is a growing global field of study.

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Public Intellectuals and the Public Interest: Toward a Politics of Political Science as a Calling

Political Science and Politics ◽

10.1017/s1049096510001356 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 43 (04) ◽

pp. 675-681 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Theodore J. Lowi

Keyword(s):

Political Science ◽

Public Interest ◽

Public Intellectuals ◽

The Public ◽

Favorite Book

Upon my first reading of the Etzioni autobiography, I recalled my favorite book review, written by a nine-year-old, who also should have won a prize for the youngest author and the shortest review ever: “This book told me more about penguins than I wanted to know.”

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Operative Doctrines of Representation

American Political Science Review ◽

10.2307/1952566 ◽

1963 ◽

Vol 57 (3) ◽

pp. 604-618 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Charles E. Gilbert

Keyword(s):

Political Science ◽

Public Interest ◽

Public Officials ◽

The Public ◽

Empirical Inquiry ◽

And Control ◽

American Political Science ◽

Empirical Approaches ◽

American Thought

The main point of this article is to identify some traditions of American thought that figure in analysis of the distinctively democratic aspects of government. The discussion is centered on doctrines of “representation.” While that term has a generally understood meaning, its application in specific contexts depends upon values and expectations closely related to other largely procedural aspects of politics; and together these perspectives figure in appraisals and decisions of policy.The “distinctively democratic aspects of government” have broadly to do, I think, with relations between public officials and the population. These can be conceptualized and described in terms of institutions, influence, identification, or exchange, and are so treated in various positive or empirical approaches. At the points where normative critique and empirical description join, the literature of American political science seems to have converged on several broad concerns that tend to organize and orient discussion—e.g., representation, responsibility, rationality, and lately, the “public interest,” of which “representation” surely has the clearest empirical reference. These are overlapping or intersecting concerns. They emphasize different aspects of government and different blends of calculation and control (or intellectual versus institutional elements); but they do not refer to distinct phenomena, and they relate to common normative traditions. Such terms are often, I think, of dubious utility because they tend to obscure the more detailed values at stake in action or discussion and perhaps thereby to discourage more pointed empirical inquiry relevant to those values. However that may be, the interrelatedness of these concerns and the broad relevance of “representation” can be briefly indicated.

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Public Administration, Public Choice and the Pathos of Reform

The Review of Politics ◽

10.1017/s0034670500028692 ◽

1979 ◽

Vol 41 (3) ◽

pp. 344-374 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

L. L. Wade

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

Public Choice ◽

Political Science ◽

Public Administration ◽

Public Interest ◽

Administrative Reform ◽

The Public ◽

Political Analysis ◽

Choice Approach ◽

Public Choice Approach

In recent years, several writers using the new political economy or public choice approach to political analysis have sought to improve our understanding of bureaus, bureaucrats and governments and, in some cases, to suggest ways in which their behavior might be “improved” in the public interest. The public choice approach to public administration rejects the so-called sociological or traditional political science approaches with their alleged Parsonian, Weberian, Marxist, historical, institutional or organic biases and limitations in favor of an individualistic, deductive, noninstitutional analysis, which is thought to be more cogent, more fertile in testable hypotheses, more genuinely theoretical and more relevant in terms of reform. Here the view is taken that the pathos of the public choice approach to public administration consists in this: that public choice advocates by virtue of their methodology are fated to “lose” consistently on questions of administrative reform and prescriptive efficacy, even while contributing, potentially importantly, to the scientific understanding of nonmarket, usually public, organizations or “bureaus.”

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Typológie legitimity a verejná politika

Verejná správa a spoločnosť ◽

10.33542/vss2021-1-01 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Stanislav Konečný

Keyword(s):

Public Policy ◽

Political Science ◽

Public Interest ◽

Equivalent Form ◽

Point Of View ◽

Public Interests ◽

The Public ◽

Policy Theory ◽

The Social ◽

The World

The study deals with the contribution of legitimacy typologies from the point of view of public policy theory. From this point of view, it first analyzes the monodisciplinary approaches (such as normative theories of legitimacy) that were created around the world within the legal sciences (C. J. Friedrich, G. Burdeau), or as empirical theories of legitimacy within sociology (M. Weber, G. Ferrero, K. W, Deutsch) and political science (D. Easton, G. Almond and GB Powell) and subsequent the multidisciplinary approaches (N. Luhmann, P. Rosanvallon , D, Beetham). The result of this analysis of different typologies of legitimacy of power and their reflection into the issue of legitimacy of the public interest is a typology of possible procedures for legitimizing public (but also supra-individual) interests, which points out that while the normstive legitimation of public interestsis possible, but not always sufficient - and therefore must be supplemented by empirical (social) legitimation, whereas the social legitimization can be equivalent form of legitimation of pluralistic public interests, which can not be legitimized normatively for several reasons.

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