20609 Public Administration

Course Description

Public administration comprises a range of public sector institutions that are critical for policy design and implementation, and that play a critical role in the political process. At the same time, public administration is a multidisciplinary research field based on approaches from political science, sociology, economics, management and others. This course introduces students to public administration as a field and object of research. It presents theoretical approaches to understand and design public administration institutions and gives an overview of recent reform trends. The course also covers state-of-the-art research approaches, designs and methods to empirically assess the success of administrative reforms.

At the end of this course, students should be able to:
• describe the foundations of public administration as an empirical phenomenon and field of research
• identify and critically compare the intellectual traditions underpinning different models of public administration
• describe and distinguish different national or local models of public administration
• explain current reform trends and debates in public administration research
• design their own empirical research in the field
• present their own research clearly and effectively.