The implications for democracy in a networked bureaucratic world

Dwight Waldo wrote nearly fifty years ago that democracy is very much more than the political context in which public administration is carried out. Public administration is now less hierarchical and insular and is increasingly networked. This has important implications for democracy, including changing responsibilities for the public interest, for meeting public preferences, and for the enhancement of political deliberation, civility, and trust. Networked public administration can pose a threat to democratic governance and it can open possibilities for strengthening overnance, depending on the values and actions of public administrators. [B]oth private and public administration were in an important and far-reaching sense false to the ideal of democracy. They were false by reason of their insistence that democracy, however good and desirable, is nevertheless something peripheral to administration. I have made no distinction... between "democracy " within an administrative system and "democracy " with respect to an administrative system's external relations. If administration is indeed "the core of modern government," then a theory of democracy in the twentieth century must embrace administration. The focus of this essay... is not upon the present and existing, but upon the future and potential. It seeks to discern where the frontier may be tomorrow and how we can move toward it