مدیریت دولتی رفتاری: ترکیب بینش های مدیریت دولتی و روانشناسی Behavioral Public Administration: Combining Insights from Public Administration and Psychology

A Reemerging Call for Integrating Public Administration and Psychology Before outlining how public administration research may benefit from psychology, it is worth showing how this idea is rooted in the concepts of early public administration scholarship. We do not have to search long or in obscure corners of our field: discussions about the cross-fertilization of the two disciplines were central to many seminal figures in public administration scholarship. We aim to deepen the dialogue between public administration and psychology by outlining a distinct approach in public administration that integrates both fi elds of study: behavioral public administration. Behavioral Public Administration: Combining Insights from Public Administration and Psychology 47 The most obvious early attempt can be found in Herbert Simon ’ s seminal work Administrative Behavior (Simon 1947a ). Today, Simon ’ s scholarship is mostly credited with introducing the concepts of bounded rationality and satisficing into the study of public administration (e.g., Meier 2015 ). While these concepts clearly draw on insights from cognitive and social psychology, they are just examples of how Simon envisioned a much more general and tight integration between the two fields. In his Nobel Prize speech of 1978, he cited how his 1947 book grew out of the conviction “that decision making is the heart of administration, and that the vocabulary of administrative theory must be derived from the logic and psychology of human choice” (Simon 1978 , 353). Simon reiterated this view in an exchange with Robert Dahl ( 1947 ) in Public Administration Review over the fundamentals of public administration as a science (Simon 1947b ). While Simon and Dahl disagreed on a range of issues, they both acknowledged the importance of understanding human behavior in public administration. For instance, Dahl noted that a science of public administration must be based on an “understanding of man ’ s behavior in the area marked off by the boundaries of public administration” (۱۹۴۷, ۷). He therefore argued that public administration must work together closely with fields that focus on human behavior in other areas, including psychology and sociology (see also Wright 2015 , 797). Simon ’ s sentiment reflects the idea that public administration is subordinate to psychology, as administrative decision making must be studied as a special case of the many forms of decision making studied by psychologists. Thus, one of the founding fathers of contemporary public administration saw the field as, ideally, an applied subfield within social psychology. However, Simon also noted that public administration cannot merely be a passive user of psychology but must aim to also contribute to it (Simon 1947b , 203). A decade later, Simon still saw a great distance between public administration and psychology, and he recognized that psychology also could learn something from public administration and thus a “a marking stone placed halfway between might help travelers from both directions to keep to their courses” (Simon 1955 , 100). In other words, Simon envisioned a two-way street between the two fields. Simon and Dahl were not the only prominent public administration scholars interested in psychology. In The Administrative State, published in 1948, Dwight Waldo, who in the 1960s spearheaded the “behavioral revolution” in political science, discussed the connection between public administration and psychology. He noted how psychologists see “that man is in small part rational” (Waldo 1948 , 25) but rather is motivated by emotional drives and urges. Despite this, he also notes that public administration has been “little touched” by ideas from psychology (Waldo 1948 , 25). Waldo ( 1965 ) subsequently evaluated the extent to which psychological insights had penetrated public administration and came to a similar conclusion. Calls for integrating insights from psychology into public administration extend beyond Simon and Waldo. Some argued early on for adopting psychological public opinion research in public administration (Truman 1945 , 69). Frederick Mosher ( 1956 , 178), for instance, discussed the role of public administration in relation to other social sciences and pointed out that there should be more interaction between them, in particular public administration and the field of psychology. Along the same lines, scholars in the 1950s and 1960s argued for a tighter integration of the fields (e.g., Honey 1957 ; Verba 1961 ). Yet, until recently, these calls have been largely unheard.