Vilisov M.V., Telin K.O., Filimonov K.G. From Resilience to Stability: What Makes Good Public Administration. Politeia, 2020, No. 1(96), pp. 7-27.

Текст статьи на сайте журнала URL: http://politeia.ru/files/articles/rus/Politeia-2020-1(96)-7-27.pdf (дата обращения 09.04.2020)

Abstract

The study of the quality of public policy and administration, which can be understood along different categories ranging from “efficiency” to “stability”, is rightfully considered one of the most important tasks in the social sciences. However, despite the burgeoning literature devoted to assessing the functioning of state institutions, this research field still has serious substantive and methodological gaps. The article documents a number of difficulties that researchers face studying the quality of state policy and efficiency of state institutions, which range from terminological cacophony to the bias in scientific constructions that heavily depend on the current socio-political context. On the basis of the analysis of these difficulties, the authors come to the conclusion that it is necessary to re-interpret the problem of evaluating state policy and the functioning of state institutions as a problem of resilience and stability of socio-economic relations and political processes that take place in the modern polities, and, with the help of such reinterpretation, they elaborate provisions that set the framework for a conceptual model for assessing the resilience and stability of public policy and administration. The model proposed by the authors is designed to take into account factors that are usually ignored by other approaches to assessing “good” go vernance, in particular, the dynamics of social sentiments. The starting point of their theorizing is the hypothesis that the analysis of political and administ rative activities in the public sector requires shifting the focus from the activities of governments to the state system, defined as part of the social order that agents of the political process deal with. The social order does not include only state institutions, normative regulations and projects implemented by go vernments, but also stable informal practices of state institutions, local self-government as well as societal rules that regulate the interaction of people.