Anthony Bertelli Won the Herbert Simon Award

Anthony Bertelli of the Department of Social and Political Sciences is the recipient of the 2020 Herbert Simon Award, given by the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) to "a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the scientific study of bureaucracy." The Herbert Simon Award is considered the highest award in the discipline for a mid-career scholar of the politics of public administration.

The MPSA publishes the top-tier American Journal of Political Science and holds the second largest US conference in the discipline.

With the award comes the honor of delivering the Herbert Simon Award Lecture which, this year, will be presented online on Wednesday, 18 November, at 4pm EST (registration required and free, click here). Professor Bertelli will deliver a lecture entitled Democracy Administered? Understanding the Role of Public Administration in Representative Government.

"In the traditional narrative of public administration," Professor Bertelli says, anticipating the topic of his lecture, "democratic values are confined to the relationship between representatives and managers through various configurations of rules and organizational forms. This narrative balances the accountability of managers to representatives, a problem of control, with the need for administration to work effectively, a problem of capability. The problem of how governance structures influence managers' democratic belief systems-arrangements of democratic values and attitudes-has remained latent. I argue that the democratic values of administration ought to complement the democratic values of the representative government in which it is done. Consequently, control, capability and value reinforcement must jointly render public administration into democracy administered."