Dueling Political Fictions and Public Administration and Democracy in an Era of Populism and Authoritarian Impulses

ABSTRACT

The political fictions used in political discourse, during the English Civil War period, remain relevant to contemporary public policy and administration. Mainstream public administration discourse has too often employed the fiction of a singular and unbounded popular sovereignty that emerged during this period, leaving public administration ill‐equipped to deal with the authoritarian impulses of contemporary populist governments. What is needed in public administration discourse, in dealing with these authoritarian impulses, is not an ethic of administrative neutrality, such as has traditionally dominated much of our field, but an ethic of constitutionalism that draws on the fiction of the individual that was also articulated during the English Civil War period by the English Levellers and subsequently by the founders of the American Constitution.