Anchoring Institutional Values in Democracy: A Systematic Review, a Constructive Critique, and a Research Agenda

Abstract

Values are ideals of what is desirable for the individual, profession, organization, or institution. Institutional values attach to organizations because of their place in a political order, capturing broad governance concerns that extend beyond the details of management and technical administration. What institutional values do public administration scholars study, how do they study them, and how do those values relate to democracy? Our comprehensive and systematic review of the contents of public administration journals reveals ambiguity about the nature of values and the level of social structure at which they operate. As a constructive step forward, we offer an analytic framework of what we call democratic anchors, conceptions of values that convey essential democratic content, that can improve the empirical study of how democracy is operationalized into norms of practice in public administration.