Public administration and administrative policies

Dear students

One unexpected side effect of coronavirus disease is a rich factual material for our course “Public administration and administrative policies”. What I mean is that we can observe a plethora of administrative policies regarding coping with the disease. Nota bene, across the world. Each policy makes use of public administration’s M-resources and hence can be described as administrative M-policy. It’s really interesting that the critical M for preventing and/or fighting the disease seems to be (legal) Might (authority) – the ability of public administration to regulate, control, command, prohibit, constrain, commend, permit, limit, close, call off etc. In a specific case to impose a sanitary cordon or a quarantine. Of course, other Ms are also necessary to prevent, fight or stop spreading the disease – Men, Materials, Money, Messages (!) and Management (organization and discipline).

Under these circumstances some of you could take into account devoting your texts (taken home exams) to M analysis of public administration’s coronavirus policy. The texts could e.g.:

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  discuss examples of administrative policies undertaken at different administrative levels: university, local (municipal), regional, state, global (WHO),
  
• 
  employ a comparative approach: public administration’s coronavirus policy in Poland, Italy, China, Germany, South Korea etc.,
  
• 
  describe and analyze different levels of administrative constraints connected with using Messages, Money, Might, Men and Materials,
  
• 
  analyze internal policies (regarding the very administration) and external policies (making use of administrative Might or authority and other M-resources on our rights, status and person),
  
• 
  discuss differences between ex ante (preventive) policies and ex post administrative policies: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
  
• 
  etc.
  

With all the best wishes

Jerzy Supernat


12^th of March, 2020