Project Objectives
The RADAR project (Renewing Administration through Democratic Anchorage Reforms) aims to enhance the democratic governance of public services and public administrations. To construct legitimacy for public administration, it will focus on democratic anchorage, new narratives and education.
What we do
Research
Through thorough research we aim to improve the understanding of the relationship between public administration reforms and democratic legitimacy.
Education
We aim to make a sustainable impact through creating teaching materials and influencing teaching standards for public administrators.
Our main objective
The main objective of the RADAR project is to provide public administrations (in particular in central government) in democratic societies with tools to construct input, throughput and output legitimacy for public administration reform.
It will do so through
- deep studying the potential for democratic anchorage of these reforms
- creating new narratives or legitimising accounts on the role and functioning of public administrations in democratic systems.
These practices of democratic anchorage and these new narratives need to be embedded in the training and education of civil servants and public officials who are the reformers and innovators of tomorrow.
Objectives in more detail
1.
Improve the understanding of the relationship between public administration reforms and democratic legitimacy.
This will be achieved through:
- a scoping review;
- multi-level statistical analysis of data from the European Quality of Government Index;
- a systematic analysis of emerging innovative solutions using a newly created database of innovation cases; and
- a comprehensive analysis of reform discourses.
2.
Examine under which conditions efforts to improve the democratic legitimacy of public administration reforms are effective.
Using a combination of research methods including experiments,focus groups, andcase studies, it will examine three types of initiatives that have shown the most promise:
- participation/co-creation,
- representative bureaucracy and
- experimental governance.
3.
Translate the findings from RADAR’s research into concrete methods to increase the input and output legitimacy of public administration.
This allows reforms and innovations to achieve results while respecting and strengthening democratic institutions.