Conceptualizing and Measuring Good Administration

Abstract

Good administration is essential for a functioning state, yet no comprehensive and accepted conceptualization exists. Scholars and policymakers consequently lack a validated set of criteria for assessing administrative quality and evaluating the effects of reforms and interventions. Drawing on literature from jurisprudence, administrative, economic, and social sciences, we apply Rossiter’s C-OAR-SE approach to ensure content validity. This approach yielded 30 constructs organized along objects, attributes, and raters, using constitutive administrative acts as the assessed object. We empirically validated measurement items for these constructs in an online survey with 519 case workers in German municipal agencies. Principal components analysis identified four components: diligence/mission, efficiency, information, and responsiveness/support. Notably, several criteria prominent in the literature, such as proportionality and fairness, distribute across multiple components, indicating that they cannot be adequately captured by single-construct measures. These findings carry two key implications. First, objects, attributes, and raters must be specified appropriately to obtain constructs that enable content-valid items. Second, the four-component structure provides an empirical basis for designing parsimonious yet comprehensive assessment instruments. Future research should extend this approach to other objects of administrative action and to legal systems beyond the German context examined here.