Daniel Engster's 'A Public Ethics of Care for Policy Implementation' (American Journal of Political Science, 2020) argues that the Weberian ethics of impersonal rule-following dominates citizens at the point of implementation, and proposes instead a public ethics of care — street-level discretion guided by the virtues of attentiveness, responsiveness, responsibility, and competency, bounded by law and public reason. The paper supplies the normative framework and general reform directions (align performance reviews and incentives with caring practice, reduce caseloads, recruit for relational capacity) but leaves its operationalization open. The derived open problem is the institutional design of that operationalization: how to measure and reward caring practices in performance management without perverse incentives or excessive subjectivity; what staffing, caseload, and resource conditions permit meaningful caring interactions across agency types; what procedural and evidentiary standards should govern the justificatory public reasons officials must give for care-guided discretionary judgments; how care virtues trade off against efficiency and consistency demands; and whether and how the framework can be institutionalized across different legal, cultural, and resource environments.

Background

Most citizens encounter the state not through legislatures or courts but through 'street-level bureaucrats' — frontline officials such as police officers, welfare caseworkers, teachers, and social workers who interpret general laws and policies in particular encounters with citizens. Because laws are general and cases are particular, this interpretive discretion cannot be eliminated by more detailed rules or oversight; proceduralization merely relocates the judgment. The traditional prescription in liberal and republican political thought — following Max Weber's model of legal-rational bureaucracy (hierarchy, fixed rules, impersonality, supervision) — has been to constrain discretion through impersonal rule-following. Daniel Engster (2020) argues that this 'Weberian bureaucratic ethics' is not merely ineffective but dominating at the street level: rigid, one-size-fits-all rule application without soliciting the affected person's input or circumstances leaves citizens subject to unilateral official interpretation, contrary to the liberal and republican ideals of limited and responsive government (nondomination here meaning the absence of arbitrary power over persons, in the republican sense associated with Philip Pettit). As an alternative, Engster articulates a public ethics of care for policy implementation, building on the ethics of care tradition (Joan Tronto's work on caring institutions) and on public-sector care scholarship (Helena Stensöta's studies of the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, which identify a 'helper' practitioner type exhibiting dialogue, trust, and sanction avoidance). The ethics of care holds that moral judgment should attend to particular persons, relationships, and needs rather than apply abstract rules uniformly; Engster operationalizes it for administrators through four virtues — attentiveness (noticing and asking about needs), responsiveness (taking citizens' input seriously), responsibility (committing to help realize jointly determined courses of action), and competency (effectively carrying them through) — exercised within legally bounded, publicly justifiable discretion. Public justifiability means an official must be able to justify a discretionary decision to the public as a reasonable interpretation of the spirit or purpose of the law, not as an exercise of personal will. Engster answers the objection that particularist care violates impartiality and 'like cases alike' by reconceiving impartiality as acting for the public interest rather than ignoring all particularities; and he answers the feasibility objection by citing empirical evidence (Stensöta) that caring practitioner types already exist inside contemporary bureaucracies and that care-orientation increases with tenure. At the level of institutional reform the paper remains general: it recommends reducing caseloads, embedding care ethics in training, aligning performance evaluation, promotion, and compensation with caring practices, recruiting for relational capacity and representativeness, and retaining specialization and supervision — while feminist critics of bureaucracy (e.g., Sophie Bourgault's 'prolegomena to a caring bureaucracy') and street-level moral-agency research (Bernardo Zacka's study of how frontline work warps moral judgment) show why neither abolishing bureaucracy nor leaving it Weberian is acceptable. What the framework does not supply is the concrete operational layer: measurable indicators of the four virtues that cannot be gamed, staffing and caseload conditions under which caring interaction is possible, contestable procedural standards for the public reasons officials must give, defensible trade-off bounds against efficiency and consistency, and an account of transferability to legal cultures and resource environments different from the Scandinavian welfare contexts where feasibility has been observed.

Problem Statement

The problem, derived from what Engster (2020) leaves open after articulating a public ethics of care for policy implementation, is to supply the institutional operationalization of that framework for street-level administration — the design layer between the normative virtues (attentiveness, responsiveness, responsibility, competency) and actual agency practice. This single open question — how the framework's general reform levers (a care-emphasizing administrative culture; promotion, review, and incentive guidelines reflecting caring values; caseload conditions; publicly justifiable, legally bounded discretion) are to be concretely designed for street-level agencies — spans several interrelated dimensions: (1) institutional design and measurement — how performance reviews, managerial incentives, and supervisory mechanisms should be redesigned to measure and reward caring practices without producing perverse incentives or excessive subjectivity in evaluation; (2) enabling conditions — what caseload, staffing, and resource arrangements permit meaningful caring interactions across agency types (e.g., policing, child protection, welfare, public health) while preserving necessary administrative capacity, given the general finding that excessive caseloads impede caring practice; (3) justificatory standards — what procedural and evidentiary requirements should govern the public reasons officials must provide for care-guided discretionary judgments, so that such decisions are transparent, contestable, and compatible with law; (4) value trade-offs — how care virtues should be balanced against competing administrative values, especially efficiency and consistency in treating like cases alike, and what trade-offs are acceptable (including the organizational costs of caregiving roles documented in later empirical work); and (5) cross-context feasibility — whether and how a public ethics of care can be institutionalized in legal, cultural, and resource environments different from those (Scandinavian welfare agencies) where caring practitioner types have been observed, and what reforms are politically and administratively practicable there. These dimensions are facets of the one operationalization question rather than a conjunctive checklist that every answer must discharge item by item; the operationalization question is addressed by a concrete design for the measurement-and-incentive dimension (1) together with at least one further dimension, with the dimensions covered held mutually consistent. The target is a defensible institutional-design account — normatively consistent with liberal and republican constraints (public justifiability, legality, nondomination), organizationally implementable, and empirically grounded — not merely further normative argument that care ethics would be desirable.

References

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