Fellow Spotlight: Daniel Carpenter

Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in academia?

I began my academic career as a student of political theory. It was Gerald Mara, then Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Georgetown University, who taught fabulous courses on the history of political philosophy. I had entered college wanting to go into law or business, but in those political philosophy courses I discovered my passion for ideas about politics and government, a passion that sustains me to this day. I wrote my master’s thesis on the Gorgias of Plato, thinking about what responsible democratic rhetoric looks like. Little did I know that over three decades later, the issue of rhetorical (ir)responsibility would become one of the great questions of our time.

Who has been a key mentor or source of inspiration for you?

John Padgett and John Mark Hansen at the University of Chicago. They both nurtured my interest in American politics, public administration and in the deployment of statistical and historical methods. John Padgett taught me organization theory and introduced me to comparative historical perspectives on state building and, beyond that, to stochastic process models. John Mark Hansen encouraged my interest in agencies that seemed, at the time, to be less important (The USDA and the Post Office) but which were pivotal in American political development and remain so today. He is also a fantastic teacher of applied statistics.

What is your favorite class you have ever taken or taught and why?

About twenty years ago I designed a course called What is a Republic? I got a lot of help from political theorists at Harvard and elsewhere, as well as from scholars in American and European political history. I now teach it just about every year at Harvard. It examines the problem of representative government from the standpoint of political philosophy and political history, ranging from the Roman Republic to the twentieth century. It explores the necessary tension between government by office and representation by assembly, as well as the centrality of political liberty and civic virtue. We read Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, W.E.B. Du Bois, Danielle Allen and many other thinkers.

What advice would you give to those interested in pursuing a career in public administration?

I would tell them to consider three things: (1) that the future of our democratic republic depends upon them as much as it does any politician or judge; (2) they should understand that they are serving their town, state, country and world, and that precisely by doing so they will court the opposition of many who see the world differently; and (3) to adopt a stance of epistemic and public humility and listen to those they serve.

What area of public policy interests you the most and why?

At the moment, I think environmental public policy, in part because three interlocking issues are at play – (1) the global climate and carbon constraint/reduction, (2) the living environment of woods, waters, land and air and their quality and (3) issues of environmental justice, especially for Indigenous peoples. All three of these force us to look beyond what is electorally popular and to consider long-term problems and, in many cases, those whose voices are very much in the minority.

What would you currently consider the most critical challenge for public administration and why?

I’m worried about the authoritarian moment we’re in, not just threats in the United States but worldwide. Many politicians want to ignore law and convert public administrators into machines that implement their personal will. Two constitutional law scholars, tom Ginsberg and Aziz Huq, call this the challenge of the administrative rule of law. I think it operates not just with respect to law but also with respect to what we consider the constraints of office. Public servants in the United States and elsewhere take oaths of office, where they swear fealty to the Constitution and to certain norms of professionalism and the public good. In the coming decades, those oaths and those offices will be tested, and the result of those struggles may well determine the survival of our republic.

Do you have a publication – books, scholarly, or otherwise – that you would like to spotlight?

Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021). Many scholars of government will be more familiar with my books on bureaucratic autonomy (The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 2001), pharmaceutical regulation (Reputation and Power (2010)) or regulatory capture (Preventing Regulatory Capture, with David Moss (2013)), but Democracy by Petition points to a logic of governance in which elections alone don’t suffice for representation.

One of the things that has fascinated me as I study the history of administration and its present is that much of public management still consists in the being receptive to citizen complaints and grievances. Some perspectives see these, but government is one of the few institutions where, in a free society, people can get a hearing of their concerns, even if the outcome of that process is not what they desired. As it turns out, the vast masses of petitions flowing into Congress plausibly led to the creation of many federal agencies. Beyond that, responding to petitions and complaints has been from time immemorial a core function of public administrators, as both an explicit and implicit function of their offices.

What is your favorite hobby or activity that you enjoy doing in your free time?

Those who know me will know that the answer to this question is immediate: fly fishing. I started 25 years ago when some friends gifted me his and hers fly fishing rigs for my wedding. I fish in all weather and all places. It’s a necessary complement to a life of hard work, and it’s a form of church.