Decision Making in Public Administration from Perspective of Administrative Science

Public administration is usually and more frequently examined from the perspective of administrative law science, which concentrates on the legal aspect of public administration. Nevertheless, public administration is more complex phenomenon, comprising, besides the legal, also managerial and political characteristics. Administrative science is aimed to examine the effectiveness, rationality and purposefulness of the structure and activities of public administration. As a connecting link between these two approaches seems to be the question how the legal regulations affect the level of effectivenessof public administration.

The internally (and often hierarchically) structured decision making system of public administration as a part of regulating systems of the society consists of diverse systems (administrative branches, bodies). The decision making process can be devided into several stages: initial situation, objectiv and tasks, definition of the problem, variants for attaining the objective, evaluation of the variants, making the selection from the variants (i.e. the actual decision), realization of the decision, supervision under the realization of the decision.

Public administration decision making is usually gradual, using feedback continuously. Relation to programme (objectives), openness, communicativeness and, last but not least, nature of obligation, these are its principal chracteristics. It contains hallmarks of both discharging of programme, of determined objectives, and of implementation of legal rules, but with different intensity in each case. Situation in which decision making is proceeding can be example of certainty, risk or uncertainty, with a permanent demand for reduction of uncertainty in decision making process. Achieving the perfect decision seems to be an ideal, while public administration reality is represented by "only" satisfactory decisions.